_As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we contin_ue with Luke Walton, Jeremy Evans, and Kyrylo Fesenko.__

• • •

_Follow Luke Walton by __AUGUUUHUH NOT A LUNK WALTON CAPSULE NOOOOOOO.___

You really have to wonder, sometimes, how far a man can make it on name alone. Luke Walton isn't a great basketball player. At least not at the NBA level. He was good in college -- legitimately good, not just faking it for the cameras. But even then, there were signs. He was a more prominent player his junior year than his senior year, implying that the team actually didn't need him quite as much his senior year when they had better pieces. He still went early in the second round, packed his bags for the 1-hour puddle jump from Tucson to Los Angeles, and nested in. Put up a shaky first few seasons -- rebounded well for a wing, but his defense was highly questionable from day one and his shot has always been about as busted as busted can be. Then, in the 2007 season, Luke Walton broke the hell out and had one of the greatest seasons anyone has ever seen from a playe-- ... wait, he averaged 11-5-4 in 33 minutes a game and downright awful shooting percentages, without any defense to speak of? Jesus Christ, Marie. Despite having a pedestrian at best, barely-replacement-level 2007 season, Kupchak saw fit to offer him a downright hilarious 6-year $30 million dollar contract. Three things about the contract that I find kind of amusing:

• There was literally a $582,726 trade kicker. He made half a million dollars from the Cavs trade. I have no idea how his agent actually got that in the contract.

• Due to the fact that post-CBA the max contract duration for a non-bird rights player was moved down to 4 years, even after the lockout ended, Walton still had 50% of the years of a max contract left on his deal. After four years.

• The mere idea that Luke Walton was signed a 6-year $30,000,000 contract at any point in his career.

God, I don't get it. His agent may actually be the greatest salesman who's ever lived. The contract was sort of like the Lakers going "Oh, hey, Luke. You played at a barely replacement-level pace for a single season! Sure, we'll make the assumption you'll improve dramatically and rise meteorically for the next 6 seasons, culminating in you being a starting quality player for the 2013 champion Lakers starring Steve Nash, Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, and Chris Bosh." (They almost got it right!) Alas, that didn't happen. I won't pretend that I'm not sympathetic to the reason Walton's failed miserably -- back problems are terrible, awful things to go through. And I'm sorry that he had to go through that. And perhaps he's going to be a good coach. But Walton's contract is basically nothing more than the worst case scenario for a situation that happens all the dang time. Marginal players who haven't played good years -- and even marginal players who play decent years! -- get large, overly long contracts. Teams spend the duration of the contract blaming them for not living up to standards, even though the standards were remarkably unreachable even at the outset. I don't really blame him for the contract as much as Kupchak, as that's one of the few incredibly poor decisions Kupchak's had over the course of his tenure. Blame the franchise, not the player. Usually.

Walton's just so easy to hate, though. I understand that Walton thinks it's really unfair to be so cruel to him simply because he got the contract. I see his point, to some extent. I also kind of disagree, mostly because I think the premise of his thought regarding the unfair nature of the criticism is based on a lie. It'd be one thing if he'd gotten the contract off a legitimately good season. He didn't. Walton's 2007 season was pedestrian at best. He got assists, sure, but his overall assist rate given the minutes he played was actually extremely low, and all things considered, it wasn't like Walton was tapping new ground. Of his 257 assists that season, 109 of them came to Smush Parker and Kobe Bryant. He didn't really have strong connections with anyone else on the team, and a huge percentage of his assists (more than average, in fact) came on long twos and inefficient outside-the-rim floaters and hooks. He gets a lot of dap from commentators, coaches, and fans for being a "brilliant passer" and a "fantastic mind on the floor" (both actual, real things said by Byron Scott upon his being traded to the Cavaliers). He just... it just... HE REALLY ISN'T, OK? He isn't an amazing passer! He isn't even a good one! He's mediocre at best and a homeless, headless man's Hedo Turkoglu on average!

I just... it's just... Christ! Christ and a half! Christ and three quarters, even! Why? Why in God's name do people insist he's such a good passer? Why do people insist Luke Walton has some magical, mystical touch? I swear! I don't get it! People give higher praise to Walton's passing than they do KYRIE FREAKING IRVING'S passing, AND THAT INCLUDES THEIR COACH. Kyrie has ridiculous court vision, and if it wasn't for the fact that his best target for assists was Antawn "take a dribble then throw up an off-pinkie ten foot spinning ballerina dive" Jamison, I'm pretty sure more people would notice. And even then -- Kyrie's assist rate this year was_ literally almost double the best assist rate of Luke Walton's career_. Just... I don't... Why? WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN. Am I living in some absurdist alternate reality where Walton isn't half the player he is for everyone else? Is this just my punishment for hating the frat bros at Duke and disliking my university experience in general?! WHY?! WHYYYYYYYYYY.

... Anyway, that's Luke Walton. Heard he's a great passer. Solid pickup for the Cavs, I feel.

• • •

_Follow Jeremy Evans on Twitter at __@JeremyEvans40.___

This capsule is pretty simple. I could talk about why Jeremy Evans is limited on defense (gets a ton of blocks, but at the expense of a wealth of missed rotations and out-muscled covers). I could talk about Jeremy Evans' jump shot (as broken as broken can be). I could talk about his awful rotation handling (SO BAD), his slippery fingers (does he eat pancakes by hand on the bench?), his inability to corral the easiest rebound (HOW IS HE SO BAD AT REBOUNDING), et cetera. I could discuss any of these things, but I don't think I will. I just stated that they exist, but that's it. Because absolutely none of this has anything to do with any of the reasons you should know anything about Jeremy Evans. Reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 as to why Evans is at all noteworthy? Simple.

He dunks. A lot.

Seriously, Evans is an fun dunk artist, albeit not a particularly creative one. Actually, it's a good mark of why the dunk contest has descended to levels of trash that even make league leaders wonder if it's worth keeping around. In the last decade or two, contest dunks have become an exercise in props, raw power, and general gimmickry. Evans is a good dunk artist because he's an incredibly talented jumper, athletically -- if there was an NCAA Tournament bracket for NBA players participating in the long jump, he'd be the #1 overall seed with a bullet. His jumping is so next-level he's able to go from a flat-footed floor catch to the rim in virtually no time flat, and although he's certainly not the strongest dunkmaster in the league, he gets up so high he's usually got the room to slam the ball in from a good few inches above the rim, minimum. The thing is, what do you really do with that? His general dunking skillset is essentially "he jumps high", "high he jumps", and "jumps high he does". But when the dunks are constrained to people generally matching Evans in jumping ability, the only way to actually differentiate them is by relying on stupid gimmickry and stunts. Not really a good formula. In my view, the reason it doesn't work has nothing to do with the players and the skillsets. It more has to do with the nature of the dunk itself.

When we think of players who are known for downright excellent in-game dunks -- LeBron, Griffin, Rose -- there's a common thread. Each of them are excellent not just at the dunk itself, but at the moment. They're good at distilling the dunk down to its purest form, an act of active aggression against another player and another team. A good dunk can't occur in a sterilized, whitewashed environment. It's not a field goal, simply existing between the uprights and the kicker. No, a good dunk is reliant not just on the player and the rim, but the player and everyone around him. It's reliant on a strong cut through a hard defense to power to the rim. It's reliant on the opposing team getting emblazoned on posters and the crowd reacting with hushed reverence or abuzz with hysterical cheers (depending on whether it's an away game or a home game). It's the other players viscerally cringing at the fury, the short preen before both players need to forget it ever happened and get back on defense. THAT'S what makes an NBA dunk so cool. With a dunk contest that's never going to be able to reflect the actual essence of an NBA dunk, I'm honestly of the view that you're better off watching the Sprite Slam Dunk contest without the NBA players. Those things are crazy -- people off the street figure out ridiculous and quasi-impossible moves, rolling with 780 degree spins off a flat-footed heave or a backflip dunk-with-the-feet or other such absurdity. Love them. And there's an added level of interest, too, when you realize that it's just people off the street. No NBA talent, just guys you could theoretically face at a pick up league. A true air of mystery. No idea what to expect before they take off. It's exciting, far moreso than the NBA contest where you know everyone's general style before the event.

Still. Evans is fun to watch at an NBA level if you like powerful dunks. If you're looking for more? Might not be your guy.

• • •

_Follow Kyrylo Fesenko on Twitter at __@KyryloFesenko.___

Kyrylo Fesenko doesn't get major minutes. In my view, he probably should. I understand the basic reason why hasn't happened. Fesenko is large and bulky, but he struggles absurdly much at the offensive end of the floor -- his per36 numbers are a tepid 10 points and 8 rebounds a night. Poor all-around, ergo, most teams barely deign to play him at all. But the game is played on two ends, and on one end of the court, Fesenko is rather special. His real value comes on defense -- Fesenko has reliably been among the tops in the league for almost every defensive stat he could for the last few years. On/off court adjusted plus/minus, Synergy stats, 82Games opponent tracking, everything -- name a defensive assessment stat, and Fesenko probably rates pretty highly on it. In the last few years, anyway. He isn't necessarily a great defender due to hustle plays, shot blocking, or freak athleticism. More aptly, he's a great defender because for someone his size, he's incredibly fluid. Moves as though he's six pounds shorter and 100 pounds lighter. Probably would make an EXCELLENT boxer. Combine that with his raw size, which is honestly incredible? You've essentially created this giant, highly mobile wall that smart teams employ very effectively to cordon off the rim and blow up any team's average pick and roll play. Even with his lacking offensive stuff, his defense makes him a clear NBA talent, and in a good situation where he's only called upon as a defensive rock he could carve out a relatively lucrative career. I'm hoping he does. (And, I'll admit -- I was really hoping the Spurs could've picked him up. A legitimate defensive center, dangit! Could've been cool!)

Off the court, Fesenko is one of those stealthy jokesters. You'll miss his humor if you aren't looking. Luckily, so many people are! And by so many, I essentially just mean Dan Devine and me. Take my favorite example, courtesy of Mr. Devine: this video from the 2010 playoffs taped shortly after the Nuggets were eliminated. Wait. You actually can't take that video for an example, because the NBA deleted it during the lockout. (I found this out about 6 months back. I was distraught.) Retrospectively, this may be the biggest lockout casualty. Never mind the 400-something people who lost their jobs. This video was legitimately one of my favorite things to watch for almost a year, and it was gone post-lockout. Dan probably knows exactly how I feel here. I'll try to explain the video for the rest of you. Basically, in a completely average and nondescript interview, Fesenko starts mumbling about teammates and what he's trying to improve. He's a little incoherent, talks about how he needs to cap the number of jokes he has per day (totally untrue, he shouldn't cap any jokes at all), stuff like that. Then, without any warning, he gets completely lucid and goes "The fans love me. In fact, I'm trying to get Kyle Korver's sexy movie of the Jazz position." I just... what?! I'm not kidding whatsoever when I say I've spent actual hours of my life on earth trying to unravel what exactly Fesenko meant, here. It's beautiful.

Is he implying that Kyle Korver made a sex tape in his Jazz jersey? Is he implying that while the fans love him, he imagines they'd love him more if he taped a highlight reel with a porn-music backdrop and a Kyle Korver wig? Did a fan REQUEST that? Does he think Kyle Korver's shot is sexy and worthy of emulation? I just... there are so many angles to take. It's one of those great turns of phrase that's so incomprehensibly vague and brilliant you have simply no idea how to parse it. Hilarious. His twitter isn't quite as absurdist, but it has its moments, like when he called The Expendables "The Expandables" (probably unintentional but completely hilarious subversion), when he said he was super excited to see Kyle Korver and Ronnie Brewer in Chicago (again, probably unintentional, but I laughed when I read it), or when he was equally excited for Diablo 3 to come out as he was for the Heat series. Funny stuff. Basically, everything Fesenko has done has seemed funny in one way or another since I saw the video. Which... you are completely unable to see. So this whole capsule may come across as head-scratching. But alas. Fesenko is great, and I'm glad the Bulls got SOMEONE of some repute this offseason, at least from a comedy perspective. Good on you, Bulls fans. (Also, yes -- if they utilize him in a similar role as Asik, there's absolutely a fringe possibility he'll be just about as good. Which would be astonishing. But his limited-minutes defensive stats certainly indicate that kind of a potential in a greater role.)

• • •

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 on the riddles, where every riddle was correctly answered at least once but where nobody got a full 3/3. For the 2/3 guesses, props to Mike, Sean, and Atori. Fun.

• I'll admit it -- I was absolutely, 100% shocked that this former Tiger could make threes this season. Only seven, but still, pretty cool wrinkle. Always thought Player #187 to be more of a big, myself.

• Should've gone with the point guard, guys. Player #188 not only isn't a great NBA player, he also suddenly doesn't fit on the team that explicitly wanted him. Yikes. He could be good, someday, but he certainly hasn't gotten there yet.

• REALLY good defender as a rookie. Still solid last year, too. Not great on offense, but that was to be expected. Player #189 may always be criminally underrated on defense because he's thin, wiry, and doesn't preen. And honestly, that's a huge shame.

Suppose I'll put this here. I'm officially over 50% of the way through the series! Fewer capsules ahead of us than behind us! Hooray! And no, this project won't be finished on opening day (nor was it ever intended to be, contrary to popular belief), although it will be by Christmas. I'll be posting a halfway-there retrospective either this weekend or in the middle of next week to go over some stats, thoughts, and musings on the general course of the project. If you want to contribute to the retrospective, please name your favorite three or four capsules in the comments below. You can even tell me why you like them! Thanks a whole bunch for reading, whether you're a regular reader or just one who pops in from time to time. I really appreciate the support.

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today's three include JaJuan Johnson, Semih Erden, and J.R. Smith.

• • •

_Follow JaJuan Johnson on Twitter at __@JaJuanJohnson.___

One of the occupational hazards of doing a series like this is running into a player you simply don't remember watching. I know I saw him at least once -- I watched more than enough of the Celtics not to. But pretending that I'm some font of all knowledge about JaJuan Johnson's game would be quite foolish. I did watch a bunch of Synergy Sports footage on him last night, yes, and I've read back on career histories, what he did in college, et cetera. I know enough now to inform. But I'd be lying if I attested some giant wealth of knowledge about JaJuan Johnson's game. Don't know if that really matters, but figured I'd state it outright. Nevertheless. A few scouting observations on Johnson's game:

• Fundamentally, he's a really poor rebounder. Which is curious, as he was a solid one in college. He just doesn't seem to have a really good sense of space or where he needs to be to snag the chippies, and his box-outs are incredibly weak. In a general sense, Johnson seems to get more rebounds by simply happening across them than he does rebounds he actively contests for. It's sort of like the rebounding strategy of a guard in a big man's body.

• He's quicker than he looks. This isn't to say he's super fast or incredibly athletic, but he has that stealthy sort of quickness, where he's fast on his feet cutting and is quick to move side-to-side on defense. This actually could make a passable defender someday -- he had his rookie yips on that end, but Johnson's clearly got a decent defensive skillset (and actually was the NCAA DPoY at Purdue), and if he can bulk up a bit and maintain that quickness, he'd have a good shot at carving out a rotation player role.

• Extremely high release to his jump shot, which is sort of trippy, but it isn't awful. He doesn't shoot as quickly as he could, so the high release helps him get his shot off before defensive pressure rotates. Although the strength of his competition in his scant minutes was incredibly awful, he did convert 44% of his shots from the true midrange last year, which puts him in the 90th percentile of players for his position if he was to do that in the regular season. Granted, due to the fact that he's bad at getting to the rim and ATROCIOUS at converting from the long midrange (under 30% on the year), it's questionable how much a single high season-to-season variance midrange jumper is going to really make him an incredibly valuable offensive player, especially since he can't convert much at the rim unless he's set up with a horrendously easy chip shot. But alas.

In terms of prospects, I'm not totally sure where he goes from here. He clearly had a ton of trouble his rookie year learning the Celtics' playbook, both on offense and defense. Just look at what happened when Doc Rivers screamed at him. Because of that, he's stuck in a Catch-22 that has doomed an incredible number of players in the NBA -- he's not good unless he can learn the playbook, but he can't really learn the playbook unless he gets the chance to play out the string and actually experience it. When all his minutes come in meaningless garbage time, it's pretty difficult to motivate yourself to really invest in learning the exact playbook. I mean, heck, you don't even know that you'll be on the team in a year, you know? Same thing happened to James Anderson, and happens to most young guns on extremely good teams. They don't get in outside of garbage time, which ruins their work ethic and makes them prone to mental lapses that end up keeping them on the bench and irrevocably stunting their development.

Perhaps luckily for him, then, he was recently traded in the Courtney Lee deal as one of the assets Houston picked up for their ever-increasing haul of forwards. While that position is now deeper than the Octomom family pick-up team roster in Houston, the Houston playbook is nowhere near as complicated as the Celtics playbook, and he stands far more of a shot of getting better quality minutes on a team that's relatively lacking than he does on a team contending for home court advantage. Still -- if Houston is better than expected (as they could potentially be -- Asik's defensive chops are legendary, and if Martin has a bounceback season and Lin improves they could very well be in the fringes of the western playoff race) I'd expect his minutes to once again shrink into the abyss as Kevin McHale rolls with the polished vets and younger prospects in Johnson's wake. Sort of a pity, as I think he could be a half-decent roleplayer someday, but it'll be alright. Someday he'll make his way to a team that can leverage his skills and develop him into a useful piece. Perhaps that's Houston, perhaps that's not, but it'll probably happen someday regardless.

• • •

_Follow Semih Erden's example by scruffing up your hair and falling over all the friggin' time__.___

If it wasn't for the fact that Erden spent his last season on the Cavs, I probably would've had to do the same thing I did with Johnson's capsule -- that is, watch a ton of Synergy scouting and hope I notice some interesting tidbits. Luckily, I watched enough Cavs games to avoid that lonely despairing fate. Why lucky? Because, dear readers, watching Semih Erden play for your professional basketball team is about as enjoyable a fate as being coated with honey and eaten by bees. No, seriously. I try to be positive in this series. I wish I could give you a bunch of positive words, but I can't. He's simply one of the least engaging, least entertaining, and outright least useful players I've ever seen in my life. At an NBA level, Erden is a poor rebounder (rebounding rates have been incredibly low his whole career), an awful scorer (he had an above average TS% due only to an incredibly limited shot distribution -- respectable that he never tried to do anything he couldn't, I suppose, but not reflective of a good NBA offensive player), and a sleepy defender. A very sleepy defender. A defender whose defensive coverage quite frankly was akin to what a normal everyday dude would look like if they were dragged out of bed on 2 hours of sleep, put in platform shoes, and ordered to cover an NBA-level athlete.

The only distinguishing factor about his game -- and yes, I realize how hilarious this is -- is that he's one of the clumsiest NBA players I've ever seen. People say JaVale McGee's airheaded wonder is akin to clumsiness, but they're wrong. They've clearly never had to watch Semih Erden try and take the ball in the post. He trips, lumbers, and slips his way into all of our hearts. He trips setting screens. He trips while trying to cut to the rim. He trips while getting rebounds. He doesn't always fall, but you always notice the "whoops" slip. That moment where he looks like he's about to fall, catches himself, and watches as his man goes up strong for a dunk. Problems, man. Watching Semih Erden play at an NBA level, where the other players are of NBA athleticism rather than Turkish league athleticism, is like betting a friend that you can make a dreidel spin longer than they can. You know it'll fall over at some point, and you can anticipate with dread the moment right before it happens. You can tell. The spin starts to break, the lean starts to emerge, and you let out a whispered cuss. The dreidel falls while your friend's top spins happily onward, the bet lost. Disappointed, you hand the friend the agreed-upon neo-shekels. It's sad and disappointing. And it's also exactly what watching Semih Erden play in the NBA was like.

I say "was" because he's moved on from the NBA and returned to the Turkish league, which is probably best for both parties. In Semih Erden's case, he's actually a relatively useful center in the international game, and yes, he does seem less clumsy when you aren't pitting him against hyperathletic freaks of nature every other night. The goaltending rules (somehow) help him out as well, and in general, watching him play internationally has just always seemed a better fit for his subdued game. So here's to you, Semih. May you bring fans in Turkey the same vigor that produced the numerous "Semih Erden Falling Over" drinking games in the NBA. (That is, er, no vigor whatsoever.)

• • •

_Follow J.R. Smith on Twitter at __@TheRealJRSmith.___

A lot of people find many of the league's brightest lights frustrating. Rondo, Melo, Kobe, Dwight -- there's a somewhat odd inverse relationship, where once you become one of the 20-30 best players in the league, analysts happen to overanalyze your game and isolate every minuscule flaw that makes you the tiniest bit worse. There's a glaring tendency (one that, I must emphasize, I do all the time -- I'm not blameless in any way, here, and these criticisms reflect on me as well) to minimize the things that make those players so incredible to the benefit of extensively explicating their few flaws. The thing that gets a bit tricky about taking this sort of an approach is that when you take a step back, when you examine how differently we assess players among the best and players among the worst, there's a necessary endorsement of a flawed corollary -- the idea that we need to analyze the least prominent part of a player's game. In the case of the lesser players, we need to find the few ways they produce value. In the case of the greater players, we need to find reasons they aren't so wonderful. In some ways it's noble, and even slightly egalitarian -- it evens the playing field in the mental landscape of NBA thought. And I certainly don't think it's entirely wrong. In some ways, I actually do think that's an apt way to look at it. In others, though, it's certainly worth taking a step back and realizing that sometimes we go overboard. There are some players that are simply absurd, impossible, and disappointing -- and honestly, very rarely are these players among the best at their position.

One such player? J.R. Smith.

Last season, J.R. posted an effective field goal percentage below his position average. Which may not surprise you. But what makes it surprising is that he accomplished that despite posting percentages above position average from every single range on the floor beyond the 3-9 foot range. Despite his at-rim percentage being in the 70th percentile of all NBA guards, he took fewer shots at the rim per minute played than 70% of the guards in the NBA. He was barely at the position average from three, which to J.R. Smith, was apparently carte blanche to pretend he's James Jones -- despite being barely above average, he took almost 50% of his shots from beyond the three point line. There are very few players in the league with such an incomprehensible shot chart relative to how well they shoot from each range. He actually can run the pick and roll pretty well, to the extent that you wonder why the hell he doesn't do it more often -- instead, he often found his partner rolling with an effective shot at an open rim-finish and Smith just decided to hoist up and shoot a random three, or a random jumper. Absolutely kills chemistry, and makes it hard for his teammates to trust he'll get them the ball. Ever. It can gum up the offense, despite his numerous offensive skills.

Then there's the mental lapses. There are players that have moderately flawed court vision. There are players who make bad decisions with the ball. There are players who make ridiculous decisions with the ball. Then there's J.R. Smith, who somehow manages to do all of that -- weird passes that would only work in some reality nobody but Smith's partial to, crazy steal attempts that had no chance, and complete misapplication of one of the most athletically talented frames in the game. He's strong, quick, and slippery -- if he put his mind to it, you have to imagine he'd make a downright excellent defensive player. If he could just get his shot distribution in check and be more consistent, he'd be a beastly NBA player at a position that's honestly pretty slim at the moment -- after the Kobe/Wade/Manu trio, there's only really Gordon/Harden/Johnson to contend with. Smith has the talent and skill to be right there in that second group if he'd just get a few of his impulses in check, and if you're honest, with a handle like his and the inherent shooting talent he has, it's really not too big of a leap to imagine a defensively-retooled J.R. Smith being one of the 10 best players in the NBA. Seriously. He never has put it all together, though, and it remains one of the things that disappoints me most in the NBA. Taking an eye to the vintage J.R. games is one of the most enjoyable things you can watch. So, in some ways, I feel Smith has let me down -- he's made it so rare, so fleeting, so pie-in-the-sky to imagine him as an all-star player. But he should be so much better. It's incomprehensible.

So. Let's push pause for a second. That was vicious, extreme, and honestly really unfair. This might be where I'd close the capsule and stop talking about J.R. Smith, if I hadn't gone super-negative to emphasize a totally different point. I entreat you to take some time and read what might be the article of the year: Jonathan Abrams' profile of Smith's career over at Grantland. There's a reason I noted in the first paragraph that I'm actually quite sympathetic to the idea that we're doing the sport more justice by approaching the best players with a critical eye and lesser players with a sympathetic eye. Sometimes the point lies deeper than a stark assessment of relative value. The reasons aren't simple, but Abrams' profile highlights one of the many ways it's a flawed dichotomy. It's a pretty big mistake to attribute 100% of the fault for Smith's currently disappointing career. Just because a player has disappointed doesn't mean we should pillory the player. It means many different things. Perhaps, in some cases, it means we need to take a step back and examine the coaching tree he went through. Perhaps it's a bunch of poor rookie fits. Perhaps the player's history, the nature, the manner of upbringing conspired to make their ceiling lower than it should be. Perhaps injuries sapped their game.

But through it all, there's one theme -- it's not necessarily their fault. There are a myriad of talents and triumphs that highlight the NBA's stratosphere, but one thing tends to ring true. The players that make it to that level have been (for the most part) blessed with coaches and organizations that matched the way they approach the game, at least at some point in their development. They've escaped career-destroying injuries, a la Antonio McDyess. They've got work ethic, yes, but they haven't necessarily been 100% responsible for their grand success. When we assess a minor player as a disappointment we're in some extent placing the weight of the world on their shoulders -- we're placing the fault at their feet, assuming that if only they'd put in more effort, they'd have made it to our lofty expectations. But work ethic isn't 100% of the story, and it never will be. Who's to say that J.R. Smith couldn't have become a brilliant, generational, top-5 shooting guard if he hadn't been under Byron Scott's quasi-tyrannical thumb? Who's to say that, conversely, Kobe wouldn't have seen his share of struggles if he'd never found Phil Jackson and actually spent his first 5-10 years as a Hornet? Is Smith's puzzling work ethic a matter of nature or nurture?

It's actively impossible to answer these questions, and impossible to actively consider on a regular basis in your analysis. That's true. But in my view, by evening the playing field and assessing the players on their relative strengths and weaknesses, you do a better job looking at the league's full picture rather than simplifying the analysis down to tropes and disappointment. By focusing on the ways the NBA's brightest lights regress to the mean while focusing the small ways lesser players triumph, you start to come to broader realizations about the game, the sport, and life in general. Perhaps one's disappointing. Perhaps one's far better. Their on-court performance may be vastly different, but in the final estimation, they're both two of the 100-something best players in the world. Maybe, just maybe, that's enough.

• • •

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. I'm clearly gaining my edge back with these riddles. Nobody got ANY of today's players right. I'd say I'll make them easier, but I'm kind of enjoying stumping everyone, so perhaps not.

• The greatest lie Stu Lantz ever told was convincing anyone that Player #184 had even a modicum of NBA passing ability.
• Oh, man, let me tell you all about Player #185. He dunks. He... uh, dunks some more. And also, he dunks!
• Extremely good defender in extremely limited minutes, Player #186 has the outside potential of being an Asik-type if he'd work his conditioning a bit more. Though I'd say that's an extremely fringe possibility.

Keep on keepin' on.

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Shelden Williams, Jodie Meeks, and Lamar Odom.

• • •

_Follow Shelden Williams on Twitter at __@SheldenWilliams.___

Last season, Shelden Williams coupled one of the most self-aware shot distributions in the league with one of the least efficient offensive seasons of anyone in the NBA. Really. Williams took over 70% of his shots at the rim, which compares quite favorably with his position as a whole -- most forward-centers take around 30-40% of their shots at the rim, which is good, however... there's an important general rule that the less versatile you are on the offensive end, the more you should pump that number up. Williams took that and ran with it, leading to a shot distribution that -- for any average offensive center -- would've led to a well-above-average shooting percentage. Unfortunately for Williams, he isn't an average offensive center -- he's a straight-up abysmal offensive center, and even a super-efficient shot distribution profile couldn't save his overall offensive game. Case in point: Williams shot 57% at the rim. You'd perhaps think that's good, in a vacuum, but that's only good if you aren't culling it down to his position's average -- most positions aren't as good at the rim as centers and big men.

To wit: among centers and large forwards, shooting 57% at the rim is only good enough to (just barely) put you in the 20th percentile of NBA centers. Yikes. Over 80% of the players at his position shot better at the rim than he did. The picture obviously doesn't get better once you get past the rim -- in the 53 shots he let off outside the rim, he made a scant 13, a completion percentage right around 24%. Rough story. For Nets fans, this does have sort of a point -- while I've been notably scathing in my criticism of Deron Williams, for last year's Nets, slightly under half of Deron's minutes (909 out of 1999) came with Shelden Williams at center. I'll repeat that. Almost half of Deron Williams' minutes came with Shelden Williams at center. While Deron Williams had terrible numbers last year (to the point that few people even remotely realize how bad they are), it's almost impossible to belabor the point enough that he was feeding a player as offensively rudderless as Shelden Williams as his primary man in the middle. I don't know that the Nets are going to really be that good this year -- I have them pegged for just over 0.500. But there's at least some reason to believe he'll return to his pre-Nets numbers when you look at the sorts of crummy offensive players he was having to force-feed in New Jersey.

All in all, I find it kind of darkly fascinating that Williams is this bad of an NBA player. The offense is one thing -- the defense is another, and he's bad at it too! His overall lacking size (scarcely hitting 6'9" is NOT a good look for an NBA center) doesn't help matters, as it makes it relatively easy for most NBA-size centers to simply convert over him. His lack of speed makes it difficult for him to recover when he gets out of position (which is disturbingly often for fans of wherever he happens to be playing). And his often sky-high turnover rate means he's so often caught having to sprint the length of the floor to stop a fast-break, something he simply doesn't have a very strong skillset in. For a player who was -- in college -- extremely good, this all is pretty disappointing. I don't really remember the 2006 draft, but I don't imagine most people thought this pick was that horrible. For instance, look at Simmons' draft diary -- calls it a "solid pick", shrugs, moves on. But Williams has been, all things considered, a pretty unmitigated disappointment in the NBA despite having a decent skillset coming in and constantly tweaking his shot distribution to try and play to his strengths. Is this seriously the best he can be? I wish I could say it wasn't, but at this point, I have legitimately no idea what aspect of his game is under his control that could make him any better. So... it's quite unfortunate, but yeah, it probably is the best he can be.

• • •

_Follow Jodie Meeks on Twitter at __@Jmeeks20.___

Surprised anyone DIDN'T snag this riddle, although a few figured it out. I noted in yesterday's riddle that today's 2nd player would be the one guy that could improve the most if he played alongside Nash. To that end, there are exactly two types of perfect complementary players for Steve Nash -- athletic rim-cutting bigs with incredible finishing ability and spot up specialist three point shooters with a quick release. The Lakers have one of both -- they have Dwight Howard for the first, obviously, but he can't really be expected to improve that much at this point of his career. For the second? They've got the young and restless bomber, Jodie Meeks. Now, Meeks isn't exactly the most versatile player -- most shooting guards stick to some combination of the rim, the long midrange, and the three on offense. Meeks takes that to a whole other level, taking 90% of his shots from those three ranges and 60% of his overall shots from beyond the three point line. What makes Meeks effective is that he's quite decent at those shots, over the last two years converting 38% from beyond the arc. For reference, there were exactly two Lakers last year who shot better than that from three in significant minutes -- Ramon Sessions and Troy Murphy. With Nash on the floor to redirect the ball to Meeks, he should see the customary Nash bump to his three point percentage, and kill more than a few teams over the course of the year with timely bombs.

Wouldn't expect him to do all that much else, though. The fatal flaw to Meeks' game is simply that of lack -- he lacks any other cogent skills he can leverage into a more important role on a good team. He's one of the worst rebounders in the game, even for a guard -- he ranked 404 out of 478 in total rebounding percentage last season. He doesn't really generate assists either -- his assist % of 5 is well below the position average, even for supposed ballhogs. One amusing thing you can do with Meeks' numbers to demonstrate his lack of tertiaries is to simply rank every player in the league on their assist percentage added to their rebound percentage -- due to the higher average assist percentage than rebound percentage, the top of the list ends up being very guard heavy, but not with Meeks. He comes in at -- I kid you not -- 463 out of 478 players. The only players under him include a lot of specialists and players who played 4 or 5 games total -- he's the lowest (by far) of anyone who played the string and appeared in a full 66 games. If he could develop at least one tertiary hustle skill, I have a feeling he'd be a really solid piece. Not sure what he can develop, but if he could just get something, he'd be right there as a starter-quality talent on an excellent team.

Some think he's a very good defender. I don't totally disagree, but I also think he's quite overrated by the statistical metrics that generally point to his defensive prominence. His Synergy numbers are good, but watching the footage, I get the sense he benefits a lot from who he's playing with. Meeks spent almost 66% of his minutes on the court with Elton Brand (who just completed one of the best bounceback defensive seasons I can remember any big man ever having -- he was brilliant on that end in 2012, and makes everyone around him look a hell of a lot better), right at 66% of his minutes with Jrue Holiday (who tended to draw the tougher guard assignment), and over 66% of his minutes with Andre Iguodala (whose defensive chops need no introduction and who helped a lot on possessions he wasn't actively shutting a man down with). His Synergy numbers are good, mind you, and the on/off court numbers make him look semi-important. But they seem more a factor of who he played with and the relatively insubstantial role he played on that end with the Sixers. I don't imagine they'll hold up in Los Angeles unless he shares a great deal of time with Dwight Howard. If not, I don't expect he'll be actively poor on the defensive end -- he has solid fundamentals and a good sense of space, timing, and when to foul -- but I also don't expect he'll rank quite as high in Synergy, or have on/off numbers anywhere near as positive as they were in Philadelphia.

• • •

Follow _Lamar Odom on Twitter at __@RealLamarOdom.___

I feel like most people don't realize how incongruous Odom's 2012 season was. This is a player who -- the year before! -- was a deserving all-star candidate, MIP candidate, and Sixth Man of the Year award winner. This wasn't some "oh, he's years from last being good" situation. Odom was less than a year from being good. Sure, he had his disappointments late in the year -- he was really quite atrocious in the 2011 playoffs, and on less of a smaller sample size, he did actually get worse as the year went on. As an example, just look at his rarely-examined splits before and after February (I say all-star weekend, but I think I accidentally calculated it by month, heh, whoops.)

Notice the issue? After the all-star break, Odom shot way worse from two point range (primarily the rim), rebounded quite a bit worse, and couldn't play quite as many minutes per game due to exhaustion. On a less statistical level, his defense looked significantly worse after the all-star break in 2011, and his general energy level was at an absolute minimum. None of these were good signs, and as 2012 showed, we might not have put nearly enough stock into them as legitimate signs of an aging player. Odom didn't just look "a little bad" in 2012 -- he looked horrible, posting career-worst numbers in points per 36 minutes, assists per 36, overall shooting percentage, and free throw percentage. He posted "almost" career-worst numbers in rebound rate, fouls per game, and steals/blocks. He posted the absolute worst defensive numbers of his career (and subjectively, those were even worse than they looked) and looked about 20 steps slow for the NBA pace of the game. Absolutely awful. And this happened on a team where he was hardly the oldest piece -- he was the 7th oldest player on the team, and 5 of the 6 players older played FAR more important roles on that Mavericks team.

So, what should we be expecting going forward? Not a whole lot, if I'm honest. Odom's falloff didn't simply look like a man whose head was a bit out of place last year -- he looked like a man who was consistently 3 to 4 steps slow, a man who didn't really know what he was doing, and a man whose athletic marvels were no longer enough to outpace poor effort. I'd look to players like Troy Murphy, Tracy McGrady, and Vince Carter for the new expectation. He may be able to produce better results if he puts in a modicum of effort, but his athletic talents are virtually gone and his game was highly dependent on them. Even if -- as with McGrady and Carter -- he reaches a sort of equilibrium at a certain percentage of his old production, it's not going to be anywhere close to the heights he used to soar. And as he was never quite the MVP-candidate type that Carter and McGrady was, I'd err on the side of the lesser players and expect him going forward to be about as useful as Troy Murphy is now. Perhaps his three point shot will come back next to Paul, and perhaps with increased effort he'll rebound a bit better than his awful rate last year. But without his legs under him on defense and without seriously revising the tenor of his game, I don't really see how we can expect Odom to be anything more than a marginal bench upgrade to a team that needed a bit more than that.

Off the court, you have to feel pretty awful for Odom, even if you don't like celebrities much. He's gone through a lot of traumatic experiences this past year, including but not limited to: experiencing the death of a beloved cousin, being the passenger in a car that hit and killed a 15-year-old boy AT THE FUNERAL for said cousin, having to deal with an extremely ill father, dealing with the ongoing ramifications of his suddenly deceased son, and dealing with the ongoing stress of having virtually his entire life televised. The thing that really gets me about it all is that so many people fall victim to the disease Matt Moore smartly calls "the victory lap" -- our inherent need to run around proclaiming our brilliance when we correctly assess that something is at risk of happening. NBA scribes, fans, and followers make all manner of predictions and share all sorts of thoughts before a season begins. When we're wrong, we like to essentially pretend they never happened. When we're right, we like to stampede around to brag about our brilliance and remind everyone that, indeed, we were the second coming of Nostradamus! But we're not always right for the right reasons, and with Odom's stark and sudden fall, those who throw dirt on the shallow grave of his waning career are completely missing the point. He's fallen off with age, yes, and perhaps he was never so great to begin with. But when the weight of personal tragedy and a body begun to fail descends upon a former great, it's hard to really sit around proclaiming brilliance. Were you predicting his cousin would die? Were you predicting the reality show would stress him to incredible levels? We predicted results, not the manner they happened. And let's be honest: nobody predicts a tragedy. For a darn good reason, too.

• • •

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. The best, yesterday? 1/3. I'm getting my edge back.

• One of Tim Severson's favorite players, this particular forward has never really gotten the chance to shine in the frosty northeast. This is probably because he's not very good at NBA-level basketball.
• The Cavs got this particular player for free. Literally free. The cost STILL may have been too much. Yikes.
• He should be better defensively. He should be more efficient. He's a semi-insane headcase. But he still does have those games, and while he wasn't a major factor outside of that, sometimes that's enough.

Stay frosty, friends.

Continue reading

_As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we contin_ue with Chris Duhon, Kawhi Leonard, and Joakim Noah.__

• • •

_Follow Chris Duhon on Twitter at __@CDuhonStandTall.___

I've got a game for you. It's fun, although perhaps a bit cruel. Go on twitter. If you don't have an account, get one. You can stop using it afterwards. Go around twitter and find a bunch of Knicks fans. Jared Dubin, the Knickerblogger guys, Dan Devine, my pal Wes, et cetera. Find them. Engage them in conversation. Discuss the finer points of basketball. Get some frozen yogurt. The finer things in life, you know. Become fast friends, and learn about why they're Knicks fans. Learn of their struggles, their triumphs, their woe. Truly internalize all of this, and realize that in the end we're all just wayward sport-obsessed souls with a penchant for exaggeration trying to one-up the other on an ever-spinning carousel of misery and disappointment. Eventually they will say something you find ridiculous -- whether it be a paean to Carmelo you don't understand, a statement of confidence in their team you don't get, or a statement about New York's mettle that makes no sense to anyone who doesn't live there. At this moment you will step back, crack your knuckles, and type out the following words.

"The New York Knicks paid Chris Duhon almost $12 million dollars to play the game of basketball." ... Okay, yep, so that's where this game becomes cruel. Sorry, Knicks fans. In truth, the only reason I'm bringing this exercise in a few cheap laughs up is the simple fact that there's virtually nothing else to talk about with Duhon at this point. His single fleeting moment of relevance in the past two years has been rooted to this incredible GIF. That's it. On the court, to say Duhon's been busted the last few years is to underrate things. He hasn't really looked like an NBA player in years, and while he had a decent season behind the arc this last year, I have my doubts he'll really extend that to next year. And the good season behind the arc was scarcely enough to override Duhon's other huge problems -- for one thing, he shot under 50% at the rim, which is remarkably bad even for a guard. Compound that with his turnovers and you have a problem -- Duhon is absolutely a turnover machine, and last year posted the 12th highest turnover rate in the entire league. The worst part about that? He played significantly more minutes than any of the players above him! It'd be one thing if he was some lock-down Gary Payton type on defense, but he's really not. He's a decently physical defender who can't really stay with quicker point guards (read: everyone but Jason Kidd) for more than 2 or 3 minutes a night, but does have the lateral mobility to bother guards-off-the-bench when he has the chance.

I've heard several people say that Duhon is important to the Lakers' title quest this season, and I agree. He's very important. The problem is that Duhon being important _is a really big problem_. He's a disgustingly bad offensive player and his defense (while situationally valuable) is completely undermined by his poor command of team offense and his weakness under even the most cursory of ball pressure. Despite that, with Nash at the point where he can't at all be counted on for more than 30 a night (and 28 might even be pushing it), that leaves 18-20 minutes without a point guard. Of the Lakers' pu pu platter of busted-down backup point guards, Duhon may very well be the best option. And knowing Mike Brown, he's certainly the one you can most expect Brown to trust -- Brown doesn't like young players much, and he always likes to play a solid defender over a solid offensive player when the players are of similar repute. Can a team win when they dominate by 20 to 30 points for 30 minutes a night and immediately hemorrhage the margin with their star point guard off the floor? Good question. As a teaching example, I'd point towards the other end of the floor with the Boston Celtics of last year's playoffs. Not with Rondo, no -- with Kevin Garnett. With Garnett on the floor, the Celtics absolutely obliterated the competition, allowing only 92 points per 100 possessions. With Garnett off? The Celtics allowed (and I swear to god this is not a typo) 118 points per 100 possessions. KIND OF A BIG DIFFERENCE. I could see a similar effect taking hold with Nash and the Laker offense in the playoffs in this upcoming season, simply because the Lakers' alternate options are so incredibly bad at the game of basketball.

• • •

_Follow Kawhi Leonard on Twitter at __@TheBig_Island.___

Today, I take some time out of my day at 48 Minutes of Hell to discuss Kawhi Leonard, expectations, and the role he plays on a philosophically adaptive offense like the San Antonio Spurs. Fans weren't really expecting Leonard to be the player he's manifested as, in more ways than one. Which leads to an interesting dichotomy -- fans are both excited for all the new things he's displayed and expectant that some of his still latent collegian talents will eventually develop into strong assets for his pro game as well. I'm one such fan. The thing I didn't touch on, and the one thing I probably should, is that this isn't necessarily how things are going to go. There's so much promise and potential here, it's easy to conflate the yet-to-happen with the things we've seen. We haven't seen proof Kawhi Leonard is going to be an excellent NBA defender yet. We've seen inklings, to whet our curiosity, but we haven't seen it definitively. Until we do, there's no guarantee it ever happens. But I take a more hopeful view with Leonard, perhaps because I like his game, perhaps because he's still so young. As one might note -- when the Spurs were eliminated in that soul-crushing Game 6 loss, Leonard couldn't legally drink. Imagine what he'll be with Artest's pet Henny!

Most people know that Kawhi is a great three point shooter. At least, he was one in the NBA -- it's worth noting (once again) that he was absolutely atrocious from behind the arc in college, hence why nobody expected he'd suddenly be good at it on the NBA level. One of the notable things that most people don't realize, though, is that Leonard isn't your everyday corner-bomber. While he takes a lot of threes from the corner, he also takes (and makes) more from above the arc than most would expect. In particular, in the 2012 NBA playoffs, Leonard shot 13 of his 40 three pointers from above the break. He made 7 -- 54%, for those counting. Yes, he took more corner threes -- 27 of his 40 threes were corner shots, but he doesn't only shoot corner shots. In fact, during his first regular season, he took far more above-the-break threes than corner three pointers, and his lack of hesitance with the shot is one of the reasons the Spurs offense moves so fluidly. It's easier to camp on the corners when you know for a fact every shooter makes their home there. When you have a shooter or two who regularly moves out and shoots on a dime or a break, the defense becomes that much more disoriented. There's that much more space they need to cover if they want to muffle your team. And while the Spurs use a lot of corner three pointers, with Neal and Leonard and Manu in the fold, the Spurs offense relies almost as much on effective use of wide open above-the-break threes.

For more on Kawhi Leonard, read today's Player Capsule (Plus) at 48 Minutes of Hell.

• • •

_Follow Joakim Noah on Twitter at __@JoakimNoah.___

You know, sometimes I wonder what to think about Joakim Noah. It's not that he's a bad player -- he's very good. But the ways his stats indicate he's good generally don't match 100% to the visual aesthetics of his game. You watch Noah and you get the sense that he's a sea-changing defensive presence, his limber body control and wide reach allowing him to get his hands on seemingly every possession he sits through on the defensive end. You watch him play and you imagine him on just about any other team in the league -- the Spurs, the Thunder, the Heat, the Nets -- and you imagine how amazing he could be as the crux of their defensive attack. He visually looks like that kind of a defender, at least in his ability to scout the point of attack on any individual possession and focus his efforts in to what viscerally looks like the most threatening offensive play the opposing team could run. His wingspan, his focus, and his monstrous talent at cleaning the glass are amazing (tangent: underrated fact about Noah -- he's one of the best rebounders in the NBA, and I have a feeling that he'd absolutely DESTROY the glass on a team where he wasn't next to Carlos Freakin' Boozer). He just feels defensively dominant.

And yet... the numbers haven't really backed that up for years. In fact, they've implied the opposite. Noah's on-and-off court numbers have indicated the last few years that the Bulls play markedly better defense when he's off the floor, INCLUDING the time he doesn't share with Carlos Boozer. Part of this is obvious. Asik and Gibson are the best bench big men in the NBA, and both would start on 20-25 teams in the league. Slotting them in against bench big men is not only hilarious, it's straight-up unfair. It's like Manu Ginobili or James Harden versus a bench shooting guard -- I mean, really, talk about an absurd mismatch. Of COURSE Asik and Gibson are going to lead to better results defensively -- they're playing worse competition. Except... this trend also extends to Noah's minutes versus bench players. And just in a general sense. It's really weird. But you know what's weirder? Joakim Noah -- the owner of one of the weirdest set-shots in the NBA, the player who has an effective field goal percentage well below the position average despite taking way fewer shots than most at his position do (and having a below-average percentage at the rim, which usually kills centers like him), the player who's usually among the first pieces mentioned when people bemoan the lack of offensive talent around Derrick Rose -- has consistently and markedly improved the Bulls offense over the past two years. Seriously. The on/off court numbers are relatively impressive, and this effect actually gets more pronounced when Derrick Rose is on the bench.

So, you might wonder. Why in God's name would that ever happen? Good question. There are a lot of useful things Noah brings to the table offensively, some of which are common knowledge and some of which aren't. First one: his free throw percentage is downright excellent for a starting center in the NBA, hovering in the mid 70s despite his odd looking release. Many defenses rely on fouling the center as a last-resort type "well, we can't defend your team, so let's make the center shoot a bunch of free throws." With Noah on the court it's impossible to really do that. Secondly, Noah's passing is absolutely brilliant, and while Noah rarely ends up with gaudy assist totals I wouldn't be surprised at all if he led the league in secondary hockey assists, or more specifically brilliant passes where he sets Rose up with two or three good offensive options through an excellent hockey-feed. He's a magnificent high-post setup man, and in a league where centers rarely have the quickness to steal, this can be invaluable to a functioning offense. Finally, the simple truth -- Noah seems to know every single person on the team. Watching him and the Bulls is fun, partly because he simply has great chemistry with just about everyone wearing the red and black. He knows their tendencies, their skills, their limitations. He sets great screens on the offensive end, and he's invaluable for getting Chicago's cavalcade of shooters open. Frankly, he just knows what everyone SHOULD doing on the offensive end, and he makes it happen. Which in turn makes him a more valuable asset for Chicago on the offensive end than he is on the defensive end, even if he's a better defensive player personally than he is an offensive player.

Off the court, Noah is the NBA's chillest bro, a man who I've heard from multiple sources "loves 4/20" and "is definitely up for chill time." He should live in the international house. (Shout out to the <15 people who will understand that joke.) I've heard several stories of people meeting Noah outside of the arena, and just about every one of them has been awesome. I'll cop to not necessarily being a huge fan of his, at least ever since his random slam on Cleveland straight out of nowhere, but the stories of how fun Noah is in real life do tend to assuage any concerns I have about him as a jerk. He seems to be a good-natured guy with a generally fun-to-watch game, an excellent sense of perspective, and a penchant for not-taking-himself-too-seriously. Good dude. Chicago fans should feel lucky they've locked this guy up for the price they did and the duration they did. He's a treasure, and the Noah-Rose core should continue to be a potent pairing well into this decade. Not bad for a guy who would've been a Knick if Isiah wasn't so hung up on getting Eddy Curry.

• • •

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. Congrats to Luke, the only one to get 3/3 on yesterday's riddles.

• It's sort of remarkable how poorly Player #178 has acquainted himself with the NBA. I realize his size is troubling, but he was so good in college you'd think he could've risen past it. Not so, alas.
• If there's anyone that's going to improve at the behest of Steve Nash in Los Angeles, it would be Player #179. They should put him alongside Nash as much as possible.
• Player #180 is another example of a player who in recent seasons has matched the Troy Murphy "instant falloff" archetype. His new team is still taking a risk on him, that's for sure.

Have a good day.

Continue reading

_As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. _Today we continue with Lester Hudson, Jimmer Fredette, and Marco Belinelli.__

• • •

_Follow Lester Hudson on Twitter at __@Lester26Hudson.___

The issue with Lester Hudson's game is, in my view, a personally warped perception of what he's actually good at. Seriously. I don't think there's a single scoring guard in the league with a more ridiculous shooting chart than that of Hudson -- strange decisions all around. Consider his time in Cleveland, which is by far the high point to his NBA career thus far. In those 13 games, Hudson converted a patently absurd 72% of his shots at the rim. That was the sixth best mark in the league among 20+ MPG guards. What's about as good is his close-in post-up game, where he had a few crafty moves to convert from close-but-not-too-close -- Hudson was well above his position average from 3-9 feet, with a solid 39% FG% from that range. So, you'd think he'd try to leverage that by taking a few more shots there, right? Try and get closer in? Run offensive sets to get closer to the basket? ... Nope! What a ridiculous notion! Hudson chose instead to backload his shots, which is insanely absurd when you actually take some time to examine his conversion percentages from that range. He took 64% of his field goals from behind 10 feet, shooting a positively blistering 27% on those shots. That's not a typo. He barely made 1 of 4! Yeesh.

This isn't to say he was an awful player with the Cavs, in his much ballyhooed rise to semi-prominence. In fact, Hudson's decent play did a relatively good job covering up one of the most incredible collapses of a team's defense I've ever seen -- while the second-half-of-the-season Cavs were absolutely rudderless on defense, most people don't quite understand how bad they were. I entreat you to take a look at how the Cavs defense performed with Hudson on the bench in his 13-game stint (second table on the page). Not only did Hudson's play drastically improve the Cavaliers' offense in the absence of Kyrie Irving, with Hudson on the floor, Cavaliers players actually seemed to give half a damn on defense again (with the singular exception of Antawn Jamison, who was still... well... Antawn Jamison) . They made some rotations, and Hudson's general energy and hustle helped lead the team into the promised land of "only being a bottom-10-of-the-season" defense rather than a "bottom-10-of-the-century" defense. Truly a hard-fought victory for Hudson fans. He did do a good job from that respect, though, and while he's a bad individual defender he does seem to have a semi-inspirational impact on teammates. So that's something.

Then there's Hudsanity (Ed. Note: Nevermind, sources say it was technically #LESTERIA), where you start to get into the funny, the awkward, and the silly. The idea behind Hudsanity was simple enough, I think. Try and capture in a bottle the same sort of magic that New York had with Linsanity, as a way to help cope with the fact that the Cleveland Cavaliers went from a fringe playoff team to a busted mess as soon as they realized Varejao was out for the season and Kyrie would be out for a while too. Simple problem, though. Hudson wasn't nearly as good, and although the front office was happy to profit off of and utilize the localized meme to their advantage, they clearly didn't have the same investment in Hudson's success as most Cavs fans did. Leading to one of the most hilariously awkward moments I've ever seen for a fanbase -- Cleveland fans having to uncomfortably stop the adulation after the front office completely unexpectedly refused to re-up Hudson on an end-of-the-season contract. One day, Cavs fans were writing long scribes about Hudson's potential as a change-of-pace bench point guard and the Cavaliers' bench mob leader of the future. The next day, they were chuckling uncomfortably as the Grizzlies signed him and wondering why the hell the front office didn't let him finish the string with the Cavs. How do you even respond to that, as a fan? No, Hudson isn't phenomenal, but he has a unique set of skills and (with the right training on how to use those skills) I could definitely see him as an end-of-rotation guy on a decent team. The decision not to re-up him doesn't actually matter in the macro level, or the aggregate -- he's a 28 year old whose lifetime NBA earnings probably won't surpass $1,000,000, with a questionable NBA-level skillset and a genuinely poor utilization of that skillset. But it was still a memorably awkward situation for Cleveland fans, and I know I'm not likely to forget it any time soon.

• • •

_Follow Jimmer Fredette on Twitter at __@jimmerfredette.___

Had I written this a year ago, I imagine a lot of people would've balked at the thought. Now, not so much. But I'm pretty sure Jimmer Fredette was the single most overhyped player in the last draft class. Fredette was bandied about as a game-changing shooting talent, whose unconscious stroke would make him an incredibly valuable piece going forward for the Kings. Needed to work the defense a bit, but a genuinely talented shooter who would finally give Tyreke Evans the shooters he needed to return to his rookie form. The great white hope. In hindsight? That expectation wasn't really fair to Fredette in the slightest, who absolutely was not in NBA shape when he first entered the league. Part of Fredette's problem his freshman season was conditioning -- at no point his rookie year did he really look the part of an NBA-fit player, and if you couldn't always tell on offense, you could virtually never miss it on defense. His defense was never going to be great, but most people didn't expect him to be THAT bad -- he simply couldn't stay with a soul or solve a rotation to save his life. It was tough, especially combined with his anemic rebounding and poor gambles. Fredette became, to some degree, a player whose minutes your defense had to survive -- which is fundamentally different than a player who's simply bad at defense, as he was actively forcing others to help to cover up his incredibly flawed defensive presence. Rough stuff, even given the rookie caveat.

On offense, he had a serious case of the sticky fingers. Never on a functioning NBA team should a player shooting a TS% below 50% on a team with ANY better offensive options be averaging a usage percentage above 20%. That's absurd. I realize it's probably a holdover from his BYU days, where Fredette shot the ball once every two minutes. And he had some offensive skills -- he was above average behind the three point line (despite NBA defenders being far more up in his grill than college defenders), on the longest two, and right at the rim. (Although it's worth noting that due to his lacking athleticism, he was barely able to get to the rim once a night). At some point, though, you need to make peace with what you are on an NBA level, and specifically make peace with the idea that you aren't what you were on a college level. I didn't really get the sense that Fredette did that. He still obviously has a few years to get to that realization, but he really hasn't quite yet. His passing was also rather depressing -- while he had a few nice connections (he was good at setting up Jason Thompson and Marcus Thornton, for two), in the aggregate his passing never struck me as reflective of any potential as a true NBA point guard, and his turnovers seemed rooted more in his lacking physical talent than in a surfeit of creativity. He put up an assist percentage of 15%, slightly above that of Kevin Martin's last season and slightly below that of Derek Fisher. He had almost the exact same percentage as Gary Neal, who I consistently argue is nowhere close to a backup point guard in the NBA. Both can make the occasional nice pass, both have some solid connections they default to, but in the whole picture they don't really have strong passing instincts and are score-first shooting guards at their core.

Unfortunately for Fredette, barring a full-time move to the large wing for Tyreke Evans (and perhaps even if that happens), minutes are going to be tight in Sacramento. Given his stellar rookie year, you have to imagine Isaiah should be good for 30+ minutes a night from day one. Same with Marcus Thornton. Aaron Brooks, if he's back to form after a stellar year in the CBA, will be taking up anywhere from 25-30 minutes a contest, and Tyreke should be able to fill the gaps quite nicely when he's not taking time at the SF spot. Which leaves Fredette with... 5 minutes a night? 10 on a good day? Yikes. Before the Brooks signing, it looked like he was in a position where he'd get 20 or so minutes a contest and a chance to really show if a summer of athletic training and shooting-coach visits couldn't improve his perceived ceiling a tad. Now, it just looks like the Kings have painted themselves into something of a corner. Fredette will get minutes, but only if one of the Kings' other pieces gets badly injured. His fans will continue to assert that he'd be great if they just gave him the minutes, his detractors will continue to note that he doesn't have NBA-caliber athleticism (even if Fredette could potentially pull a J.J. Redick and work himself into prime NBA shape with a brutal workout regimen), and the fence-sitters like me will wonder aimlessly whether Fredette's current tepid play is a general indicator that draft evaluators still have a long way to go before they weed out the Fredette-ish flash-in-the-pan types from lottery consideration.

He still has a chance to be a decent player, certainly -- the kid is halfway to 24, not halfway to 28. But given his old-ish age for a rookie and the general habits he's picked up, molding Jimmer into an NBA-level player with a clear understanding of his role on a good team won't be easy. Best of luck to the Kings -- they're going to need it. As for the off-court stuff.. for what seems like the 100th time, take some time to read our contributing writer Alex Arnon's encounter with Jimmer's wife. It's always -- ALWAYS -- worth a re-read.

• • •

_Follow Marco Belinelli on Twitter at __@marcobelinelli.___

Reading John Hollinger's player profiles is often a treat, and one of my favorite things to read about is his assessment of marginal NBA players. You can kind of expect the LeBron profile is going to be incredibly positive, and you roughly know what you're getting with the prominent highlight players in the league. With the marginal players, though, you can learn a few things you didn't necessarily know about the little guys, or little statistical oddities you didn't quite realize were there. There's a catch, though. Now that I'm doing this capsule series, where I'm basically writing a 700-1000 word essay on each player in the league, I've done enough scouting to notice a lot of these things myself. Which can occasionally make me sad when I read a Hollinger profile and read something that was going to be the entire basic theme of an upcoming capsule. Gosh, John. Get out of my head!

No, but really. Hollinger's profile on Marco Belinelli called to light the same exact trend I was planning on covering in the guy's capsule -- that is, the idea that Marco has become one of the most predictable per-minute players in the entire league. You know virtually exactly what you're going to get, to the letter. Marco Belinelli will give you:

• An effective field goal percent within three percentage points of 50% -- erring above 50% with a good PG, below 50% without.
• Five or six three point heaves per 36 minutes played, with a little over two makes a night.
• A minuscule turnover rate to go with a bare minimum assist rate and some of the worst guard rebounding in the NBA.
• Complete and utter disinterest on the defensive end to the point of being actively harmful.
• An awful and patchy beard that sometimes includes a mustache but usually just looks like overgrown peach fuzz.

That's Marco for you. He's incredibly predictable at this point, and a fringe NBA player solely for the fact that he can make a few threes and he has a name most people recognize. Important, important stuff. And this is really one of Chicago's big free agency acquisitions? I hate to make every single Bulls capsule an indictment on the management, but I can't really help it -- what the hell is Reinsdorf doing? If he wants to take the plunge and field a bad team while Rose is out, and he wants to be cheap (as the refusal to take the Asik deal indicates), he might as well make connections with some D-League teams. Just let the Bulls run through 10-day D-League contracts on a season-long talent search for players who could actually make waves with Rose in the fold. Instead, they just seem to be signing a bunch of crusty vets. That gives this Bulls team the "upside" of having wasted money on poor veterans who hurt the Bulls' win total and get them slightly better draft position while simultaneously taking up roster space with refuse that have no chance of being better pieces when Rose gets back to form. Combined with the "downside" that the vets actually make the team slightly better and put the team in draft purgatory, with no chance at a high lottery pick but simultaneously no chance at making waves in the playoffs.

If you don't want to spend money, then, well, don't. Use D-League talent and actually roll the dice on players who have the outside potential of being solid supporting pieces when Rose returns to the fold. Find undrafted rookies, European guys, et cetera. I just don't understand the strategy here. Snagging low-variance veterans who have displayed little outside potential on semi-low value contracts makes a lot of sense if you're looking at a juggernaut of a 60 game winner that needs to shore up a few minor things for the Eastern Conference Finals versus the Heat. Not so much if you're looking at a middling-tier season with a recovering Derrick Rose. If you're thinking for the future, you'd have kept Asik to keep the defensive core intact. If you're thinking to tank, there are better ways to do it. I just don't get it, and honestly, I feel immensely for Bulls fans who have to deal with this sort of rudderless frittering. Chicago fans are immensely loyal even when their team is remarkably bad, evinced through their league-leading attendance figures through the Bulls' dark post-Jordan epoch. They deserve better than rearranging deck chairs on a doomed team with low-upside vets and no broader plan. Come on, Reinsdorf. Get it together.

• • •

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. I was pretty lax on the Friday riddles last week, as everybody got 3/3 on them. That includes: Free_Zero20, Jeffrey, J, Luke, Chilai, and Sam. Whew. Let's see if I can't make these harder next time.

• Player #175's single hilarious dance move in this year's playoffs was funny. Completely overshadowed his play, which is actually a good thing for him, because he's awful.
• An article featuring Player #176 received one of the highest-traffic links in this site's history. It was a Proboards forum. I still don't get it. Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).
• One of the better defensive centers out there, this guy. Which is good, because even though Player #177 can technically run the floor, beyond passing, you seriously don't want him doing too much on the offensive end.

Two short notices: first, I spent about an hour this week adding a stylesheet to the comments. If you refresh the page, you should see a more-stylized comments page than before. Given that we're getting 10-20 comments a post now, I figured it'd be worth my time to make them better from a standpoint of not reading floating white text with poorly produced list statements. Second, going forward, I'm going to try and link every player's name in his "Follow ____ on Twitter" blurb to their basketball-reference page, in case you'd like to look at their stats while you're reading the capsule. Hope that's helpful to some people.

Until next time, then.

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Michael Beasley, Ian Mahinmi, and Steve Nash.

• • •

_Follow Michael Beasley on Twitter at __@MBEASLEY8.___

I was actually pretty shocked that Batum was so commonly mentioned as the answer to yesterday's first riddle (in case you forgot: just a statement that this player had the worst new contract signed in the west this offseason). It's not that I'm in love with Batum's game (ask Tim Varner, I'm absolutely not), nor that I think he was signed to a good contract (too many years / too much money for a player that still has to take a proverbial leap to be worth that much). It's that there are simply so many better choices. You can go for Jamal Crawford -- actually, to be totally honest, I'd forgotten the exact terms of that contract. That one's probably the worst. Or you could go with Eric Gordon, if you think his health problems are more concerning than I do and you have a less sparkling assessment of his game. Considering his injury trouble and the fact that he's been legitimately maxed out, you might have a case. Or you can go with the player I was actually talking about, who somehow managed to wrangle $18,000,000 in guaranteed dollars from a dismal team that's going nowhere. A player who has not once displayed an above-average NBA capacity at any broad scale on a basketball court. A player who Kevin Love was explicitly happy to get rid of. I refer, of course, to samurai legend Michael Paul Beasley.

Beasley's general play is misleading, to most people. Most would assess him as a generally poor player, but few would realize just how harmful he can be when he has his bad nights. A few facts about Beasley's play. First, while he rebounds passably for a large wing (barely above average, but at least he's at the average there), he's one of very few players whose rebounding gets no better whatsoever when he plays the four. Every moment he's switched into the four-spot, Beasley ends up letting rebounds sky over his head like it's nobody's business. Offensively, he's not the worst, but he's pretty bad on-the-whole -- he's a ball-stopper extraordinaire, and a huge proponent of the "I'm Michael Beasley, clear out and let me work my magic" play-calling strategy. This strategy would work extremely well if Michael Beasley was actually good at picking his spots -- unfortunately, his shot distribution is obscenely frustrating, and he generally just ends up turning the ball over or missing the shot entirely. Believe it or not, if Beasley would pick his spots better, he would potentially be a very good offensive player for his position -- he's actually at or above average at every individual range on the floor for the SF position -- more a symptom of weakness in the position than a serious assertion of strength, but he's got that going for him. He also has, overall, one of the lowest assist rates at his position and one of the lowest %AST totals (that is, he both assists others far less than everyone else and gets assisted by others less than everyone else).

The first part (low assist rate) is awful. The second part (low percent assisted) isn't the worst, and would actually be a potential asset to him -- the idea that he's creating the majority of these shots for himself would tend to indicate that if Beasley backed off and let others create for him, he could be a markedly more effective player. The issue with that logic is that it assumes Beasley has the capacity to make that leap and realize he'd be more effective if he did it. And that's a relatively big assumption to make at this point. He's been in the league for 4 years and (if anything) has gotten worse about it as time goes on. At some point, a player essentially is what he is. I don't know if we've quite reached that point with Beasley yet, but we have to be close. And this barely even touches on Beasley's defense, which is a tour de force in not giving a crap. A bold new talent at falling asleep on rotations. A visionary approach to fouling like a madman and refusing to talk. Compound that with the actively poor shot selection, his general disregard for his teammates, and the bleeding-edge inefficiency with which Beasley plies his trade? Pretty poor picture. I have no idea why the Suns gave him $18,000,000. Even if he was worth that much (and I can see absolutely no way he's worth even half that over the life of his contract), they were bidding against nobody. This is like going to a silent auction with only your 5-year-old nephew there to bid against and putting in a seventeen thousand dollar bid on the shiny red Radio Flyer wagon to head the 5-year-old off at the pass, never once realizing that the 5-year-old has absolutely no money and hates wagons anyway. Really. The Suns have made a lot of questionable personnel decisions over the last few years, but I'm not sure any are as questionable as this one.

• • •

_Follow Ian Mahinmi on Twitter at __@ianmahinmi.___

While Spurs fans weren't looking, Ian Mahinmi found a way to (somehow) morph into a decent player. This in and of itself is enormously frustrating to me, because in San Antonio, he did basically everything he possibly could to turn Spurs fans off to his play and make himself expendable. Once he got into the Carlisle system and was able to wrangle a defined role on that Mavericks team, he managed to break out relatively nicely. Mahinmi has his flaws -- specifically his incomprehensibly bad rebounding (not quite as bad as Ryan Hollins, but relative to his size, Mahinmi is one of the most disappointing rebounders in the NBA) and tendency to get in enormously quick foul trouble (last season is the first in his career his per-36 numbers didn't feature 7-8 fouls a game) -- but he's finally carved out a role by finding a few pluses as well. He could always finish at the rim, but in Dallas, Mahinmi finally solved the art of getting there, which allowed him to actually cut to the rim when he got into in-game action against real NBA players. Before that, he could only really get to the rim or put up stats against the scrub backup's scrub backups. He's developed some proficiency with a nice 15-foot pop shot, and he has a few (awful, but existent) post moves.

The big key with Mahinmi (and the place where he's a legitimate value-add) isn't really in his relatively incomplete offense, it's in his defense. In my view. Although his poor rebounding does hurt him a bit in the overall team picture, he's a quality defender. He has serious mobility, and a knack for timely shot-blocks. His instincts aren't great, but his mobility combined with a decent system (thanks, Carlisle) made him into a legitimate asset for the team defense. In fact, with Mahinmi on the court, the Mavericks (already a solid defensive team with him off it) played better defense in 2012 -- they allowed an offensive rating of 100 to teams with Mahinmi on the bench, but only 98 with Mahinmi on the court. This was primarily rooted in the Mavericks slowing the pace down with Mahinmi on the court and playing to their old-man strengths. Mahinmi helped that by leveraging his mobility and helping to cut off passing lanes. I imagine Mahinmi will keep doing the same in Indiana -- in any event, he's a galaxy beyond the cringe-worthy pairing of Hansbrough and Amundson, and if Miles Plumlee can give the Pacers anything they'll have drastically upgraded their backup-big rotation.

Also, specific note to regular reader Mike, who had a well-thought out rebuttal in yesterday's comments to my general observation in yesterday's riddles that the Pacers overpaid to get Mahinmi. I still do think they overpaid -- while Collison didn't fit in Indiana, from a talent-in/talent-out perspective, Collison has a far higher ceiling than Mahinmi does. He wasn't working out in Indiana, though, and I agree that D.J. Augustin is a talent upgrade from what Collison gave them last year. Which does make Collison worth "less" to the Pacers than he necessarily was for any other team. The Pacers also gave away the crummy contract of Dahntay Jones, who was absolute bollocks in Indiana this past season. So while they may not have necessarily won the deal from a talent-in/talent-out perspective, from a fit and team improvement perspective, you may be right that the deal was a net positive for them. We'll see. Still, quite an apt observation. Thanks for reading.

• • •

_Follow Steve Nash on Twitter at __@SteveNash.___

This one was a bit tough to write. I want to clarify something regarding the broader point of the piece. I'm not trying to say the Lakers are going to be bad -- far from it, I think they'll be extremely good next year. But I think simply saying they'll be good and assessing them without paying heed to their incoming peaks and troughs is mistaken at best and actively misleading at worst. Age brings increased production volatility, and just about every word in this piece on degenerative aging I've applied to Nash could apply just as well to players like Pau Gasol (older than you think), Kobe Bryant (who experienced the same peak/trough give and take this past season), and almost everyone on their bench. Even Dwight Howard is going to find himself more prone to peaks and valleys next year, coming off a relatively bad back injury that may (for a time) lend itself to sap his overall game every few nights as he recovers. By playoff time, Howard should be fine. But having so much volatility to contend with confuses the picture, at least for me.

Consider it this way. The Lakers in years past embodied the natural Phil Jackson style on effort when it came to playoff basketball (try really hard and dominate certain games, then follow those up with tepid efforts that could scarcely beat an 8 seed), these Lakers may unintentionally embody that style even if they're trying their hardest. Age works in strange ways for NBA players, and more than anything, it lends itself sadly well to the idea of "on" nights and "off" nights. The Lakers, with everyone having an on night, are unbeatable. With one player having an off night, they're very good, and still a title contender. But not a title favorite. And with two or three players having off nights, on a team that top-heavy? They're going to have trouble winning a game against ANY decent competition, let alone a team like the Thunder or the Spurs. Just look at Miami without Bosh.

It's not that such games will happen often, or that they won't have a non-fleeting affair with generation-defying dominance. They'll have nights where they may be the greatest team the world's ever seen. It's just difficult to really figure out what the whole picture is going to look like until we have a better inherent understanding of the volatility we're dealing with. In today's piece on Steve Nash, I take a deeper look into this phenomenon, and reflect on both personal lessons of fragility in age and the multi-faceted legacy Steve Nash will leave behind.

When Nash has good games, the Lakers should be quite literally unbeatable. I don't think it's too hyperbolic to say that. Imagining a fully-functioning Nash-Howard pick and roll with Gasol and Kobe as weakside options is absolutely sublime. The wealth of top-flight talent on this team, combined with a fully-active Nash, could manifest as one of the greatest teams to ever take the court. It could be -- and may be -- just that simple. If Nash is healthy, his good days will more than make up for his bad days. But that's the thing. While we can envision this to the high heavens and assert the Lakers to be the new title favorites, that isn't how age works. Once you get into the weeds of extremely old NBA age -- which, make no mistake, is exactly where Nash is headed -- you start to get into unprecedented territory. The only really distinctive, all-encompassing fact is that players who stay in the league at Nash's age tend to see an increased volatility in their contributions. One night they'll be classic -- or even better. A shining example of everything they always were. One night later they'll have no lift, no instincts, no shot. So on, so forth. Variance inflates, and merely assessing the "average" game becomes more and more misleading.

For the 2012 Lakers to match their potential and become the unbeatable teeth-gnashing beast we've imagined, they require much of Steve Nash. At least considering that Artest is virtually gone, Howard's back is balking, and the Gasol-Bryant dynamo is aging as we look the other way. They don't simply require some certain set of averages, a dismal checklist of mean production. They require Steve Nash's guile to remain intact. The creativity to sustain. They require Nash's candle to flicker at just the right time. There can be no letdown game, no nagging injuries, no disappearing act behind the velour curtain. Part of the great conceit of this roster is the concept that they must be better than the sum of their parts. That Nash's brilliance will salve the cuts and soothe the wrinkles away. That Pau Gasol, in Nash's presence, will return to his 2010 form. That Bryant will become more efficient without having to carry such a heavy load. That Howard's offensive game will emerge from the fire's of Mordor even better than before, and pole-vault Bynum's production. On Nash's good nights, none of this will be a problem. It should be rudimentary, in fact. And on Nash's bad nights? It could be troubling.

In a lot of ways, the frequency of those bad nights decides the fate of the Lakers' season.

For more on Steve Nash, read today's Player Capsule (Plus) at Hardwood Paroxysm.

• • •

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. Smart guess from twitter follower @JoshsPseudonym, who got a 3/3 rather quickly.

• There was Linsanity. Then there was Sloansanity. Then there was [Player #172]sanity, at which point I began to question Cleveland('s)sanity.
• One of my favorite stories ever comes from contributing writer Alex Arnon, regarding his exploits with an intimate relation of Player #173. (Yes, this riddle is basically just an excuse to link you to it.)
• He's been OK in recent years, but I expect Player #174 to go "belli" up in Chicago. (Pretty sure this the worst pun I've ever scribed.)

Have a good weekend. Hoping I can get a full 15-player suite done next week. Fingers crossed, eh?

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Troy Murphy, Chris Kaman, and Andre Miller.

• • •

_Follow Troy Murphy's example by becoming a franciscan friar__.___

I really feel like people don't realize how far Murphy's fallen in the last few years. Over two years in Indiana from 2008 to 2010, Murphy averaged 14-11 in a scant 33 minutes a game. He shot 81% from the line as a big man, 41% from three (on five three pointers a game!), and missed just 19 nights of play over two seasons. That's very near an all-star level. Very good work from him. Entering the 2011 season, Murphy was 30 years old -- although big men usually begin to fall off around their early 30s, it's rarely a rapid decline. I wrote my thesis on aging in basketball players and in a general sense big men tend to have the slowest decline-from-peak rates among all positions. Point guards fall off the quickest from their peak, wings fall off less quickly, and bigs fall off quite slowly. Murphy sees this trend and spits on it. From his two-year peak from 28-29, Murphy's performance descended from "patently decent rotation player" to "WHAT ON GOD'S EARTH" in no time flat.

He had a PER of 18 in that two year peak -- his PER has been 8.7 in the two years since. He went from 41% three point shooting on five tries a night to 33% on a single heave. He went from a solid and dependable 33 minutes a night to 15 minutes a game. And his defense suddenly transformed from "extremely poor" to "consistently causing blood to shoot indiscriminately out of any random fan's eyes." Bad, bad news. And he did this without any serious injury problems, too. Sure, he started the 2011 season with a strained lower back. Back injuries can sap a player's game terribly (which is one of the reasons I'm bearish about next year's Lakers). But it wasn't a break, or a torn muscle, or a bone bruise. It was a strain. He strained something in his lower back and had some hamstring troubles. That SERIOUSLY doesn't explain this sort of a rapid decline. Especially since he was never some kind of physical beast -- he's a slow and plodding white guy who makes some threes. I mean, damn. His game is as "finesse" as they come, based far more around a decent three point shot and decent rebounding instincts than any particular penchant for rough-and-tumble post play or fluid motion. And his talents have vanished.

In Los Angeles, he should've been in a perfect position to fix his career up. Make a few spot-up shots, trust in Mike Brown's system, and rebound. No big deal. But he looks like a completely different player. He went from quasi-all-star to utter schlub. Will he be in the league next season? Probably, because GMs__ love__ throwing money at old vets who look washed up. Will he be effective? Doubt it. In general, though, it's worth pointing out that Murphy's current disgusting play doesn't totally erase the fact that he was actually a really good player with the Indiana Pacers. He was a plus rebounder, a great three point shooter, and (although his defense was awful) there was nothing in his numbers that indicated he was anything other than a solid starter in the league. We tend to let a player's final few enfeebled years detract from how good they were at their peak. In Murphy's case, given the sudden transition, we're even more in danger of doing that. He was solid. Now he's not. But his current state doesn't mean he was NEVER solid, and that he NEVER accomplished anything.

• • •

_Follow Chris Kaman on Twitter at __@ChrisKaman.___

Chris Kaman has his skills, but I'll be honest with you -- I'm not a fan. I've been watching him closely for a while, due to his constant presence in trade rumors and the drumbeat of people who treat him as though he's a major acquisition in the making for any team silly enough to sign him. I've come to a few conclusions. First, he's one of the biggest shot-vortex big men you can possibly find on offense -- he has a few assists a night on the really obvious passes, and he can be efficient if you set him up right, but on almost every possession Kaman records a touch he'll end up shooting a basket one way or another. He's had a usage percentage (a stat measuring what percentage of possessions Kaman ends in his time on the floor) over 20% for the last 5 years running. In fact, in the past 5 years, Chris Kaman has had the 6th highest usage percentage among big men in the NBA. Seriously! It'd be one thing if he did efficient things with those touches, but he doesn't -- out of every big who played over 5000 minutes and over 164 games in the last five seasons, Kaman sports the 36th worst true shooting percentage. He's one of only three players on that list with a shooting percentage below 49% that didn't take any threes, and he's got the second lowest offensive win shares (-1.3) of any big over those five years.

So, yes. His offense is extremely tough to deal with, if you're a fan of a team featuring Kaman. He was notorious in Los Angeles for constantly freezing out Eric Gordon and other better offensive options to run obscene isolations from 20 feet out. He set weak screens, barely freeing up the men he was setting the pick for in an effort to try and get the ball off of every one. If he does that to Dirk in Dallas, there are going to be some major problems on that Mavericks team -- he's the best offensive center they've had in years, but with the scorers they've got, they don't NEED the center to take 15 shots a night and use 20% of the offense. They need Dirk to do that, and Mayo, and Collison. Not Kaman. If he overuses his own offense when there are better options available, he's going to raise his stats at the expense of team quality. Which would be bad. On defense, well, the story is slightly different. Mark Cuban has stated outright that he believes Chris Kaman will be a phenomenal defender in the Mavericks' system. With all due respect to Mr. Cuban, that's kind of absurd. Kaman has NEVER been an amazing defender in his career, and nothing in his playing style indicates he has the ability to do what Dallas is going to need.

Look at what he did in New Orleans, with Monty Williams -- Monty's system is manna from heaven for poor defenders, because he explicitly maps out defensive strategies and redirects players to the right spots to maximize their talents. Under Monty's system, rotations conspired to give Kaman one of the higher DPPP ratings on spot-up shooters, and allowed him the freedom to cover his man in isolation decently. Unfortunately, he also was a terrible defender in the post, and an atrocious pick and roll defender -- the key for Carlisle is going to be to transform Kaman from a bollocks low post defender to a good one. Because you really need the big man next to Dirk to have some ability to guard the post. Okafor, Smith, and Ayon were able to cover the post for Kaman and allow him the room to stick to his man and focus on the space he was rotating into. In Dallas, Dirk isn't going to be able to replicate what those three did in New Orleans. Shawn Marion will help, but as Marion gets older it's doubtful he'll be able to do everything he needs to. Elton Brand and Chris Kaman could probably make a great defensive lineup under a Carlisle scheme, but I have serious doubts that a Kaman-fueled starting lineup is going to do great shakes for Dallas defensively. Or offensively, if Kaman freezes out Dirk.

In any event, it should be interesting to see how he acquaints himself in Dallas. I'm looking forward to watching if Kaman can really evolve as a player -- he'll finally be on a team with a solid cast around him and a reasonable expectation of a decent playoff seed. If he can mold his skills to fit a new role, he'll be fine, and he certainly has the talent and skill to be a considerably positive presence on a contending team. But he absolutely needs to reinvent his game and reorient how he approaches his offense. If he can't do that? There will be serious issues. Off the court, Kaman is a hilarious gun-toting conservative with penchant for shooting everything that moves. Seriously. He shoots bobcats. He tweets pictures of himself holding assault rifles (...days after a shooting in a movie theater, even). He tweets pictures of himself gutting deer. Should be a decent fit for Texas, in that sense, though given the generally liberal bent to NBA fans I'm skeptical that his off-court gun nuttery will really endear him to Mavericks fans all that much. We'll see. He's an interesting dude, if also a moderately scary one.

• • •

_Follow Andre Miller's example and you'll eventually be__ really cool.___

So, fair warning. There are a few players in the league that I'm an unabashed fan of. I tend to try and be positive in all these capsules, because I think there's far more reason to celebrate players in this league than there is reason to detract from them. And even if there WAS more reason to detract from them, it seems like every player analysis you read nowadays is some scathing critique or dripping with vitriol. I don't like to use that, except in rare cases where I truly can't stand watching a player's game or can't stand a player I feel is absurdly overrated (as in the case of the Chris Kaman capsule above). But despite my making every capsule positive, there's definitely something that differentiates capsules I write about players I'm huge fans of from those of players I'm tepid on -- they're just way more positive. Today, at Hardwood Paroxysm, I'm covering Andre Miller. I will admit this from the start -- Miller is one of those players I find it impossible to be reasonable about.

It's not that I think he's the greatest player ever or something like that. It's more that I simply can't help but respect the absurd hardships Miller has perservered through in his life, and I can't help but love the blue-collar abandon and grit with which Miller performs his game. If the NBA was performance art, Miller would be the town's muted bladesmith, performing in front of a nearly-empty house. Always quiet, never elaborate, extremely effective. Spends these long hours pounding away with his scaling hammer on a piece whose beauty is rarely appreciated as much as their application to war. Never gets wholescale appreciation for what he brings to the table, but always comes back and puts the same loving care into every pass thrown and offense built. Miller is simply brilliant, and there's a rare few players in the league that are anything like him. I love Andre Miller, and today's capsule at Hardwood Paroxysm discusses where exactly this love stems from, and why exactly I enjoy his life and game. Apologies for the dripping positivity -- for some players, I simply can't avoid it. Hope you understand.

As a kid, I used to wonder how in the world anyone failed tests like the ACT or the SAT. I always thought I was really bad at them (and relative to the kids in Honors classes with me, even in public schools, I absolutely was), but I got decent scores and the question was less “will you pass” and more “how close to a perfect score can you get”. But as I get older I've started to gain a greater appreciation for how much of a ridiculous privilege it is to not have to concern oneself with that — I grew up in a solid public school system that had great graduation rates and that developed an excellent SAT-friendly curriculum from an absurdly young age. They taught you how to think like a test-taker, in some ways, from grade two onwards. But not everyone has that! Despite getting on the honor roll and working incredibly hard, Miller failed the ACT. Given how intelligently he plays, and how well he had done on the backs of hard work at his schools growing up, I’d consider the failure less a problem on his end and more a problem of development. It’s not his fault, really. He had excellent grades, and worked incredibly hard to get those grades by all accounts. If you get good grades you should be able to pass a standardized test, theoretically. If you can’t that’s less a failure on your end and more a failure in how the school is teaching you and how their curriculum prepares you. Which is really, really sad. So many basketball players come from these depressingly scant backgrounds, with poor preparation for both the real world and any further academic work. If a player works hard enough to excel in their school and still can’t pass a standardized test, I’ve never quite understood how we can vilify the player. That’s on the system, and the broader disparity in the quality of schooling between even comparably well-endowed school systems. In a lot of ways, it’s luck of the draw.

Still. The Andre Miller story doesn’t really end there — due to Proposition 48, due to his failure on the standardized test, he wouldn’t be able to suit up for a college team until he’d accumulated one year in good academic standing. Predictably, this dried up almost every scholarship offer Miller had received. He went from having his pick of schools to having doubts he’d get a solid scholarship from anyone at all. Which, by the way, puts something of a damper on the idiotic criticisms people throw at Derrick Rose for cheating on the SAT. What was his realistic alternative? He couldn’t possibly pay for college, his family needed the NBA money, and if he failed the SAT again he would’ve been in Miller’s position. No scholarships, no ability to go to college, no hope. Of course he cheated on it. Check your privilege — in that situation (one that’s hard to imagine for most people reading this, but consider it deeply), you would too. Anyway. Luckily for Miller, a single college chose to not rescind their scholarship — the University of Utah, wholly used to losing players for a year or two at a time on missions. So Miller packed his bags, going straight out of Compton and into the Mormon-built catacombs of the flagship Utah university. Which there aren’t nearly enough stories about — Miller said once that he went to school with “the first white people I ever went to school with” in Utah, and as neither him nor his mom were Mormon, there HAS to be a bunch of funny stories about his time at Utah. Few are published, unfortunately. But they have to exist, right?

For more on Andre Miller, read today's Player Capsule (Plus) at Hardwood Paroxysm.

• • •

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. We got a smart guess from BNB who correctly realized I was talking about Andre Miller with my last riddle, and a 3/3 guess from Chilai who put it all together. Good work folks.

• I'm of the opinion that Player #169 got the absolute worst contract given out in the west this offseason. Just completely befuddles me that a team would give him that.
• If he simply replaces Hansbrough's minutes, the Pacers will be A-OK. Should help shore up the bench. Might've given a bit much for him, though.
• "People say not to swim with sharks. But I'm faster than sharks, so it's not a big deal." Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).

Sorry for the lack of capsules yesterday. Work is busy and I've been a bit under the weather. Here's hoping I can rally through this head cold and finish the week off strong.

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Randy Foye, Cole Aldrich, and Arron Afflalo.

• • •

_Follow Randy Foye on Twitter at __@randyfoye.___

When it comes to Foye's game, the first thing I'd think of is "bursts." No, not starburst candies, although now that you mention it I could use some breakfast. (Sponsor me, Mars!) No, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the concept of burst scoring. If you haven't heard the term, it refers to the situation where you have a player whose main purpose is to come in the game off a cold open, get the ball on a few fortuitous bounces, and proceed to make shots until he gets cold again. Then they're off, thrown in the cooler for the next round. Go on these 9-12 point personal runs, where they're scoring almost every point purely on the basis of a ridiculous hot streak. Draining shots they have no business taking and even less business making. And then the streak ends abruptly, they embarrass yourself a time or two, and they're back on the bench waiting for the next hit. It's like getting off on danger, a bit -- living from high to high, never knowing when the high is going to abruptly end and you'll fall flat. It's when you have cash flow problems and live paycheck to paycheck just trying to stretch your funds to that next so-needed infusion. That stuff.

That's how Foye's game comes to mind for me. Very feast-or-famine. Is this fair to his game, though? Not completely. Although his defense is markedly poor, to simply distill Foye's game to a "make a few shots, get the hell to the bench" style is to underrate him. One of Foye's greatest assets actually contributed to what made the Clippers such an immensely dull team to wtach for me last season -- his absurd knack for drawing free throws as a jump shooter. Of his 10 shots a night, 8 of them come outside the rim. Usually, if you're talking role players, that kind of a disparity would tend to indicate a player that barely gets to the line at all. Not so for Foye. He averages on his career three free throws a night, and while he had a down year last year, he had been hovering around four a night in years directly previous. He's very tricky -- he jumps into his defender in such a way that few can actually guard, and he draws free throws with the best floppers and gamesmen in the league.

It's always weird to me that Foye is rarely considered for the current top-NBA-floppers list -- it's not that he flops in such an aesthetically ridiculous way as the league's grandest floppers, necessarily, but that he's simply so good at drawing free throws for someone who shoots ONLY jump shots that you'd think at some point someone would notice "hey, dang, we should probably pay attention to this guy." Given his veritably insane free throw percentage (86% for his career, 89% from 2009-2011), this is a ridiculously great asset to have for a guy of his repute. Aside from the foul-drawing, he's a so-so shooter with a tendency for high-variance performances. Which isn't a bad thing, and should be a huge upgrade over the pu pu platter the Jazz put out at the two-spot last year. But it's definitely not "NBA starter" quality -- not that that's a bad thing. After all, that leaves the door open for Burks or any old D-League guard to prove their mettle in the Utah kiln. Flexibility is good, with a roster as multifaceted as Utah's. Although they probably would've liked to find a better defender, given the sad state of Utah's currently abysmal team defense. Jerry Sloan is crying on his ranch, somewhere.

Off the court, you have to respect Foye's accomplishments. He came from about as rough a background as one could possibly come from, with his father Antonio killed in a motorcycle accident when Foye was a scant two years old. He doesn't remember his father very much. His mother was caught up in the drug trade, and not three years after his father's death, she was kidnapped and met her own grisly end. Foye was taken in by his grandmother, who in his words, was a recovering drug addict herself. They had to do a lot of crazy stuff just to help him get by, things most of us can't even really imagine. At every step of his education and upbringing, Foye encountered setbacks and doubters -- for instance, the many who doubted he'd make it out of high school. He proved them wrong about as thoroughly as a man can do, as well as the people who doubted he'd get a college degree and people who doubted he'd make it in the NBA. Sometimes it's hard to really think about the crazy, circuitous roads taken by the entertainers who adorn our screen when we watch an NBA. I'd entreat you to think a bit on Randy Foye, though, and how inspiring his journey has been, grisly and awful though it may be. Here's a man who was orphaned at six, growing up in a broken household besides. Through constant work and grind, this man was able to find both prosperity and the resources to help people in his old position (hence the Randy Foye Foundation, dedicated to the constant improvement of living conditions in Newark, NJ). It's essentially the American dream realized. Beautiful stuff.

• • •

_Follow Cole Aldrich on Twitter at __@colea45.___

It's hard to find much to say about Cole Aldrich, all things considered. It's not that he's an awful player, but he's certainly not a good one -- for a 3-year college player that came into the NBA at the age of 22, he's awfully unpolished. His freshman season was notable mostly in how ridiculously bad he looked -- just a terrible fit on the court, seemingly several hundred steps slow on defense and several dozen steps lacking on offense. He posted a freshman PER of 7.0 and it felt a hell of a lot worse than that. Last season he had a PER of 17.7 (and a PER of 19.8 in the postseason), but I'm hesitant to really assess much value from that. First off, he was playing against busted competition -- the Thunder blew out a hell of a lot of teams last year, and the vast majority of Aldrich's minutes came in garbage time during blowout wins. In fact, the Thunder went 25-6 in the 31 games that Aldrich saw the floor last year. Kind of skews the picture a bit. What's worse is that not only did he virtually only play in wins against poor late-game competition, he also managed to be part of bench units that were incredibly awful.

It's nitpicky, but one of the things most don't necessarily internalize about "deep" teams like the Thunder or the Spurs is that their depth tends to mean that their late game blowout lineups are actually a bit worse than that of an average team -- when the coach is playing the "preserve your players" game you play in a blowout like that, you're putting important roleplayers at risk every minute you keep them on the floor when unnecessary. With lacking depth, your 6th or 7th best player isn't actually all that important to your team concept, so you can afford to play them a bunch of minutes during garbage time -- when you're sporting a 10 man rotation and have decent players all over the place, you quickly discover that you either need to risk injuries to valuable tertiary pieces (say, Danny Green or Eric Maynor) or play guys who might not get minutes anywhere else. So you end up with lineups featuring the INSANELY overmatched end-of-rotation level folks, and lineups that get HILARIOUSLY overwhelmed if you actually take their stats and extend them to a full-game scenario.

Anyway. Regarding this phenomenon, that general trend held true for Aldrich. Lineups featuring Cole Aldrich last year may have featured a center sporting a 17-20 PER, but that sure wasn't helping his team out much. In the regular season, if you pro-rated the performance of the Thunder during Aldrich's 173 minutes of burn, you're left with a team that was outscored by 6.5 points per 100 possessions (as opposed to a team that outscored others by 8 with Aldrich off the floor). That team featured insanely anemic rebounding, a ridiculously slow pace (which I can attest to -- Thunder blowouts ended up slowing the game down considerably, a phenomenon that made writing about games in-the-moment a bit easier but made watching them occasionally awful), and 42% shooting from the field. Gross. The crock-pot of small sample size reared its ugly head once more in the NBA playoffs, where the Thunder found themselves outscored by (no typo) 21.2 points per 100 possessions with Aldrich on (and outscored others by 5 points per 100 possessions with Aldrich off). Insanely small sample size, but hilarious numbers. And it points to the ephemeral nature of decent advanced individual statistics (not to pick on PER, either -- this is true for EVERY non-minutes weighted statistic you can possibly rattle off) for players with scant floor time. If Aldrich was actually a center with 20 PER performance, he probably wouldn't be the featured player on lineups that underperform the Thunder's overall performance by such a drastic degree. No -- Aldrich is a developing and limited big man with a lot of energy and an unfortunate lack of NBA-level talent. He could potentially develop into more, I suppose, but I've certainly got my doubts. Hasn't really shown us much of anything yet, that's for sure.

• • •

_Follow Arron Afflalo on Twitter at __@arronafflalo.___

Denver was one of the deepest teams in the league last year. One of the ways you can gain some insight into this -- beyond simply watching them play -- is to look at how the Nuggets' bench competed compared to the Nuggets' starters. Look, for instance, into Arron Afflalo's numbers. With Afflalo on the court, the Nuggets outscored opponents by about 2 points per 100 possessions -- their defense was worse, their offense was slower, and their general outlook more of a fringe 0.500 outfit than that of a high seeded, dangerous Western team. With Afflalo on the bench, and the Denver depth ravaging the scrubs of the other team (and, underratedly, the incredible two-PG offense featuring Andre Miller and Ty Lawson in concert)? The Nuggets outscored opponents by 6 points per 100, which is elite. The problem with this kind of a setup on a good team is that when rotations shorten for the playoffs, the level of competition those bench units face rises considerably, which in turn lowers their efficacy -- I have my doubts that the 2012 Nuggets could've competed at all in the first round against any team with better depth than the Lakers. The Lakers were thus the dream matchup for a team like the Nuggets -- very old (the Lakers have been one of the 5 oldest teams in the sport for the last few years), relatively plodding, and with shaky depth that left the Nuggets' bench mob facing relatively tired starters and marginal-beyond-logic bench players. But if the Nuggets wanted to beat the Lakers, they really needed one thing -- one single starter to have a good series and keep their starting lineup in the game for the bench to win them the series. Before the series, most people (me included) thought this would be Afflalo.

Okay. So. That didn't work out too well. But I think Afflalo has proven pretty thoroughly that he can be an effective NBA player despite that. Before last year's big contract, it was his defense -- he used to be an extremely effective 3-and-D shooting guard. Last year, it was his offense -- he stopped paying much attention to defense altogether in favor of absurdly efficient standout offensive performances. A bit troubling. His defense was excellent before last year, but he simply stopped paying much attention on that end in favor of taking more of a load on the offensive end -- this wasn't a terrible thing, mind you, as he's an incredibly efficient offensive player (despite a career high usage rate by 4%, Afflalo still shot nearly 40% from three and well above-average percentages from almost every spot on the floor) but for a defensive enthusiast like myself it was a tad bit disappointing. No, the question I have with Afflalo isn't whether he can be a good NBA player -- my question is rather pondering which Afflalo is going to show up in Orlando. Will it be the defensive savant or the offensive mastermind? Or, perhaps more importantly -- will it be 2012 regular season Afflalo or 2012 playoffs Afflalo, where every single one of his numbers cratered and he looked like a fringe NBA player at best? It's rough. Kobe's defense certainly isn't what did it -- Kobe was laying off his man so much, I mistook him for a Wall Street CEO. Afflalo had the space, but he just couldn't seem to make an open shot. Over the seven games of 2012 playoffs, Afflalo made just four threes -- to put this in context, in the 2012 regular season, Afflalo had five whole games with that many or more! Absurd.

I don't usually mention one specific game for these guys, but for Afflalo, I feel it's apt. Back in 2011, Afflalo had one of the best "forgotten" games I can remember for any NBA player. It might've been the game of the 2011 regular season. It was a one point home win by the Carmelo Nuggets against the fully healthy would-be champion Mavericks. It was arguably Melo's last great game as a Nugget, as he put up 42 points on a TS% of 80%. It featured 10 lead changes, an Afflalo game-winner, a fantastic Jason Terry game (in a loss, just like a Spurs fan likes it), a ridiculous pace, and some insane offense. The thing that makes Afflalo relevant? He poured in a ridiculous 19 points in the fourth quarter, missing his first two shots of the quarter then making all but one afterwards. Afflalo went completely supernova to close that game, which is doubly funny because he'd played pretty terribly on offense up until the fourth (although his defense was fantastic). I'd never seen him assert himself on offense like that... well... ever, honestly. It was a wonderful watch. And moments like that are what make me think that Afflalo -- although he's getting a bit old, although he's had trouble putting his defense and his offense together at once -- DOES still have the ceiling of an all-star in this league. I don't know if the Magic are the proper melting pot for him to get there, but he should certainly get the chance to improve his numbers these next few years. Not bad for a player the Detroit Pistons gave away for virtually nothing. (No, seriously. They traded him to the Nuggets for a second round pick. I like Vernon Macklin, but DANG.)

• • •

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. I once again need to strengthen the difficulty -- 100% 3/3 guesses were put in by Mike L, Brian, Free_Zero20, J, Atori, and Chilai.

• The Great White Wonder. Nearly an all-star in 2010, Player #166 is basically out of the league today. The most forgettable "recently sporting a 15-10 line" dude in the league, I'd venture.
• Ball dominant center with a penchant for chucking and getting ridiculously undeserved all-star appearances. Hates Bobcats, tho.
• One of my absolute favorite players in the league. Easily my favorite outside the Spurs and Cavs. Humble but tough, of low means but resourceful, underrated but assured. May retire soon. Will be sad to see him go. Will be a Capsule (Plus).

I'm almost done with my nightly Red Dead Redemption livetweeting series (lovingly titled "#reddocredemption"). Should finish the game tonight. Tune in to watch me react live to the game's (seems pretty boring?) end.

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Enes Kanter, Ricky Rubio, and Derrick Favors.

• • •

_Follow Enes Kanter on Twitter at __@Enes_Kanter.___

One of my most notable Enes Kanter memories came back in mid-2011, when I was new at my job and meeting some friends. I talked with my friend Hugh (a fellow statistician) about the NBA, and happily discovered he was a huge fan. Big Nets guy -- incredibly excited about the move to Brooklyn. We talked about the draft, for a while, and specifically about the pick the Nets had traded away to the Jazz for Deron Williams. It had turned out to be the third overall pick, and the Jazz had chosen Enes Kanter with the traded pick. I asked Hugh what he thought about that. He scoffed and said that Kanter was why he didn't care that the Nets had traded the pick. Curious, I probed -- he went on about how he'd watched a ton of footage on players in the draft for a project for his master's thesis. He was only really confident in Kyrie Irving to actually assert himself well as a player in the NBA, and if there was one player he was low on, it was decidedly Enes Kanter. As he said, his skills weren't all that excellent -- he'd put up middling numbers at best overseas, and what's worse, he couldn't perform an in-game jump. Sure, he had a "decent" vertical in workouts, but Hugh had quite literally never seen game footage in the hours he'd watched of Kanter where Kanter made any non-hop jump in an in-game situation. Suffice to say, Hugh was not expecting much from Kanter. I admit, it doesn't really say great things about his rookie year that I find an offhand conversation like that more memorable than Kanter's entire season.

There are some positives, here. His rebounding was extremely strong for a rookie -- Kanter was among the league leaders in defensive rebounding percentage. His stats, translated to 36 minutes a night, indicate a player with the potential to put up stats hovering around 13 points and 12 rebounds a night. Extremely solid totals, all things considered. And although he still can't jump amazingly well, with a season's worth of footage to choose from, you can actually find a few nice hops. (Well. Sort of.) Despite all that, there are a few big problems. First, his defense -- it's not actively harmful, but it's not great. He's gigantic and lumbering but he tries to get into the passing lanes like a guard, which is pretty taboo when you're not very quick. He can defend individual big men decently, if they're mountains like Shaq. Against limber, quicker big men he has troubles. Unfortuantely, that's most everyone in the league. What's more, while his offensive stats were decent in a vacuum, almost every minute Kanter was on the court was a minute Al Jefferson wasn't. I'm not Jefferson's biggest fan, but he was offensively essential to the Jazz last year -- without three point shooters or wings that could really produce offense, they needed their men in the middle producing offense to function as a productive team. Hence it being a problem when Kanter saw the floor. The Utah offense was (this is not a typo) 12 points per 100 possessions worse with Kanter on the floor. Rough stuff, that. Combine that with his foul troubles, and you have a player who has a lot of work to do.

Amusing things about Kanter? Many. Just look at who he's following on Twitter for a taste of what he's like off-the-court -- he's following Hugh Hefner, a bunch of men's magazines (Maxim/Playboy), aspiring starlets, NASA, and Spongebob. (God bless you, Amar.) His most recent pictures posted to his twitter involve Kanter kissing an alligator, chillin' like a bro with some snakes, and giving a shout out to an extremely attractive Latin dance teacher. Fair warning: his tweets contain an excess of winking emoticons, exclamation points, and a strangely solemn and somber profile picture. Still. He seems like a nice guy. And with rebounding like that, as long as he can work on his mobility and conditioning (and stop the silly fouls!), he'll eventually be a decent player in this league. A man his size can make it in the league with only one or two crucial skills, and lucky for Kanter, rebounding is one of them. I think that as his mobility improves his general command of the game will improve, and eventually, he should be a decent big-off-the-bench for a contending Utah team. We'll see, though. At the very least he should be tweeting for the forseeable future. And he's a fun follow, so that's pretty excellent.

• • •

_Follow Ricky Rubio on Twitter at __@rickyrubio9.___

Today's edition of our extended capsules features -- who else? -- the international man of mystery with floppy hair and a winning smile, Ricky Rubio. I'm discussing Rubio's general game, the Who, one of my ex-girlfriends, and the burden of expectations. Should be a fun time, provided you have a different definition of fun than the majority of the human race.

In 2009, to much fanfare, the Minnesota Timberwolves drafted Ricky Rubio. This was ironically months before Justin Bieber’s first album, meaning that if either of the two are copying the other, it’s decidedly Bieber copying Rubio rather than the other way around. When he first was to come over, we were treated to several love songs about his game — Rubio was, so they said, “bigger and better” than Pistol Pete Maravich. He was the most hyped prospect in years, promising to bring together things like Steve Nash’s passing with Pistol Pete’s scoring, and a touch of Wally Szczerbiak’s good looks to really bring everything together. The floppy hair, the scrawny frame, the glowing smile. Everyone eagerly awaited for his arrival, and as the basketball-loving public waited, Rubio mulled coming over. And decided (perhaps in part due to David Khan’s “drafting another point guard directly after him” move) that it’d be best if he refrained, for a while, and continued his development in the Euroleague as he worked out his contract and figured out the exactitudes of his personal journey to America. Then, last season, he finally relented — he came over to play the point for an intriguing Wolves team that had finally accumulated some solid pieces. This tends to happen when you’ve been among the worst teams the sport had ever seen over the previous three seasons. The comparisons started up again. Pistol Pete, Steve Nash, Isiah Thomas. Every good NBA point guard — or, in Pete’s case, a scoring guard — was a comparable for Rubio. Which might’ve been a mistake.

Scratch that — it was definitely a mistake. Rubio was never to be the same kind of a scorer as Pistol Pete, and the idea that he would be was one of the most ridiculous overstatements that’s ever entered the popular consciousness. While Rubio started the year shooting a decent percentage from three, there’s virtually nothing that distinguishes Rubio’s freshman year scoring ability to that of the highly less heralded Brandon Jennings — Jennings started the year on fire from three point range, as did Rubio, but there were warning signs as to their overall scoring game even then. Poor form on the three point shot, no real long two to speak of, and (perhaps most importantly) one of the worst at-rim finishing percentages in the league. He had the 6th worst percentage in the league last year (sort by “at rim” percentage), which matches exactly Jennings’ finish in his rookie year (6th worst in the league). Both players started the year on fire from three, and neither finished the year with an exceptional true shooting percentage despite that. Their final true shooting percentages, in fact, are almost exactly equal — 2010 Jennings had a TS% of 47.5%, while 2012 Rubio had a TS% of 47.6%. Not very good at all — 50% is the Mendoza line for “even remotely competent.” Clearly, both their rookie seasons miss that not-particularly-high mark.

READ RICKY RUBIO'S EXTENDED CAPSULE AT HARDWOOD PAROXYSM

• • •

_Follow Derrick Favors on Twitter at __@dfavors14.___

Out of all the players on last year's Utah Jazz, I don't think there's a single one I'm more interested in than Derrick Favors. Kanter has the size, sure, and Burks is interesting (if only just). Millsap pretty much is who he is, at this point, and Jefferson strikes me the same way. Gordon Hayward could be really good if he puts it all together, too. But none of them make me feel the same excitement as Favors when I think on their future potential. He's got an incredible amount of potential. He made a solid leap between his rookie and sophomore seasons on defense, going from a "decent with potential" defender to a legitimate lockdown option. On offense, he regressed -- but with defense like that, you can wait a bit for the offense to flesh out. He was just about as good at the rim last year as he was his freshman year (slightly below positional-average, but decent), but he experienced a huge falloff from outside 10 feet -- from 10-15 feet, he went from 45% on a shot every two nights in Utah to close last season to an abysmal 22% on one shot a game. Outside 15 feet, he went from 36% (not great) to 28% (dear God). Some rough regression, especially for a player like Favors who isn't quite comfortable in the post yet with the ball.

But that defense? Lord, that defense. The numbers don't blow you away (the Utah defense was better with him on the court -- to the tune of 4 points per 100 possessions -- but that's not the largest gap in the league by any stretch), but visually, it's a fun watch. His on-ball post defense is stingy, rangy, and brilliant. His instincts aren't perfect yet, but they're developing -- if he keeps getting better, he's got the potential to be a Garnett or Duncan type of dominant defender from the flex-four quasi-center position. Even as his offense is a tremendous work in progress, his defense is more than enough to get him floor time and guarantee him work going forward. He's an all-star level stopper who should get his due at some point -- as the numbers catch up to his general abilities and his playing time increases, I expect to see an increasingly outsized impact from Favors on the Jazz. He may not be their best player right now, but he's sure as hell their best defender, and if the Utah Jazz are to make the leap from "intriguing lowly quasi-contender with a chance to get HCA" into "legitimately elite team in the western conference", it's not going to be on the backs of Millsap and Jefferson's offense. It's going to be on the back of Favors developing into his own and pushing their defense to a level beyond "atrocious."

The big question -- as with just about every big man on the Utah roster -- is how the heck the Jazz are going to get enough playing time to develop him well. The Jazz are currently experiencing a surfeit of "not quite" bigs -- big men who are very good and have lots of solid talents, but who simply need more development or more complementary pieces around them. In the case of Jefferson, you have to look at his game and imagine that Jefferson and Favors could make a dominant frontcourt pairing in the future -- with Favors arming the defense and Jefferson controlling the ball on offense, the Jazz could have a wonderful thing if they could get it to work. But right now you have Kanter (who rebounds like a monster but ruins offensive pacing and doesn't have the mobility to defend outside of one-on-one situations), Favors (whose defense and rebounding move mountains but whose offense actively harms his team), Jefferson (who's their best player by a country mile on offense but whose defense is substantially lacking), Millsap (whose offense is great, but again, his defense can't do a thing and his size is lacking), and Jeremy Evans (who can dunk... and that's it). The Jazz have this giant menagerie of talent to draw from, but it's mismatched, with so many players that are assets on one end and come up lame on the other. Coach Corbin has a ridiculous task ahead of him to organize these disparate talents into one coherent unit. And while I'm interested to see how he acquaints himself to such a challenge, if I'm a Jazz fan, I'm a tiny bit worried about his ability to manage this many intriguing talents at once.

• • •

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. Lots of 3/3 riddle performances last week -- it started with "animeweedlord_gavman420" (I'm not kidding), went on with Brian and longtime guess-master J. Also Atori and Chilai. Basically I need to make these harder, is what I'm figuring.

• This recent Utah acquisition should shore up their three point shooting nicely. Player #163 likes the threes. (And their quota of sitcom guest-stars, too.)
• While the Thunder don't give Player #164 enough time to really let him show his stuff, I'd argue he hasn't shown enough to warrant it. His ridiculous PER excepted.
• The question is thus: will the Magic get Player #165 from the regular season, or Player #165 from the playoffs? Depending on which they get, the trade will succeed or fail.

Sorry for the late capsules -- spent the weekend in Chapel Hill (and met @CardboardGerald!), had fun, but didn't have as much time for writing as I was perhaps hoping. See you tomorrow.

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Jason Kidd, Taj Gibson, and Nick Collison.

• • •

_Follow Jason Kidd on Twitter at __@RealJasonKidd.___

I don't like Jason Kidd. At all, really. That doesn't mean I don't respect his game or accomplishments, mind you -- I respect that Jason Kidd was an incredibly good NBA player for an incredibly long time, even if he isn't quite there now. In his prime, Kidd was the best point guard in the league at about the same separation from the pack Chris Paul has today. He was that good. His offenses were brilliant, his defense was incredible, and (while he did have the advantage in playing in one of the least-difficult Eastern Conference slates in the history of the sport) he pushed a team with Kenyon Martin and Richard Jefferson as his other "big three" talents to two consecutive Finals. And it probably should be remembered more often, as well -- they did it in dominating fashion. In 2003, the Nets went on a 10 game playoff win streak, a streak that included sweeping Pierce's Celtics (who they'd faced in the previous year's ECF) in the semifinals and sweeping the would-be dynastic Pistons in the conference finals. In 2002, the Nets were swept in the finals, but after a shaky start against Reggie Miller's Pacers, they went 8-3 in the middle two rounds once again. People tend to think of those Nets teams as fundamentally flawed, and from a championship perspective, this is true -- the best 2 or 3 teams were in the West for every year of Kidd's Nets' reign. But you can only really play the teams in front of you, and from that respect, Kidd's Nets thoroughly dominated the Eastern playoffs. They were a legitimately solid team.

How did Kidd's play contribute to that? If you listen to the Wages of Wins advocates, the main reason Kidd has been elite has been his rebounding. And I think that's fair, in some ways -- he's one of the best rebounders the point guard position has ever seen, and there's a good reason he's got such a ridiculous number of triple doubles. But I think the rebounding is more of an indicator of what he really does well rather than the reason why, per se. Jason Kidd had two big talents, in his prime. The first was that he ran solid offenses that improved the shaky offensive acumen of the players the Nets put around him, and could turn a fundamentally flawed roster into a middling-tier offense in no time flat. They weren't brilliant offenses, and they weren't going to win any awards as pretty or aesthetic, but they got the job done and actively improved the platter of awful players he'd been given to play with. The second was that he was a legitimately game-changing defender -- he could guard up to the large wing without really giving an inch, and he was as tenacious and vicious as they came. He also had (and has, and always will have -- even at the age of 80 in the local YMCA) a spookily effective talent at boxing out smaller players on the defensive end. Usually, he'd box them out so they couldn't receive passes. Which worked well. As a tertiary benefit, though, it also dramatically increases his rebounding totals and makes his stats that much more impressive.

In terms of the modern league, if I had to assess a player most-resembling prime Jason Kidd, it'd probably be Rondo with better offense. Even in his horrendously inefficient scoring prime, Kidd was still a far more dependable scoring option than Rondo. But Kidd suffered some of the same issues as Rondo, wherein his offenses weren't all that great and his main contribution to the team was game-changing defense, and making the players around him statistically better in ways that didn't necessarily translate to a fantastic offense. I also think Kidd's late-career shift to the Mavs is something that could be in Rondo's future, whether he has to change teams or not. Suddenly, when Kidd joined the Mavs, he had better offensive pieces around him than he had at any point in his entire career. He realized that, changed his style a touch, and worked with Rick Carlisle to make the team great. And indeed, they were -- the 2011 Mavericks were one of the best offensive teams of all time, and while I'd give the vast majority of the credit to Dirk, it's hard to deny that Jason Kidd's ability to find the open seam and hit open threes absolutely helped that team make the next-level leap they needed to win a title. Can't someone else see this too? Some situation where, later in his career when he's past his prime, Rondo gets moved to a team with brilliant offensive pieces (or the Celtics actually manage to sign some) and uses his creativity in the pursuit of a fantastic offense? I could see Rondo succeeding in that kind of a capacity later in his career, with Kidd-style triple doubles seemingly every other night as he functions in the same role that Kidd did on the last few years of Maverick teams. (Not this last year -- he was awful this last year, and giving a player his age who just had a terrible year a three year contract might rate as the single stupidest move the Knicks made this offseason. Sort of beside the point, but wanted to throw that in here.)

As for Kidd's personal issues... I started this capsule by saying that I greatly dislike Kidd. He was arrested in 2001 for beating his wife. It wasn't some puffed-up charge, either -- according to testimony and evidence, he didn't simply hit her with fists, but beat her to the ground. Which (to me) is so far beyond disgusting it's hard to comprehend how a human being could do that. He told her he'd get counseling, reportedly continued it after the court-mandated counseling ended, and became active in his local church. Then in 2007 they divorced, with Kidd saying that she had grossly abused him (though offering little evidence outside of one incident where his wife threw a remote at him) and his wife filing a counter-claim saying that he had as recently as a year ago beaten her head into the console of a car, damaged her hearing, and kicked her while she was pregnant. Atop the (relatively benign, but evident) cases of Kidd fathering children with other women and cheating on his wife to a ridiculous degree. And... you know, the DWI he just got not less than 2 months ago. He's 39 years old. You shouldn't be driving drunk no matter what age you are, but once you get past 25 or so, you don't even have a vestige of an excuse for it. He could've killed someone, not least of whom himself. It's absurd. Look. I don't want to pretend like I know Jason Kidd personally, or that I really understand the full story on any of this. But this is terrible, terrible stuff. If even half this stuff is true, Kidd is one hell of an awful person. He gets a lot of good publicity because -- predictably -- he's white, quaint, and reportedly decent to reporters. But off the court there are no shortage of indications that Kidd is one of the absolute worst people in the NBA, and someone who makes just about the worst role model a man could possibly make. So yeah. I don't like him much. Respect his game, sure, but don't conflate that with respect for him as a human being.

• • •

_Follow Taj Gibson on Twitter at __@TajGibson22.___

Taj Gibson is a very solid player. Most people just sort of lump him in with Chicago's bench mob, and to some extent, that's fair -- Chicago's bench has been phenomenally effective during Gibson's time in Chicago, and it's partly the fact that when they come together they produce something better than the sum of its parts. But I feel like people often use that to the detriment of Asik, Gibson, and all the pieces that really make the bench unit good. And that's a massive mistake. Gibson and Asik are very good players in their own right, and as I was saying in the Asik capsule, people underrate Asik's status as an essentially transformative defender. The same is true of Gibson, who has a relatively strong case as being the best defensive power forward in the game today. In 2011, he led all power forwards in Synergy defensive stats -- in 2012, he improved the best defense in the league's defensive rating by (this isn't a typo) 11 points per 100 possessions when he was on the court. Click on that. Scroll down to the on/off stats. Stare in awe, because it's ridiculous. With Gibson on the floor, the Bulls flat-out destroyed teams defensively, and while part of it is the Asik/Gibson effect, part of it is simply that Gibson is an incredibly good defensive player and pretty underheralded for all the things he does. And for those wondering where that effect was in the playoffs? Well, it was still there -- the problem was the offense falling apart without Rose, folks, not the defense. In any real way.

Offensively, Gibson is less of a rock-solid player, but that isn't to say he's bad. Just a bit lacking. His at-rim finishing leaves a little to be desired (conversion rate of 61%), but that settles in right around league average for a big man, which is fine. His big problem is that he doesn't really have much on the offensive end outside of his finishing -- his outside shot is vastly overused by the Bulls, with Thibodeau's system forcing Gibson to spot up outside the paint far too often. This is bad for two reasons. First, he's simply not very good at it -- he shoots in the mid to low 30s from every range outside the immediate rim area (and an almost-there 3-9 foot percentage of 41%), which is pretty awful. This is made worse by the fact that almost 90% of the shots he takes from 10 feet and out are assisted -- these are plays that the Bulls are actually trying to run, and they simply aren't a very good use of Gibson's offensive skillset. In an ideal world, Gibson would be the 4th or 5th best offensive starter on a very good team, called upon for about 5-6 cuts to the rim per game to get him open dunks when necessary. Essentially, he'd be a slightly smaller Anderson Varejao. Very low usage offensively, but a game changing defender and a strong 25-30 MPG player on a great contender.

In general, I really like Gibson. It's partly his game. After all, I love watching his defense -- it's as aesthetically pleasing as it is effective, I think, and it's really fun to watch him going at opposing bigs and mucking up every play he can get his hands on. He's great. But it's also partly personal sympathy -- take a second and read this profile on ESPN, going over the depth of Gibson's personal tragedies during the 2011 season -- three friends dead and his beloved grandfather died of cancer. He coped with basketball, playing his heart out every night in dedication to the ones he'd lost. Absolutely heart wrenching story. And I find it really, really hard to root against a player who had to go through that. Going forward, I admit, it's hard to see how he really improves beyond simply playing more minutes. Gibson is older than most people think, clocking in at just over 27 years old as I write this. To put that in context, he's older than all but three players that'll be suiting up for the Thunder next year -- Thabo, Perkins, and Collison, in case you were wondering who those three are. He'd immediately be one of the older members of that team. But after this contract-year with the Bulls (where he SHOULD get quite a few more minutes than he's gotten the last few years, if Thibs doesn't bury him behind Boozer again) he should get a very decently sized contract, and hopefully, a chance to shine with a franchise that gives him the minutes he deserves. I really look forward to seeing him succeed and finally get the widespread, public validation as an excellent player. Whether it's in Chicago or not. Because he's a fine, fine player. And he really deserves it.

• • •

Follow Nick Collison on Twitter at__ @nickcollison4__.

I really feel like this capsule is going to stir up a hornet's nest for me, so I'm hesitant to write it. While I don't think it's an absolutely controversial opinion, it does stray from the usual tenor of discussing Nick Collison, so I'm probably going to annoy quite a few people with it. Let's start by describing Collison's game. First, he's great at taking charges -- really, really good at getting his head down and setting his feet below the offensive player. He has a great sense of space, and he knows exactly where he needs to slide to make everything work. He's a very good cover on the pick and roll, and does a great job mucking up set plays (even if that often results in leaving his own man open). He fouls a ton -- his per-36 foul rate is high enough that he'd rarely be able to play the full 36 minutes a night. His offense is pretty awful at this point of his career -- he's decent at finishing at-the-rim on criminally low usage, and he's decent at the long two (actually led the PF position at it last season, in an incredibly outlier-type year), but he turns the ball over a lot and he legitimately shoots in the low 20% range from 3-15 feet. He's not an offensive asset, for the most part, because his passing is pretty bad and he tends to turn the ball over if you "feature" him too much. Very solid defender, though. And that's why he gets minutes. Now. Read that description again, think about it, and try to take it out of context.

... Doesn't that sound like Jared Jeffries?

I realize this is kind of like throwing dynamite at a golden goose. Collison is ADORED in most statistical circles -- he's a darling of adjusted +/-, and has been among the league leaders for years. Jeffries... not so much, heh. He's been a clearly positive impact player for the majority of the last few years (and in fact, he had the strongest adjusted defensive +/- on the New York Knicks last season among all serious rotation players), but nothing quite like Collison. But their skillsets are virtually EXACTLY the same. They both take charges, they both are fantastic pick and roll defenders, they're great on help, and they're highly foul-prone players who can't really stay on the court. Neither of them are phenomenal rebounders (actually, they're both awful -- Collison was solid earlier in his career, but he's been pretty bad the last few years) and neither are phenomenal passers (they have virtually equal TO and AST numbers over their entire careers). The only thing Collison really has on Jeffries is that he can finish at the rim, while Jeffries can't. But even then -- Collison generally has a far lower usage rate, and while the difference helps build confidence that Collison is a legitimately better player than Jeffries (and he is, if only a little), it doesn't explain the vast difference in reputation.

I mean, cripes. The Jared Jeffries capsule was basically a laundry list of reasons why I don't care for Jeffries' game. His offense is awful, he's foul prone, his man-to-man defense is bad, et cetera. But how is Nick Collison so much better that he deserves the adoration of the entire basketball media? I realize that it's partly his off-court pursuits -- his twitter account is (in my opinion) one of the funniest and most thoughtful of all the players I've ever followed, his observations on being an NBA player he blogged at GQ are legitimately incredible reads, and he's an actively great person outside his sport. His intelligence and class are probably reason enough for his being assessed as so much better than Jeffries. But the fact remains -- his game and general skillset is virtually the exact equivalent of a player that suffers yearly evisceration at the behest of the New York media, and a player for whom "I Hate Jared Jeffries" campaigns have been started and supported in full. This points to one of two things. Either Collison is pretty dang overrated, or Jeffries is pretty dang underrated. My opinion? A bit of both. Collison isn't nearly the perfect roleplayer most people portray him as. But Jeffries is hardly the worthless flotsam most people portray him as, either.

• • •

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. Yesterday's riddles were funny -- almost everyone got 2/3, but nobody could ace it. Surprised nobody guessed that a Spurs fan would dislike Kidd, heh. Anyhow. Good job to Weagle, Atori, Brian and Chilai for their 2/3 guesses.

• While this Utah player has proven he's a good NBA rebounder, Player #160 hasn't really shown much else. A pity, for such a high pick.
• Why are we calling him Pistol Pete? May have the mop, but Pistol Pete never had defense half this good. Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).
• This Utah player has -- ... why are there so many Utah players at once? What? Anyway. Overrated in #NBARank, but should be a REALLY good player someday.

Again, sorry about the missed day this week. Extraordinarily busy. Get excited for next week, though. I have a ridiculous THREE capsule plus posts next week! Absurd. And one the Monday after! I better get writing those now. Have a good weekend.

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