Every year, the NBA Draft offers promise and despair for fans and front offices around the association. Fans watch with rapt attention and bated breath [Ed. Note: Just playin', they read Twitter] as David Stern ambles to and from the podium, smirking as he holds their teams’ fates in his frog prince hands. They oscillate from cheers to cries as he unveils their pick, knowing that with it their organization’s final call has been laid bare for the world to see. For NBA fans, every year’s draft (however deep or diluted) holds simultaneously the implied promise of a brighter future and the grim reassurance of their doomed fates. How appropriate that the 2013 draft, an occasion we collectively wrote off as likely being one of the more uninteresting in recent memory, ended up being the most exciting. Boos and jeers rained down, Stern smirked, the names slowly filled the board, and we're left to sort through the debris. We stand amidst it, left to wonder “Wait, how did my team actually do?” With respect to that question, at least for the first 10 teams in the draft, your friends at Gothic Ginobili are here to assess your grim fortune:

• • •

1. Cleveland Cavaliers – Anthony Bennett – Power Forward
After recovering from the initial shock of the pick, I’m actually not totally against this pick. This’ll be the second year in a row the Cavaliers took an unconventional choice with their top-5 lottery pick, and if I was a Cavs fan I’d be much more comfortable with this pick than last year’s. Bennett is a versatile forward with excellentsize and length. Offensively, he reminds me of Charles Barkley minus the back-to-basket game. Of course, the question on everyone’s mind concerns what position he’s supposed to play. I don’t think this is a tweener concern in the traditional sense -- with proper conditioning I think Bennett could handle limited time at small forward, and with a fast-paced small ball lineup is perfectly suited for the 4 spot given his skill in transition and offensive versatility. The problem is that Tristan Thompson exists, is on the Cavaliers, is a power forward, and is on a rookie contract. Thompson can’t play small forward, and I’d have serious doubts about replacing Alonzo Gee with Bennett for any length of time, so I’m interested to see what Cleveland is going to do here. Given the already shaky injury status of the Cavaliers frontcourt, I understand why they passed on Noel. Why pass on Oladipo though? His addition presents no more of a logjam at shooting guard than Bennett’s does at power forward, and his ability to defend multiple positions solves an issue more immediately pressing to the Cavaliers than Bennett’s scoring does. Another interesting choice from an organization with a history of interesting draft choices.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

Bennett's name features a "triple double" composed of the letters "e", "n", and "t." Bennett will average a triple double.

2. Orlando Magic – Victor Oladipo – Shooting Guard
In my opinion, this was the best fit of the draft. It speaks highly of Oladipo that this likely would have been the case no matter which team took him. Were the rumored Bledsoe deal to take place, Orlando would be looking at a formidable athletic core and a dangerous 1-2 punch in transition. However, I don’t buy that Oladipo puts Orlando back in the conversation as a fringe playoff team. For his relative completeness as a player I see his value for the Magic lying more on the defensive end. That said, Moe Harkless looked awfully effective for much of last season. There’s reason to be optimistic for Orlando fans.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

If you add an "n" and a "r" to Oladipo's name, you have "Orlandipo." This means he will be Orlando's very best Scrabble player.

3. Washington Wizards – Otto Porter – Small Forward

Next to Oladipo, this is my pick for most likely to quickly improve their team. Washington’s small forward rotation is a disaster, and Porter’s length and ability to move without the basketball should, with time, make him a valuable upgrade over Martell Webster. His length and quickness makes him look like he’ll develop into quite an NBA-level defender, and the Wizards were already looking like an elite defensive squad in the latter half of the 2012-2013 season. Porter should only improve that. If Beal continues to improve, and Wall can stay healthy, Otto Porter and the Wizards look like good bets to be fighting for a playoff spot come next spring.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

Otto Porter represents the second Airplane! star to "make it" in the NBA. He was the pilot.

4. Charlotte Bobcats – Cody Zeller – Center
The above represents one reaction to the Bobcats pick. Cody isn’t the stereotypical stiff the name Zeller often brings to mind, as evidenced by his draft combine stats and college performance. He’s a stellar athlete, especially in transition, who’s capable of converting those transition opportunities into points. I’d project Zeller fitting reasonably well into Charlotte's framework of a fast up-tempo super-small-ball team helmed by Kemba Walker and Ramon Sessions. That said, he’ll pretty much have to, since he doesn’t promise to bring much to the table defensively. He’s got a small wingspan for a big man despite his size and frame, and though he’s quick on his feet those arms are going to limit him as a defender and rim protector. If the Bobcats want to win games with this lineup they promise to field (which isn’t as bad as you think: did you know Kemba Walker was statistically better than Damian Lillard in 2012-2013?), they’re going to want to run their comparatively old and busted Eastern Conference foes into the ground. Zeller looks like a nice fit for the kind of team it seems like they’re trying to build, and that’s the first time I think I’ve ever said that.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

Cody Zeller's favorite fish is cod. His favorite game is Call of Duty. He owns a city in Wyoming.

5. Phoenix Suns – Alex Len – Center
Len is a prospect I love for his physical attributes and skill-set. He's also a prospect I’d be terrified of taking, at least with his injury history. Stress fractures are no joke when it comes to big men, and even for an organization with a supernaturally effective medical staff like the Suns, its reason to take pause. That said, the Suns are in dire need of anything resembling upside, and if they can keep him healthy, Len shows promise of a Hibbert-esque force in the paint. With Gortat looking ready to catch the first flight out and Jermaine O’Neal being where he is in his career, the center position is as good a start as any for a Phoenix organization looking for a long-term piece.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

Fun fact: Alex Len is a boy, not a girl! Woah! National Basketball Association? More like National Boys Association.

6. New Orleans Pelicans – Nerlens Noel – Center
Wait, scratch that.

6. New Orleans Pelicans – Jrue Holiday – Point Guard
Since Noel got flipped to Philadelphia, this draft pick becomes more about the acquisition of Jrue Holiday. I’ve seen some frustrated thoughts on both ends of the spectrum, but I see this as the rare trade where things worked out on both ends. Jrue will presumably start at point guard for the Pelicans, creating a formidable backcourt tandem with Eric Gordon (who, to his credit, seemed pretty excited about the move on Twitter). That’s a heck of a lineup, particularly if Davis can gain some weight and become more comfortable playing a small-ball 5 next to Ryan Anderson. That’s a squad that can run you ragged up and down the floor in transition AND execute from the perimeter and on the pick and roll in the half-court. Give them some time to gel and they’ll be a tough out. The wild card in this whole scenario is Grieivis Vasquez, who the Pelicans will presumably want to bump to sixth man. Vasquez [Ed. Note: He led the league in assists] was one of the more underrated players in the entire league [Ed. Note: which he led in assists__] last season [Ed. Note: a season which culminated in him leading the assist leaderboard], and his combination of size and skill [Ed. Note: at assists, which he led] make him a versatile and potent option for a team to have in its second unit. But being the sixth man can be touchy for guys [Ed. Note: especially guys who led the league in assists], and there’s no way of telling how Greivis [Ed. Note: Who also led the league in assists.] will feel about potentially playing that role [Ed. Note: He also led the league in assists last season]. Regardless, this is still an exciting Pelicans team that I’m going to be making some trips to New Orleans to check out.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

If the Pelicans regret this acquisition, they should take a Holiday in order to Jrue their decision to trade for him. (I am horrible.)

7. Sacramento Kings – Ben McLemore – Shooting Guard
One of the few predictable picks of the draft, McLemore was one of two “sure things” available (next to Oladipo). There was no way he was sliding past the Kings, who’ve never met a scoring guard they didn’t like. Jokes aside, this is a great fit for the Kings roster assuming Tyreke makes on his way out the door. Though he’s a restricted free agent, it’s unlikely the Kings opt to match an offer on him. Despite his disappointing decline since his stellar rookie season, Tyreke still has plenty to offer for a number of teams that need a complimentary backcourt piece and have the money to pay for it. The McLemore pick seems to reinforce the notion that the Kings are looking to change up their rotation at two-guard. And I can’t fault the pick at all. Athletically gifted, talented and fundamentally sound shooter, NBA-ready body; McLemore has it all for a team looking to add a ready contributor. McLemore’s shooting ability should open up a new dimension for the Kings’ offense. My only concern would be that the Kings’ biggest problem hasn’t really been their offense. They find ways to score, usually. Rather, their biggest problem has been their completely non-existent defense. Whether that’s the result of coaching or personnel, I’m not qualified to say, and it’s hard to look at the dismal state of the Kings roster and say they should look at defensive big men to complement Cousins rather than someone who can contribute more tangibly. But it’s certainly food for thought going forward.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

You can't spell "McLemore" without "More Mel C." I agree, Sacramento. You can't get enough Spice Girls.

8. Detroit Pistons – Kentavious Caldwell-Pope – Shooting Guard
I haven’t heard a ton of chatter on this pick, but it strikes me as one of the better picks in terms of roster suitability. The rap on Pope (Is that right? Or is it Caldwell-Pope every time?) is that he’s a shaky ball handler and not much for driving the rim. He’s more of a perimeter creator, possessing excellent touch from long-range and a good eye for getting his shot off of screens and shaking loose to create spot-up opportunities for himself. Luckily, the Pistons already have two ball handlers in Calderon and Knight, one of whom is capable of spacing the floor at an elite level and the other serviceable at creating opportunities at the rim. While Caldwell-Pope is a shooting guard, he’s got great size at 6’6”. He may be a liability on defense at the NBA level due to his small wingspan, but he’d likely be an upgrade seeing minutes at small forward over Kyle Singler. The Pistons have accumulated a number of surprisingly promising young pieces, particularly their frontcourt lineup of Monroe and Drummond, and I’m hoping Maurice Cheeks will see the benefits of giving Drummond time on the floor over Jason Maxiell. Fun fact: Maxiell remained an NBA starter in the year of our lord 2013. Cheeks’ head coaching record isn’t sterling, but he’s also been placed in some unfortunate situations personnel wise. This is his first real shot with a young and talented roster. Let's get it, Pistons.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

Pope is 76 years old. What kind of a handle can you really expect to have at that age, anyway? Dumars strikes again.

9. Minnesota Timberwolves – Shabazz Muhammad (via Trey Burke)– Shooting Guard
Going into last season I was reasonably confident that the Wolves could be a playoff squad in the Western conference. I penciled them in as a fair shot at the 8th seed, at least. Then there was the Love injury, Rubio’s recovery took longer than expected, and things sort of flew off the rails. With the news that AK47 (an underrated contributor to what success the Timberwolves mustered last season) has opted out of his contract, even healthy the Wolves’ prospects look a little dimmer. But Muhammad adds a dimension Minnesota hasn’t had in quite a while: a legitimate scoring wing. And despite the media fallout surrounding his personal life and his underwhelming performance over the past year, I’m still a believer in Shabazz’s prospects as a real NBA contributor. If nothing else, he adds depth at a position the Wolves sorely need depth at.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

Excuse me, Mr. Harmon, we do not use curse words here at Gothic Ginobili. For shame. His name is "Shabutt." Get it right.

10. Portland Trail Blazers – CJ McCollum – Shooting Guard
Injury issues aside (a broken foot isn’t anything to sound the alarms over when it comes to small guards), the criticisms of McCollum going into the draft centered mainly around his status as a scoring guard in point guard’s clothing. Luckily for him, the Blazers are quite set at both point guard and backup point guard, and instead are much more in need of a capable shooting guard or a scorer off the bench. I doubt he’ll start over Wes Matthews' steady hand given his smaller size, but his game screams “bench spark” and that’s a role he should be able to perform to expectations with this season’s Blazer squad. Given the Blazers had virtually no bench in 2012-2013, those expectations shouldn’t be that high. Notably, Portland recently snagged Thomas Robinson, making it fair to speculate a Blazer bench mob pairing the two. But one should be careful in speculating the ultimate destination of that ill-fated Kansas forward, as he travels about the Association helping to set cap space right which once was wrong, leaping from team to team, hoping each time that this is the final leap home.

AARON MCGUIRE'S HOT SPORTS TAKE

CJ represents the very first former White House Chief of Staff to make it in the NBA. They call him The Jackel.

Continue reading

In today's ESPN 5-on-5, I was asked an interesting question. Was Roy Hibbert having the best playoff series against the Miami Heat of any player in the big three era? My immediate answer: "no, what the heck, Dirk Nowitzki, whaaaaaaat." My not-so-immediate response: "... still, that's a neat construction." The whole idea of a single 'best' series against the Heat by any individual player, from point guards to centers, seems a bit weird to me. As does any cross-positional comparison that isn't couched in a lot of uncertainty -- including the Kobe/Duncan debate, or any effort to put together a list of the ten to fifteen "best" players to ever play the game. It's hard to put a whole mixed mess of players together and sift out any particular "best." It's easier (and more accurate!) to simply appreciate for where they are among their general peers. That said, I like the idea of examining the all-time playoff ledger to figure out who's really stood out after a few years of a dynasty's reign.

We don't know if the Finals are going to be a Spurs/Heat showdown yet, but we COULD certainly take the time to put together an all-star team of playoff performances that shocked, awed, or pushed both the LeBron/Wade/Bosh dynasty-in-making and the Duncan/Parker/Manu dynasty-in-closing. It could be fun, even. So, I'll do it. The statistics referenced in this post will be series averages, obviously. I'll be going with the all-star setup -- the three best "big" performances and the two best "guard" performances. For Miami, the playoffs spanned include 2011, 2012, and 2013's in-progress run. For San Antonio, the window's larger -- 2003 to 2013. Some extra points to each player if they beat the team in question, although there have been some depressingly impressive performances in lopsided losses that bear mention as well. If you think I'm missing any, take a few minutes to add a comment and point it out. I'm not too proud to change, folks!

• • •

THE MIAMI BIG THREE ALL-OPPONENT DEATHSQUAD

Guard: RAJON RONDO, 2012 ECF. (45 MPG, 49-30-70 shooting, 21-7-11)

A lot of people overlook how ridiculously good Rajon Rondo was in the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals. I beg you -- don't be those guys. I'm on record as being a bit more of a hater than most when it comes to Rajon Rondo's game, but I can't slam the guy without pointing out that last year's ECF represented his absolute finest hour. Ironman play (45 MPG?!?), insane shooting (... for Rondo, at least), and a near triple double average as he filleted the Miami defense. The biggest difference between Boston's ignomious five-game loss to the Heat in 2011 and their near upset in 2012 was Rondo -- he improved his game from 2011's pedestrian (and injured, as well) 10-4-8 averages to an absolute force. By a decently large margin, Rondo was the best guard that Miami has ever had the honor of facing.

Guard: JASON TERRY, 2011 NBA Finals (33 MPG, 49-39-75 shooting, 18-2-3-1)

Alright, I can imagine Oklahoma City fans getting incredulous with me right now. "Jason Terry? Over Westbrook? NAH, BRAH." On a large scale, that's obviously true, just as Isiah is better than Dumars. But Dumars played marginally better in his finals MVP series, and Terry played marginally better in his Heat Finals series. Terry's efficiency over the six-game series win was what pushed me over the top. Westbrook played well, but he shot 24 shots a game and went completely cold from three at the absolute most inconvenient time. Westbrook has a decent case, especially since he played nine more minutes per game than Terry, but Terry's part in the Mavericks' shocking game #6 win was too enticing for me. Sorry, Russ.

Big: KEVIN DURANT, 2012 NBA Finals (43 MPG, 55-39-84 shooting, 31-6-2)

Alright, you can be honest -- you didn't remember how efficient Durant was in that series either, did you? I admit that I didn't watch the entirety of this series as-it-happened -- the despair over the 2012 WCF was too pressing for me. But I eventually picked up the replays and remember being impressed-but-not-blown-away by Durant's numbers. That said, those shooting numbers are far beyond what I would've guessed after watching the series, especially the 55% from two. His rebounding and passing were lacking, but that scoring represents the highest-scoring series any single individual has had against Miami in the big three era. The second highest? Well...

Big: DIRK NOWITZKI, 2011 NBA Finals (40 MPG, 41-37-98 shooting, 26-10-2-1-1)

Lord, Dirk was great. Even regardless of context, those averages are killer -- my favorite part (by far) is that Dirk made 45 free throws on 46 attempts. Absolutely absurd. Historically, it's matched only by Reggie Miller's underrated turn in the 2000 NBA finals, where he (somewhat comically) made the exact same number (45/46) in a 6 game loss. Nobody with greater than 13 free throw attempts in a Finals series has ever shot better than those two. That said, his averages also need to come with the context that Dirk was quite ill for two games of the Finals, dragging himself (and his lethargic team) to several wins while sick with the flu and lagging. It also needs to come with the fact that the Heat were a fluky game three win away from dropping the series in five games. Also needs to come with the fact that he registered just 17 turnovers in six games and was never in foul trouble over the entire series. Missing you, Dirk.

Big: ROY HIBBERT, 2013 ECF (39 MPG, 54-xx-81 shooting, 23-12-2)

And finally, Roy Hibbert. The funny thing about Hibbert's performance is that -- like Rondo's -- it comes on the heels of a generally terrible performance just one year prior. Hibbert averaged 12-12-1-3 in Indiana's six-game loss, generally taking a backseat to David West and Paul George. He shot just 47% in that series and looked a bit lost. That's obviously applied in no way to his virtuoso performance against the Heat in this series -- he's dominated the paint defensively even as the rest of his team has wilted, a touch, and he's somehow managed to evade significant foul trouble ever since his near-foulout in game one of the series. Excellent series by an excellent player.

• • •

THE SAN ANTONIO BIG THREE ALL-OPPONENT DEATHSQUAD

Guard: CHRIS PAUL, 2008 WCSF (41 MPG, 50-20-76 shooting, 24-4-11-3)

I'll start with something that may shock many. I don't like Chris Paul very much. Dude's got game, but the amount of dirty play he gets away with on defense and the amount of respect he gets for doing it bugs me. Bruce Bowen is widely vilified for his dirty play (with many people actively expecting Spurs fans to apologize for having ever rooted for him), and Manu's flopping might as well come with its own sitcom laugh-track. Paul? His dirty play is "gamesmanship, gritty defense, overcoming his obstacles." And his flopping is simply ignored. Why does Paul evade all criticism for his faults? Why doesn't anyone call him out on forcing his franchise into a terrible trade to L.A., just like Dwight did? Boggles my mind. Anyway. That all said, my dislike for him might also be rooted for his lights-out performance against the Spurs in 2008, when he put the fear of God in Spurs fans everywhere and dragged the defending champs to seven brutal games. If he could've made a damn three pointer, maybe they'd have even won!

Guard: KOBE BRYANT, 2008 WCF (40 MPG, 53-33-91 shooting, 29-6-4-2)

Fun fact -- you could put Kobe here for any number of his performances against San Antonio. He was really good in 2003, although his shooting was nowhere near as good as it was in 2008. He averaged 26-6-6 in L.A.'s series loss to the Spurs in 2004. He was really good before the big three era, too -- but that's to be expected. He's Kobe Bryant, _man._Still, his performance in 2008's too-easy five game series win against the Spurs was tops. Bruce Bowen was 36 at the time, and his defense had definitely lost a step (or two), but Kobe was still scoring on him with ease. Manu was unable to cancel out Kobe's crazy production (Ginobili averaged 13-3-3 on the series) and nobody but Brent Barry could make a freakin' three. Kobe was defensively active in this series win, and even though Duncan was able to keep Pau and Odom well in check, nobody could hang with L.A.'s superstar to prevent the first LA/BOS finals since the Bird/Magic glory days.

Big: KEVIN DURANT, 2012 WCF (43 MPG, 53-36-91 shooting, 30-8-5-1)

NOT KEVIN DURANT, MAN! NOT KD! NO! Anyway. Yeah, no, Durant totally obliterated the Spurs in this series, and it was one of the most depressing things I've ever watched. That said, it's kind of hilarious to compare Durant's series averages for the 2012 WCF here and the 2012 NBA finals above -- he actually was more efficient against Miami's defense than he was against San Antonio's defense, which goes against everything everyone has ever said, ever. The big difference wasn't really Durant's scoring or his efficiency, it was the overall team ball-movement and the fact that Harden went from hero to zero on a dime as the opponents changed. You can see echos of that here, as he averaged five assists per contest in the Western Conference Finals and two per contest in the NBA finals. Still. Durant destroyed all comers against the Spurs in 2012, and Spurs fans still have cold sweat nightmares about it to this very day. (Or... wait. Is that just me?)

Big: DIRK NOWITZKI, 2006 WCSF (44 MPG, 53-12-91 shooting, 27-13-3-1)

Hot DAMN, Dirk, why you gotta be on both lists? It's true, though -- as much as a few of my favorite Spurs fans liked to call Dirk soft and marshmallow-textured, the man roundly dominated the Spurs in the 2006 Western Conference Semifinals, in what is perhaps the greatest second round series in the history of the league. In fact, for all the hand-wringing over San Antonio's status as ratings poison, the 2006 WCSF broke (and set) a lot of records. The series' game seven was the highest rated second round game in TNT's history and the series' game six was the highest rated second round game in ESPN's history -- both stood for several years, with the ESPN record falling during LAL/HOU in 2009 and the TNT record falling during ORL/BOS game seven in 2009. So, there's that, I suppose. Dirk was amazing against the Spurs in this series. (And I admit, I find it pretty hilarious that Durant/Dirk make both lists, with virtually identical numbers.)

Big: AMARE STOUDEMIRE, 2005 WCF (41 MPG, 55-xx-84, 37-10-1-1-2)

Look. I know the Suns lost in five games. I know it was very nearly a sweep, despite the fact that Phoenix had home court. I know that Spurs fans aren't really scared of Virginia Woolfe. I mean, er, Amare Stoudemire. But look. Hold up for a second. A center averaged 37 points per game on 55% shooting against the 2005 San Antonio Spurs. Take that in. Repeat it. Yes, Amare was pillow-soft and allowed Duncan, Manu, Parker, and Mohammed to get to the rim with impunity. Yes, the series was lopsided. No, that doesn't totally erase the fact that HE AVERAGED 37 POINTS PER GAME IN A SERIES AGAINST ONE OF THE GREATEST DEFENSIVE TEAMS IN LEAGUE HISTORY. Man, shoot. Is it obvious I had forgotten just how many points he scored in that series? Jesus. He didn't even embarrass himself on the boards!__ I'm gonna go lie down.

Continue reading

Hey, all! Season's drawing to a close -- can you believe we have an absolute maximum of 15 games left in the 2013 NBA season, and quite possibly less than ten? Things are crazy like that. Previously, we've had several fun Q&A sessions -- we had one during the 2012 playoffs, one during the 2012 offseason, and one during the 2013 preseason. Due to my inability to take time off work, we haven't done one in quite some time since. Until now.

For today's post, I'll be answering questions from now until I drop. Usually get 20 or so questions done before that happens. Have a question about data you read in another site's playoff preview? Some nagging statistical oddity you've been dying to have someone look into, if only glancingly? Questions about me, the blog, or the universe? Well, I'll be here all day, so it's a good time to ask. Questions can be statistical, aesthetic, personal, humorous, serious, or greasy. Depends on what you want to hear, I guess. Ask away, holmes. Here are the three ways you get in contact with us:

1. Ask the @gothicginobili twitter account your question.
2. Ask questions in the comments below.
3. Ask questions via email, to staff [at] gothicginobili [dot] com.

I'll be here all day, folks! Happy asking.

-- Aaron

• • •

QUESTION #1: If you could be an animal -- any animal -- what would you be and why? And how do you think Dewey would respond to the same question? (Asked by Chris)

When I was a kid, I was an avid consumer of the "Animorphs" series of books. For those who aren't aware -- in those books, a group of kids are given the power to morph into any animal they touched. They proceed to become the only thing standing up to Earth's utter annihilation at the hands of a powerful species of alien mind-control slugs. For real. The general theory behind the books was always sort of absurd. The entire idea that a group of five kids with the ability to morph into animals would really be able to stand up to a giant race of aliens using only their animal-morphing powers is hilarious, even by science fiction standards. But, on the plus side... reading Animorphs has given me a pretty solid list of tiers I can place animals into when trying to answer this question! Score.

• TIER #1: "No way in hell." These include animals that I would never EVER want to be. This includes -- but is not limited to -- cockroaches, 'hive' bugs (bees/ants/termites, et cetera), starfish, easily-killable-fish, pigeons, chickens, quails, squirrels, rats, turtles, and Tucker Carlson.

• TIER #2: "Alright, maybe." These include animals that aren't really ideal, but they're pretty solid and I wouldn't mind chilling as them for a while. Mostly animals that can defend themselves but aren't exactly the BEST options. This includes orcas, sharks, dogs, housecats, alligators, sloths, lemurs, leopards, bears...

• TIER #3: "Now THAT'S the one." These include three animals, my 'top 3' of animals I'd totally be without a single hesitation. I will explain all three in brief:

• #1: Bird. I'd be TOTALLY DOWN with being a bird, so long as it's a hawk or an eagle and not some lame one that can barely fly. Look. Flying is probably really awesome. Birds sometimes eat roadkill and they have to be ridiculous predators all the time, but those things can fly! How cool is that? Birds are sweet.

• #2: Tiger. Man, tigers are vicious and dangerous and beautiful. What better way to embody all of the traits I don't? Also, the main character of Animorphs was a tiger, and he was a total doofus. I bet I could be a better tiger than that guy.

• #3: Elephant. Because nobody messes with an elephant. (Except for the poachers trying to kill off elephants for their tusks. But if I was an elephant I'd go scorched earth on those jerks.)

As for Dewey's animal? Cynothoglys, of course!

• • •

QUESTION #2: Suppose there's a stratego tournament between the guys on the all-NBA team, who wins? (asked by Michael Toney)

Mike has asked roughly 342,467 questions to date, so I'm not sure I'll get to them all. (Or, alternatively, I'll put off some to answer other questions and come back to them later.) But this one is pretty great. For those who aren't in the know, Stratego is a strategy board game where each player has a 4x10 grid of space wherein to place an array of bombs, offensive pieces, and a single flag -- you lose when your flag gets captured. The game is a tour de force in misinformation and red herrings, as the successful Stratego player is one who can bluff his opponent into making premature retreats and chasing after faux-flags and misdirection. In other words, seeing as how he does all of that without anyone bluffing him, Alex Jones is the worst Stratego player.

So... who on the All-NBA team wins an all-out Stratego tournament? Really good question, although the answer is pretty obvious. Given his fascination with table-top games and his four-year degree in psychology, I have no idea how anyone would pick against Tim Duncan. The man has the poker face to end all poker faces, and he's in his board game element here. After Duncan, things get a bit less obvious. If Chris Bosh or Brook Lopez were on the all-NBA team they'd make decent dark-horse picks, but given that they aren't, you have to dig pretty deep. I'd go with Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant as the dark-horse candidates that could potentially upend Duncan -- both of them are good at misdirection, and both of them are unerringly competitive and would at least THINK about cheating if they felt it was worth it. Great question.

• • •

QUESTION #3: This is a set of three pub questions. What team left in the playoffs would win at pub trivia night? Give us your "I want to have a beer with that dude" power rankings for NBA players. Then give us those rankings for all public figures. (asked by Michael Toney)

Interesting array here. For the first one, the answer is obvious -- San Antonio. They have Duncan, Parker, and Pop. That's enough to win it, even if the Heat do have Shane Battier. Second one is a little more difficult for me, because I don't tend to think in terms of that particular construction. But here's my list. No explanations, just the top five.

1. Matt Bonner
2. Tim Duncan
3. Grant Hill
4. Brook Lopez
5. Mo Williams

As for my "all public figures" rankings, here's a top ten for that one.

1. Alton Brown
2. Tiger Woods
3. Boris Johnson
4. George W. Bush
5. Robert Downey Jr
6. Matt Bonner
7. Bill Clinton
8. Stephen Colbert
9. Roger Federer
10. Antonin Scalia

Just missed the cut: Duncan, Will Smith, and Harrison Ford.

• • •

QUESTION #4: If you had to choose between being a Looney Tune or a Disney character, which would you choose? And who would it be? (asked by Sam Stewart)

No easy questions today. The easy answer is being a Looney Tune, simply because Tex Avery and Chuck Jones gave them an incredible depth of character. But Pixar characters are technically Disney characters, and that throws a big wrench in my answer. Carl Fredriksen is my favorite animated character ever, and the guy I relate to the most. So... man. Rough choices. If we're counting Pixar and Miyazaki characters as "Disney characters" I'd probably go with Mr. Fredriksen. If we aren't, I'd probably go with Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck. Both of them are hilarious in ways that mimic my own general approach to humor, depending on the hour, and I'd be happy to be either one of them. As long as I'm similarly impervious to bodily harm, of course.

• • •

QUESTION #5: How much would you pay for a D-League team in Richmond? (asked by Michael Toney)

I'd pay a lot, if I had the money to pay it. I don't, though. Heck, I'd even take a D-League team in Virginia Beach. Which raises a follow-up question -- why exactly doesn't the NBA look into relocating flagging D-League franchises into cities that lost out on NBA team relocation negotiations? It's the closest thing to a controlled trial to see if the city can handle professional -- or, I suppose, semi-professional -- basketball. D-League games are fun. It's a good test run. Come on, Silver, let's run with this.

• • •

QUESTION #6: If Matt Bonner battled a giant sloth... who would win? Besides everyone ever. (asked by Sam Stewart)

EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER EXISTED WOULD WIN, YOU ARE CORRECT. That said, Matt Bonner is at a decided disadvantage here. We all make fun of sloths for being slow and silly, but the giant sloth was a four-ton beast with razor sharp claws and the ability to run. In fact, the giant sloth's claws are horrifying -- they were likely as large as hunting knives and daggers. If the sloth snuck up on poor ol' Matty, he's dead. Literally. The beast was almost 20 feet from head to tail, larger than modern elephants! Matt Bonner would need to use all of his wit and guile to pull out this kind of a battle, and he'd probably need to shoot it. Many times. Many, many, many times. Dunno if he has it in him. Still, if he has access to human technology, he might be alright. We're gonna have to test this out. Anyone have a giant sloth lying around?

• • •

QUESTION #7: Where does Z-Bo rank as an offensive rebounder? Is he top 5 all time? (asked by Sam Stewart)

Definitely not top-5 all time, although he's really good. This actually points to a trend that most people don't realize is going on: rebounding, as a whole, has become a bit more team-based than individual-based over the last few decades. Back in the heyday of players like Moses, Rodman, and Dudley, big men ended up being responsible -- on average -- for more of a team's rebounding than they are today. As we've become a league of longer-range shots, rebounds tend to go a bit farther out than they used to, which leads to higher rebounding numbers for guards and lower rebounding numbers for big men. As a result, with a few notable exceptions (mostly owing to teams where the GM pairs a rebounding wizard like Howard, Duncan, or Randolph with a less-heralded rebounder), the rebounding is more spread out and we're seeing fewer and fewer obscenely dominant rebounding seasons.

This goes double for offensive rebounding, which has been falling out of favor with many NBA teams due to the ill effects it tends to have on a team's defense. Of the top 250 offensive rebounding seasons since 1974, only 30% of them came after the year 2000. That's despite having more teams in the league (ergo, more chances for a statistical outlier season). If there were an even amount of seasons each year, you'd expect 35% of those top seasons would occur in the 2000s and onward. That includes just 8 of the top 50 and none of the top 15. In fact, Nikola Pekovic -- at #40 -- is the only player in the last five years to break the top 50. As for Zach Randolph, he's had two years in the top 250 -- one at 98 (his 2011 season) and one at 129 (his 2013 season). His career numbers have him clocking in at #36 all-time, which is reasonably good without making him one of the best ever.

• • •

QUESTION #8: which would you rather have happen tomorrow: you tear your acl, or Tim Duncan tears his? Related: what's the worst injury you would sustain in place of your favorite player? (asked by Michael Toney)

One of the funny things about this question is how instinctively most sports fans would profess to take on the burdens of injury. Me? I probably would, but I'd definitely have to think about it. You have to put things in context, here. Sports stars have the latest and greatest in modern medicine and recovery techniques. They'll have a medical staff trained to their every step of recovery. They'll have to pay for little of it. Consider, then, what happens if you suffer the same injury. You go to the hospital, wondering what's wrong. You go through a long barrage of tests, finally discovering -- probably much later than the sports star would've -- the identity of your injury. You then have to do months and months of excruciating rehab, quite possibly taking double the amount of time it takes your favorite sports star. Also, you might have to pay for it. Luckily, I have a pretty good health insurance package from my employer. So I probably would take the injury.

But there's also one additional nut to this question that most people don't think about. If you were to take an injury for your favorite sports player, would you feel lingering resentment to the player as you got over your injury? As you went through your own hellish rehab process, would you become more and more irritated when your favorite player doesn't live up to your expectations than you would have otherwise? I feel like the answer is an obvious yes. Which could mean that you stop being a fan of the team you once loved. And that further complicates the picture. Imagine if you suffered a horrible, possibly-debilitating knee injury in place of your favorite player. Imagine if they're on the precipice of the finals. Then imagine if they get swept in the finals. Wouldn't you feel angry? Wouldn't you be inordinately pissed off that you sacrificed your health for a team that got utterly embarrassed? Wouldn't you -- quite possibly -- stop really caring about that team, and perhaps start hating them altogether? It's a rough question. I'd take an ACL tear, a broken bone, or a concussion. I don't know if I'd take something that would require horrifying reconstructive surgery, though, or something that I'm going to feel for the rest of my life. Call me a crummy sports fan if you'd like. But if you thought about the consequences, I bet you'd come around.

• • •

QUESTION #9: Rank these four: Paul George, Kyrie Irving, Blake Griffin, Stephen Curry.__(asked by Quixem Raimirez)

I don't usually like ranking questions, but this one's a solid list. Twitter's been abuzz for most of the playoffs over the subject of who's overrated and who's getting unduly held up by an unsustainable playoff performance. My take, with short explanations:

• #1: KYRIE IRVING. Look, he's not an excellent defender. I get it. But 75% of Kyrie's issues on defense are those of the personnel behind him and the 'system' he learned under. He was a superb defensive player at Duke and he's got a toolbox that could eventually translate to some excellent NBA-level defense. Chris Paul wasn't immediately a good defender in the NBA, and Byron Scott did nothing to institute a system that Kyrie was going to learn under. Also: his jump shot is only a hair worse than Curry's, he's the best rim-finishing guard since Tony Parker, and his passing is a lot better than most people realize. He's had a lot of incidental injuries, but he's got the highest upside of all these players (HE'S 21 YEARS OLD DEAR GOD) and he was the only "100% rock-solid definitive all-star" out of these four. That said, it's only a hair between him and #2.

• #2: STEPHEN CURRY. When in doubt, pick the guy who has a legitimate argument for being the best in NBA history at an important skill -- shooting, of course. He's the best jump shooter I've ever had the pleasure of watching and he's an excellent passer. That said, his defense is as bad as Kyrie's and he's 25 years old (Kevin Durant is 24). To me, Curry's general inability to finish at the rim makes Kyrie vs Curry lean in the direction of the guy that finishes incredibly well and has significantly more growth potential.

• #3: PAUL GEORGE. I love Paul George. Think he's great. That said, he's not exactly the most efficient scorer on the face of the earth -- his defensive brilliance is something to behold, and nearly pushes him past the two sieves above him, but his offense is lacking enough to keep me from declaring him better. He takes a LOT of poor-decision midrange jumpers, especially since he simply isn't very good from that range (33% between 3 feet and the three point line, to be exact). And his ballhandling still needs a lot of work. He's a Pippen-type player, for sure -- but he definitely isn't there yet.

• #4: BLAKE GRIFFIN. While I'm not Griffin's #1 fan, there's something to be said for a guy who puts in his work and gets results. And Blake gets results. He shot 54% from the floor this year, and before you cry out "HE ONLY DUNKS!", I'd like to point out that he shot better from midrange than Paul George and has one of the best conversion rates in the NBA between 3-to-10 feet. His post moves aren't exactly Olajuwon-esque, but they ARE effective, and he's developed his offensive game in such a way that it isn't nearly as raw as it used to be. That said, his rebounding has fallen off precipitously over the course of his career and his defense is still pretty shaky. And he's drawing fewer and fewer free throws as time goes on, which is a pretty disturbing trend. So it's hard to really declare him better than any of these guys. He's still really good, though.

• • •

QUESTION #10: Cake or Pie? (asked by Quixem Raimirez)

Pie. I love cake (especially ice cream cake), but a good pie destroys a good cake. ... Hey, wait, is cheesecake a cake? Or is it a pie? Oh my lord. Life is so hard. These questions are tearing me apart, Lisa.

• • •

QUESTION #11: What should the Cavs do in the draft this year? (asked by Michael Toney)

I don't know whether or not Noel will be a star in the NBA, truth be told, and I'm not sure the Cavaliers are entirely beholden to the high-upside move of drafting Noel. But I do believe he's the highest-upside player in the draft and his defense in college was absolutely stupendous. I think his skills will translate well to the NBA once he puts on a bit of weight, and I like the idea of pairing him and Mike Brown. I think they'll make a good pair. That said, there's another reason to draft Noel above and beyond his status as the "likely best player". That reason? Trade value. Noel is currently targeting a Christmas return to playing action. Even if Noel proves to be somewhat disappointing in the few minutes he'll play before the trade deadline, the trade value of a high-upside 19 year old big man on a rookie scale contract is absolutely enormous. Chris Grant is a deft hand in the front office -- drafting someone as high-upside as that doesn't just give the Cavs that upside, it gives the Cavs the ability to flip that upside for whoever happens to come on the market. That's big.

As for the rest of the picks, a lot of people I've talked to want the Cavs to flip them for a higher pick or a few vets. I disagree. The Cavaliers are looking at a future core with 4-5 reasonably highly paid players -- a max in Kyrie, then a bunch of players at $10-$15 million a year in Waiters/Thompson/Noel. At some point, they're going to need to surround those players with a low-cost bench. Rookie scale contracts are the absolute best way to do that. Locking in a few high second rounders and late first rounders at low salaries lets Cleveland try out a bunch of young guys to fill that role now, at a lower cost than MLE veterans like Jarrett Jack or Andre Miller. Think Chandler Parsons. Think DeJuan Blair. Think Danny Green. That's the kind of talent they need to try and luck into with their lower picks, and to that end, I think it makes sense that they keep the lot of them and take some calculated risks. Some of them will work, some of them won't. But if they can convert on just one or two of those picks and negotiate a four-year salary, that could pay some huge dividends down the line.

• • •

QUESTION #12: What's your favorite Spurs team of all-time? Also: why? (asked by J. Dana Teague)

Probably the 2003 team, simply because it combined a genuinely sub-par supporting cast that still managed to have four hall-of-fame players in it with a genuinely generation-defining Duncan run. Tony/Manu's production was pretty terrible -- in 2003, they were embryonic at best. As for D-Rob and Ferry, those guys were well past their primes and -- on some nights -- could barely move at all. But Duncan was so dominant that absolutely nothing else mattered. It was the perfect combination. It had everyone I love in it (D-Rob! Manu! Captain Jack! Tony! Pop!) while simultaneously displaying why exactly Tim Duncan is one of the most incredible players who's ever played the game. Perfect combination. Also, I think I've watched every game of that run twice. Beautiful stuff. The way Duncan, D-Rob, and Bowen locked down opposing teams was beyond compare.

That said, at the time that occurred I was a 12-year-old kid who barely followed sports. Given that, I'd probably tab the 2012 Spurs as my favorite of the post-Twitter era, and the post-Aaron-McGuire-Rediscovering-Sports era. The 2013 Spurs still have a shot at upending them, of course, but the beauty of 2012's offense combined with the return of Jackson, the unexpected RJ trade, and the way the season drew to a roaring crescendo led to a sports love I'm not positive I'll ever feel again. And a heart-rending loss I'm not positive I'll ever feel again, either... if we're counting.

• • •

QUESTION #13: If the NBA championship was determined via a Mortal Combat style tournament, who wins? Each team picks 1 entrant. (asked by Michael Toney)

If you're the kind of man who picks against Tony Allen in a Mortal Combat scenario, I don't even want to know you. In any event, the Grizzlies would destroy this no matter WHICH player they chose. Z-Bo, Gasol, Allen... all of them could annihilate anyone that the other three teams could throw at them. Wouldn't even be fair. (Warning: answer would be different if the Spurs hadn't waived Stephen Jackson.)

• • •

QUESTION #14: Can you talk about Memphis? Imagine if they had Danny Green. (asked by Sam Stewart)

I love Memphis. Let's get that straight. I've had lingering resentment for them since 2011, but that resentment isn't meant to be disrespectful in the slightest. The Grizzlies legitimately outclassed the Spurs in 2011, and they're a far better team than most people deign to anoint them. They're hard-nosed, sure, but they aren't a chore to watch on offense -- Marc Gasol's brilliant passing and Conley's adroit game management both approach best-in-class at their respective positions, and Zach Randolph's doughy dominance on offense is something to watch when that man get's going. Lionel Hollins is a really good coach. Their role-players are solid, and their minor stars (see: Allen, Tony) are absurdly good. They remind me of the early-dynasty Spurs. They're phenomenal. And if you replaced someone like Jerryd Bayless with someone like Danny Green, they'd be a force to be reckoned with for years to come. And I think it's worth pointing out that I'm not some recent convert. In the preseason Q&A (linked above), I wrote the following about the Grizzlies while anointing them my sleeper team:

The Grizzlies are about as frightening as they ever were, and very quietly, they've improved in most of the ways they needed to. Darrell Arthur is going to help the Grizzlies rest Marc Gasol quite a bit more, which will make them more dangerous when the playoffs roll around. He's a very good player whose absence hurt a ton last season. Bayless and Ellington are immediately the 2nd and 3rd best three point shooters on a team that was formerly dismal at it, and Tony Wroten could be helpful. They could still use a player like Gary Neal or James Jones, but the Grizzlies are deeper than they were last year and (theoretically) more healthy. They still won a pro-rated 51 games last year, despite having no real presence from Randolph all year, overplaying Marc Gasol to the point of exhaustion, and featuring one of the worst three point shooting offenses ever. With both of those improved, I think they're going to push the Spurs for the Division crown, get home court relatively comfortably, and stand a pretty good shot at making a Western Conference Finals. None of the top three teams match up with the Grizzlies particularly well, if they're healthy. I think -- at the end of the year -- they'll be one of the 5-7 best teams in the league, even if Randolph doesn't return to full form.

I'm not often right, but I think I was spot on here. And I think the Grizzlies fans should be incredibly proud of the team they put on the floor. Nobody has any reason to hang their heads. (Except the Spurs, if they manage to lose a series they were up 3-0 in. The Spurs would have reason to hang their heads in such a situation. Because my God. That would be brutal.) Still. It's the best team in franchise history by a country mile, and a few role-players are currently all that stand between the Grizzlies and perennial contention. Amazing team. All the respect I can muster. And a strong "hear hear" to Alex Dewey's post at Pounding the Rock yesterday, on this very subject.

• • •

QUESTION #15: If a basketball genie granted you the ability to learn one player's signature shot, what would you pick? (asked by Chris)

Manu Ginobili's step-back in-motion three point shot.

Can you imagine just draining that shot over and over again in pick-up games? EVERYONE WOULD HATE YOU.

If not that, then I'd like to learn Dirk's signature fade, because it's one of the most iconic shots ever and it's always a joy to deconstruct.

• • •

QUESTION #16: If you could be any NBA player, which would you choose to punch a Disney princess in the boobs and why? Also which Disney princess would you punch thanks. (asked by Kathryn)

... what?

• • •

QUESTION #17: please respond (asked by Kathryn)

... well, I guess I'd be Matt Bonner, because I can't imagine a Matt Bonner punch being super injurious and I don't like hurting people. Especially not princesses. And I guess I'd punch Snow White because, well... girl, what you doin eatin apples strange ladies give you the hell's wrong with you stop that now 'fore I gotta punch you.

• • •

QUESTION #18: If you could punch one NBA player in the face with no repercussions, who & why? Also, one front office person? (asked by _Michael Toney)_

WHY ALL THE PUNCHING THO?!?

Anyway, again, I don't really like punching people. But if I could deck one NBA player in the face with absolutely no repercussion, it would be Karl Malone. Because of that whole "abandoning his son" thing. And hiring a team of ruthless lawyers when the 13-year-old girl he impregnated pressed charges. And refusing to give any child support whatsoever, even when the family was asking for -- I kid you not -- $125 per week. A $100 million dollar basketball player who preaches the ideals of fiscal responsibility can't pay $125 a week, huh? Really? Runner-up would be Jason Kidd. Partly for the spousal abuse, but more recently for the whole "driving while falling-down drunk" thing. You're in your late thirties. Grow up. As for NBA front-office people, I'm going to cheat and pretend that team owners are front-office people. That way, I can punch Donald Sterling in the face, for reasons obvious to everyone.

• • •

QUESTION #19: If you could do Player Capsule Pluses for more players, with this season in hindsight, who would the players be? (asked by Leif Erikson)

Damian Lillard, Paul George, Stephen Curry, Marc Gasol, and J.R. Smith.

• • •

QUESTION #20: Can we discuss teams you thought over/under achieved and about how the Knicks didn't do either?__(asked by _Michael Toney___)

Sure, meet me at the bar tonight.

Oh, wait, you mean in the Q&A. Fine. One of the funny things about the over/under achieving structure is that it's beautifully binary -- you can't really straddle the line too much. You either overachieved or underachieved -- you don't just achieve, if you get my drift. Which is to say that I somewhat disagree with you regarding the Knicks. I think they overachieved, if only just. Yes, they didn't make a conference finals -- they still played above their general talent level. And barring some major moves, they just had the best season they're going to have in the next several. That said, there are two main teams that I'd tab as the BIGGEST over/under achievers in the NBA. These teams are:

• MOST OVERACHIEVING: The Houston Rockets. Really! Remember how I brought back that great quote that showed how right I was about the Memphis Grizzlies? Let me keep my head deflated by bringing back this phenomenal set of gems about the Houston Rockets, where I gave their case as the worst team in the league:

• "They have a questionably fitting roster with virtually nobody who's played together before." This is true. This also didn't make them bad, because those pieces actually fit very well in the end.

• "They have little depth outside their Nutcracker army of tweener forwards." Except for the part where their bench ended up being essential and their pickups like Greg Smith and Patrick Beverly totally tore up the world, I was right on with that one! (Note: That was sarcastic.)

• "Also, their coach is awful." I've been driving the "KEVIN MCHALE ACTUALLY LEGITIMATELY DESERVES COACH OF THE YEAR VOTES" bandwagon since midseason. Reason being that -- while he used to be a terrible coach -- McHale had a phenomenally good season and he did a great job with this roster. As much respect as I can possibly give to that man.

• MOST UNDERACHIEVING: The Los Angeles Lakers. Alright, I don't mean to be cruel to Laker fans when I point this out. I really don't. But a common trope among experienced NBA writers is to point out the difficulty of jumping to the level of a franchise-defining superstar from an all-star, and by extension, the difficulty of jumping to the level of a decade-defining superteam from merely a very good team. On the other side of the coin, the incredible disappointment of the Los Angeles Lakers -- a team that was commonly expected to challenge for win totals in the high sixties -- has to mean something a little bit more. This team was SUPPOSED to be a legendary tour-for-the-ages. It ended up being a creaky old compote with poorly-fitting pieces.

This is an interesting course of inquiry, so I may very well do a full post on this one. We'll see.

• • •

QUESTION #21: Would Scottie Pippen be the second best player in the league if he played today? (asked by _@2rollz___)

Dude, he's basically 50 years old. You are so rude. I can't even believe it.

• • •

QUESTION #22: What is the stupidest question you’d ever answer during a Q&A? (asked by Adam Koscielak)

Anything involving Mike Bibby.

• • •

QUESTION #23: When society ranks Tim Duncan, should he be a PF or C? (asked by Nick Sciria)

Honestly, it's an interesting query. A lot of people are starting to come around to the idea that Tim Duncan should be designated a "center" for the purposes of historical assessment, theorizing that Duncan played the role of center far more frequently than he did the role of power forward in his later years. I don't think it's quite that easy though. For the first five years of Duncan's career -- 1998 to 2003 -- Duncan played the power forward position for the vast majority of his minutes. Even afterwards, his tendency to float outside the paint on offense makes him something of a stretch five even if you do consider him a center. He would float between the big positions, guarding the opposing team's best big on a nightly basis no matter where that placed him in San Antonio's offensive and defensive schema. He was fluid, and he had the ability to transition.

Duncan has the post up chops of many of the historical greats at the center position, and he's a lot larger than most of his contemporaries at the power forward position... but he also has a dependable long-range shot and better passing than almost any center who ever came before him. And the whole of the evidence just ends up leading you in circles. Which is kind of the point. It's impossible to say for sure which arbitrary designation fits Duncan the best, because they both do. Far more reasonable to simply say that Tim Duncan is one of the greatest big men of all time and leave it at that. Roles have changed with the generations and the exact definition of both "power forward" and "center" are completely inscrutable at this point. All we can really agree on? Duncan's a big guy. Perhaps we should just call him that and call it a day.

• • •

QUESTION #24: When will the Spurs unleash Patty Mills and (more importantly) T-Mac? (asked by Martin)

The 2016 Olympics.

• • •

QUESTION #25: Are the Heat going to win it all? Yes, or yes? (asked by John)

Probably. I'd give them a 65% chance of winning the East and a 65% of beating the Spurs or the Grizzlies, myself. Easy favorites in both of the series, despite Indiana's persnickety nature and San Antonio's tremendous upside. That said, we tend to overrate statistical certainty in matters of sporting odds, so I'd like to calculate out something for you all. If the Heat are favored by ___% in each remaining series, what percentage of the time will they win a title?

• If the Heat are 50-50 to win each remaining series, they'll win the title 25% of the time.
• If the Heat are 60-40 to win each remaining series, they'll win the title 36% of the time.
• If the Heat are 70-30 to win each remaining series, they'll win the title 49% of the time.
• If the Heat are 80-20 to win each remaining series, they'll win the title 64% of the time.
• If the Heat are 90-10 to win each remaining series, they'll win the title 81% of the time.

So, to recap, in order for the Heat to be favored over the entire remaining field, you need to believe that the Heat are at least 70-30 odds to win each remaining series. Reasonable, but not quite what most people are generally thinking. Probability's a funny thing. The Pacers are hardly eliminated yet -- they're down 2-1 and have played Miami razor-close. The Spurs are starting to resemble a defensively-superior version of the offensive juggernaut that they were when entering game 3 of the 2012 Western Conference Finals. The Grizzlies -- if they make the Finals -- would have just dismantled the previously described team. Nothing's over 'til it's over, folks. And Heat fans (as well as Spurs fans who've started planning for the NBA Finals) should hold off the celebratory daps until such an end arrives.

Thanks for reading, folks.

Continue reading

This morning, a somewhat depressing story broke on the San Antonio Express-News. At least to me. That story, in short? Tim Duncan's getting a divorce. As Duncan is my favorite player ever, I know most of the outline of his personal story -- including the fact that he dated his wife (Amy Duncan) in college and married her in the early 2000s. Like most cases of college sweetheart engagement, I found it somewhat heartwarming. There's something neat about the idea of meeting your beloved in college. College is a time when high school kids evolve and develop into the sort of adults they want to be. Any relationship you carry on from college is bound to go through periods of intense change as both parties grow as individuals. The person you are in your early 20s bears scant resemblance to the person you are in your late 40s -- any collegiate relationship that can stand the test of time shows a beautiful propensity for change and adaptation. When one of those relationships ends, it makes me sad. That's the primary reason the story depresses me.

The other reason? The fact that it exists at all.

• • •

One of the content-related wrinkles to last year's Player Capsules that I found difficult to juggle was my personal desire to bring some of every player's personal background into the fold. There was never any doubt in my mind that I'd try to incorporate some manner of personal examination into every player's essay, but that doesn't mean it was always particularly easy. Some players keep to themselves and made it generally impossible to bring any manner of personal flair to the capsule, other players had so much depth that I felt any treatment whatsoever was hardly going to do them justice. One of my main goals in undertaking the series was to humanize and bring the readers "closer" to the players in whatever way I could -- either through a quirky examination of their game, a publicly released personal story or two from their lives, or a teammate's endorsement of how they were off the court.

Here's the thing. With a few notable exceptions of individual events that are court record, virtually every available story that I could point to for individual players were positive. That wasn't without reason. I found myself willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a dubiously sourced story that highlights positive character while demanding a higher burden of proof for a dubiously sourced story that highlights negative character. I don't think my reasoning was particularly out of line, either -- these guys are sports stars. They make millions of dollars playing a game. They make millions of dollars playing for fame. They make millions of dollars playing the hero. A sports star -- minor or not -- represents person who's signed up to become a distraction from our daily lives. They've put their job performance in the public eye and taken on a vastly different lifestyle than one I could ever imagine.

Critique of their game and their general play is quite in-line. Critique of their status as a human being, with perhaps a few notable exceptions (the Karl Malone children story is my go-to example as one that transcends sports and fundamentally disturbs me), serves only to undermine the entire point of a sports star. At least to me. They're a nice little distraction from the rigors of everyday life, a decent pastiche of a hero to young children and an escape for an overworked adult. Character assassination -- relative to the way I watch sports -- has always struck me as a little unnecessary. This story edges into that "character assassination" fold, if only just. The facts behind the case are slim, and the article generally reads as a speculatory whodunit. Reporting a divorce that appears to be in-process is hardly some character-impugning nightmare, but it is a generally unwanted incursion into an athlete's personal life. And it's rather obvious that it's unwanted -- why else would Duncan and his wife have set up the paperwork to include none of their actual names and as little identifying information as possible? Why is it necessary? Why do we need to know?

• • •

Thing is, there's nothing that can be reasonably done about it. And all things considered? It's probably apt coverage.

When complaining about the ongoing creep in mass media's engagement with our stars and heroes, it all usually comes back to a single issue: the smut sells. Anyone remember_ A Tale of Two Cities, the Charles Dickens classic? That's sold roughly 200 million copies over the course of its 154 year lifetime, making it the highest selling book of all time. But _People magazine -- one of the more popular of the world's Celebrity Gossip rags -- sells 43 million copies every week. Many people blame celebrity gossip and the dumbing-down of the world's press for the fall of the newspaper and the death of the printed word. I don't totally disagree, but that interpretation limits society's culpability for the long fall -- it's hard to defend the integrity of the reader without noting that the not-so-gradual shift towards paper-thin journalism and fluff was precipitated by the reading audience's purchasing preferences.

Most people balk at this, especially when they aren't the ones directly involved. "I don't buy gossip! I'm not at fault!" On some level, it's true. But mass price signaling has been around since the dawn of time and it's hardly going to go away now. And there's a certain amount of culpability inherent in all of us, even if we aren't the ones buying the gossip magazines and feeding the churning beast. I've never bought a gossip magazine in my life, but I've also never had a frank conversation with one of my gossip guzzling friends trying to get at the bottom of why exactly they get so heavily engaged in it. I've never really tried to dissuade them from feeding the beast, or taken any effort to understand why they and so many others are so inclined. I can work on interesting basketball writing until the cows come home, but I'm often genuinely stumped when I try to step back and understand exactly why Gothic Ginobili readers like what they like. There have been more than a few pieces I thought were awful but drove scores of traffic by being a bit controversial. There have been more than a few pieces I thought were really good that virtually nobody read. It's the nature of the beast.

And looking at it from a broader level, it's hardly as easy as blaming a rogue editor or an individual story-writer. I'm sure that -- on some level -- the editors that greenlight celebrity gossip and supervise the entrenchment of the rags are as confused as anyone as to why this sells. But that's the thing. It still does, whether we know why or not. When the NBA's Twitterati slam Bleacher Report's search engine optimization and ESPN's Heat Index and the over-focus on the NBA's star-studded teams, I find myself caught between two sides. On one hand, I tend to agree with the complaints. On the other, I find it difficult-to-impossible to blame the larger institutions who perpetuate the problem. It's not really their fault it sells. It's not ESPN's fault that screaming and ranting drive viewership over intelligent philosophical sports banter. It's not Bleacher Report's fault that mindless slideshows drive much more traffic than a loghorrea of intractable play diagrams and acronyms meant to share intelligent basketball strategems. One can't simply consider the editorial contributions to the problem in a vacuum -- if it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't be done. And it's profitable because, for reasons somewhat beyond my understanding, the sorts of people who follow sports (and politics, and music, and media in a general sense) tend to be more interested in controversy and screaming matches than they are in thoughtful meandering through a field of ripe ideas.

In a world where print media is dying and television is flagging fast, there are two things that virtually guarantee short-term profits and a semi-sustainable revenue stream: gossip and controversy. Pap, fluff, and reality TV abounds. As all-too-tuned-in NBA fans, we tend to criticize NBA general managers for focusing on the short term to save their jobs. But we also tend to feel a slight twinge of sympathy for them -- ownership demands dictate consideration of the short term over the more intelligent play of cultivating the long term. They're locked in a catch-22. And as much as I'd like to pin the blame on the producers of injurious, inexplicable fluff like the Duncan divorce story, I find myself feeling that same twinge of sympathy for the editors and the writers as I do for the errant GM. The stuff sells, and it'll keep them their jobs in an increasingly brutal media environment. Journalistic integrity and media ethics be damned -- sometimes you have to save your own skin. And stories like this, as bankrupt as they may seem to the outsider, go a long way towards doing that.

Why's that, though? Why does it sell? Wish I knew. Maybe someday I'll figure it out.

In the meantime, tune in to Gothic Ginobili tomorrow for an up-to-the-minute liveblog of my seventh divorce.

Continue reading

"In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them ... There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be _foreseen. ... Y_et this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil." -Bastiat

Seen: the audacious disappointment of the Lakers. Seen: the apparent 70-win season snapped ingraciously from Kobe's hands by the Fates and the limits of the human body. Seen: A cascade of endless injury. Seen: a story of merely-average-and-decent looking suddenly ruinous when sneaking a peek at its price and pathetic prospects. Seen: An almost-literal dismantling by the Spurs. Seen: A desperate reliance on Earl Clark and Metta World Peace and Steve Blake. Seen: Dwight at 50% just long enough for the season to be anything but uphill from the outset. Seen: Some of the worst defense ever, by some of the best players in league history. Seen: Spectacle, frustration, outrage, schadenfreude, spin cycle, eerie commiseration from the unlikeliest fanbase. And, seen: A titan's fall.

Unseen: Hints of a revolutionary offense for two or three possessions at a time, in the right phases of the moon. 1-4-5, 2-4-5, 1-5, 2-5, whispered like cheat codes. Unseen: An owner dying and his team, at its nadir, recovering and making a season respectable through it all. Unseen: a leader of offenses elevating himself to a leader of men, getting himself to the place he needed to be in a seeming blink of an eye, both humbly passive and fiercely aggressive, in the same possession, in the same sentence, Kobe expanding his essential game as surely and as potently as LeBron and Durant, until what is left is something new. Unseen: The epidurals, the labrum torn and the indefinite absences that lasted minutes, the back surgery. Plantar fasciitis. A fanbase learning and accepting the hard truths of anatomy in chagrined mornings after devastating losses. Unseen: the regret after the schadenfreude, where suddenly it stopped being funny that Andrew Goudelock had to start, that Kobe just had to play that 45th minute against Golden State, all of us knowing he'd be alright.

Seen: An organization that doesn't know how to hire a coach. Seen: A coach that doesn't know how to communicate to players. Seen: Kobe leading through conflict (with a strange degree of success), Pau and Nash relegated to the margins, Dwight a young man pushed to the front, whose voice has relevance only because his body and mind have talent. Seen: Players that couldn't adapt, players that could, players that didn't have any choices. Seen: Earl Clark. Remembered: An almost physical anger when Clark started playing, having assumed he was injured, given that Antawn Jamison was getting 20 guaranteed minutes despite having with the transition and half-court defense of a toddler. Seen: A seemingly endless rotation of diminishing returns on number of roster spots. Seen: Role players that never embarrassed the Lakers to play, despite not really being able to play. Seen: Chris Duhon.

Unseen: The dismal bench of the post-Jackson years, having nearly the same problems. Unseen: Mike Brown being universally respected as a man, but in the end not quite commanding the full attention of players or the organization. Unseen: Phil Jackson barely able to walk, touted as a franchise savior for players that could barely lift their arms. Unseen: The subtle decay of age, before or after any trades. Unseen: Andrew Bynum, Unseen (and still an interesting idea): The Princeton offense. Mike Brown with a healthy team.

Unseen: The Lakers problems did not begin this year. Unseen: The Lakers have never made risk-free moves, but have always simply aggregated wise strategic decisions from a position of power as a wealthy, potent larger market. Unseen: Andrew Bynum, for months and longer at a time would sit in the several years before his trade to Philly. Unseen: Andrew Bynum being dominated by Dwight Howard as a prospect from floor to ceiling to upside to downside, even when the NBA collectively exempted him from the 3-second rule on both ends and called half the fouls against Dwight Howard. Unseen: The road not taken, for, as inevitable as it seems, the Lakers could have said "no" to Dwight Howard and Steve Nash last summer. They said yes, because the risks of their status quo were far worse than the risks of their new acquisitions. The Lakers made the right choice time after time, and only bad luck and calculated risk worked against them.

Unseen: Kobe's health problems aggregating every season, far beyond pain and fatigue. Unseen: That the perpetual battle of Kobe against injury was not merely a battle against pain but a battle against decay, against time, against his own apparent limitations as a leader. A losing battle, except on that last count.

Seen: That old cliche "heart of a champion" inasmuch as a seemingly sandbagging defense and an otherworldly collection of talent that dies in the first round can be said to have "heart". The Lakers fought. I saw them. They didn't play possessions; they played games. They were tired and they were banged-up and they were seriously injured. More bone against bone than a butcher shop. And they fought. This could have been a 30 win season that everyone decided to recuperate. But for pride, personal pride and the pride of a franchise, and an asymptotically fading hope that they always seem to stave off for another day, every day, the Lakers knew it was too important, and played. They showed professionalism and class and never acted like they were entitled to a win. They had a gameplan, and they executed it, but horror of horrors, irony of ironies, they did not have the personnel.

They were never out of any game nor could they ever seem to get out of the woods, in a game or in the season. They could have done some damage if more guys were healthier, earlier. Every game seemingly came down to a random like Gerald Henderson missing a tip-in or a tricky Philadelphia team finding a mysteriously truck-sized hole on the interior. I rooted for them to lose, up to the last night of the season, but I also wanted to see their opponents win, if that makes sense, and in the end I finally gave up on rooting for the mediocre and disappointing Jazz over the mediocre and fascinating Lakers. I graduated from hater to... well, still, screw the Lakers, but still... there are things that are seen and unseen about the Lakers that are important to the basketball culture, and this season was a unique look at some of the unseen things - the media cycle really causing the problems as much as it was expressing real problems. Unseen: How important the team is for the game when they're relevant and the chaos that ensued when they weren't. Unseen (and sickening): Every Laker's injuries being used to cast doubt on all his previous accomplishments. I didn't really understand the cable deals and the historical relationship that NBA fans have with the Lakers - the weird 30-faced die all of whose faces read "Beat LA" except one that keeps getting break after break and finally lost more than anyone could have known. I got to see who in the media was actually watching the games. Hint: You have an excuse not to watch the Spurs; you don't have an excuse for the Lakers. I got to see the strengths and weaknesses of every player.

The Lakers had the most interesting season of all the teams this season, and it was not because of hype. No, the Lakers, traditionally they of the limelight and the hype and the spin cycle, played a season that was almost scarily substantive, in which the seen could not hide from the unseen, and in which the unseen haunted every positive moment and tempered every negative moment. Championship runs are sometimes preordained as the world collapses around the team, leaving them only to hold serve and survive. Fun seasons for would-be contenders are derailed by a single injury or a single rotten break, and we laugh sadly about the injury or break and get back to talking about the team's wondrous passing or defense. And we remember these championship and also-ran seasons and talk about them with animation and pride as fans. The Lakers this year weren't a team to talk about with animation. Sure, you could talk about them with the grim certainty of time and the fascinating uncertainty of circumstance, but it's hard to get excited about that. But you could talk about them with pride, and, what's more, give them this: At all times ever-present for the Lakers were distant hope for a title and distant fear of a terrible injury. When the seen and unseen are standing as brothers in the same room, can any dream or catastrophic nightmare that we utter in confidence ever be so justified?

Continue reading

As Kobe Bryant took his fateful final step and hobbled off the court with a grimace and a quieted crowd, visions of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid loomed over the proceedings. Because, let's face it -- they never had a chance. You know the apocryphal story of the two old western outlaws. Everyone does. And most people know the film, too, where the two friends gamble with fate all throughout the duration. They endure close call after close call, openly debating whether to hang up their guns or keep searching for a final heist to end it all. They go straight, then they don't. You CAN'T just go straight after what they did. You think you can evade that world, but you simply can't. The film fools some into thinking they'll find their eternal idylls, but that was never in the cards. Never is, really.

In the end, it was never some incredible feat that had them knocking on death's door. It was the tiniest mistake. The most imperceptible setback could ruin them -- and it did. What finally brought them down was the most innocuous heist of all time, and a detail they simply couldn't have seen coming. A small child recognizes the brand on their mule, and the Bolivian police force isn't about to let the two men go. They go out in a blaze of glory, shining brightest before their shortened last breath. The outlaws spent the whole movie fleeing from the stark inevitability of consequence. But that mistakes the moral of the movie -- the two were cornered from the moment they started the grind.

For a variety of self-evident and not-so-self-evident reasons, Bryant's injury brought me back to that film's conclusion. That same feeling of disturbing inevitability fell over the proceedings, despite the nature of the pain. Not a single doctor blames Bryant's insane minutes total, or the irresponsibility of keeping Bryant in the game after his numerous contusions and scary falls. But SOMETHING was going to happen. A 34-year-old player simply can't play 48 minutes a game to close a season. There was going to be a break, a strain, a pop. And it wasn't going to be pretty. Degradation by aging is inevitability -- by cheating it, you evoke Death's wrath and risk a more sudden and overwhelming pain than you'd have experienced if you simply tamped it down over time.

But Bryant doesn't seem the type who simply sees fit to fade away. Not to me. He's the Butch Cassidy player. If everyone goes out, they'll go out -- Bryant will go out in a blaze of flaming glory, challenging Death to a tête-à-tête on his field of battle. "Just TRY and strike me down. Just TRY and injure me. I'll come back. I'll keep fighting." And so it has been -- Kobe Bryant has cheated Death. He's put off his career's closing act as long as he possibly can, putting up the best offensive season of his career at an age where the superstars cease to be super. And when he returns from this injury, he'll continue to do so, for a time.

Bryant's career is mortal. It's quite the depressing reminder -- everything ends.

• • •

Kobe Bryant's injury causes us to think back on what he accomplished this season. Spoiler alert -- he accomplished a lot. The superlatives that can be applied to the severity of the L.A.'s' disappointment can be applied in the inverse to Bryant's incredible season. He was phenomenal. As the team concept of the "72-win Lakers" crumbled around him, Bryant leaned more than he ever did before on his court vision and applied a new devotion to his potential as off-ball threat. He lowered his usage to accommodate L.A.'s ever-shifting roster of refuse and injured stars. His defense was awful, and that must be noted, but one can't look away from what Bryant accomplished on the offensive end of the floor. One could make an argument that Kobe's 2013 season was the best offensive season of his career. It certainly isn't that far off.

The 2013 regular season, despite Kobe's triumphs, was not about Kobe. It was about LeBron James and Kevin Durant, the two effortlessly dominant players that look set to run things around here for the next several years. It was about a two-city cage match for a rudderless franchise, with two cities prostrate before the grace of Stern and Silver in a gasping lunge for a team to call their own. It was about win streaks and dominance. It was about tanking and cowardice. It was about the people that weave the tapestry of this wonderful league, and the personalities that make the game a joy. As it always is, and always will be.

Yet, Kobe Bryant's injury -- grisly though it may be -- casts another light. A further purpose to the season, and something I can't ignore. It speaks to the old souls of the NBA, the dominant renaissance players who are simply destroying the league in their waning years. You have Bryant, who dominated in a new way and answered his critics like never before. You have Tim Duncan, obliterating players with dunks that fans thought were gone a decade ago and leading a top-3 defense. Dirk Nowitzki battled back from injury upon injury, returning to his title-team form and very nearly leading his prized franchise back from the brink. Kevin Garnett remains, like clockwork, a strong contender for the best defender in the league. Ray Allen, Manu Ginobili, Andre Miller -- they aren't dead yet, and each still had ample flashes of their former glory.

Which is to say that alongside all those other factors that defined the season, we had one further -- the old guys got it done. They defied age, by and large, and burnished their resumes with the kinds of seasons we never thought they had in them. And Kobe's injury casts a pall on the proceedings, as we realize the sad undercurrent to this unexpected brilliance of the relative archaic. These players -- these invincible old souls with their ageless wonder and their timeless legend -- are mortal. And whether they get struck down by a freak injury or a sudden snap, Father Time goes undefeated. Even superhumans like Kobe can get struck down without warning.

• • •

The horrific scene in Boston last Tuesday reminded us of several contradictory things. It reminded all of us of the damage wrought when fundamentally awful people enact their darkest desires. It reminded us of the horrors that some see fit to indiscriminately unleash. The worst dregs of society pay no quarter to reason or empathy. They destroy and they ravage and cause us to question humanity. There is nothing positive about the villains who decided to turn the pride of Boston into their own warped fantasies of destruction and misery.

There is no moral to their actions. But there was a moral to the reactions.

All tragedy reminds us of the kindness in the heart of strangers. The same race that produces the horrors who blow up the innocent is the same race that produces the heroes who, upon hearing and seeing the explosions, run directly towards the flames to help the victims. The same race that produces the humorless cretins who joke about the tragedy and "push the line" to try and turn the deaths into a sick joke was the same race that produced the marathon runners who, upon reaching the finish line, ran to the hospital and gave blood to fill the blood banks. The same race that produces a single killer produces a dozen healers, amped to fix the wrongs wrought by the thugs who cause these sorts of tragedies.

In a hopeless tragedy, there remains proof of a fundamental good in the hearts of many. And that counts for something. So, too, does the tertiary lessons of a tragedy. What's really important? What matters, in the grand scheme of things? For the first time in NBA history, the league cancelled a game that will never be made up. Boston and Indiana were set to play a meaningless late-season scuffle. The league axed it, and openly announced that it wouldn't be made up. The Pacers and the Celtics will play 81 games this season, for the first time ever. And all of us -- from the devoted fan to the front-row-ticket-holder -- nod in assent.

Because at the end of the day, basketball is an escape. It is an expensive facsimile of life, a technicolor television show with heroes and villains and good people all around us. It comes second to life, and it comes second to repairing a broken city. In our fandom and our devotion, we oftentimes find ourselves lost in the gravity of a basketball tragedy. Basketball loss is not real loss, no matter how strongly we feel it in the core of our fandom. We lose sight of the human core of the game we love. And we chance to forget the most necessary saving grace of all.

In this case, it's a simple three words: Kobe Bryant lives.

• • •

Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, Manu Ginobili. All of them will be gone one day, and one relatively soon. Yet here they are, the stage producers in a final one-act drama. They're dazzling and mystifying us all once again. And like the greatest films and screenwriters, they've given us no indication of when -- or where -- they'll end the streak and fall for good. Kobe has suffered a setback, and he'll likely return to the stage a lesser performer. But he will still return, and more importantly?

He'll still be there to watch the next act.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were never to know of the ubiquity of their story. They were as any old outlaws in their day, with knowledge of their passing fame but no awareness of their future reputation. The inverse of this lies at the heart of what may be the greatest saving grace of becoming a sporting legend. After your career draws to a close, and the curtain falls? You can sit back and watch as your legend takes shape and form. Michael Jordan dominated the league for over a decade, and retired having answered every critic he possibly could. And now, Jordan lives. He lives on to enjoy his reign as the greatest player to ever play the game. He watches as player upon player takes him as an idol, basing their games on the shadows he left behind.

And so it will be with today's NBA legends, as they exit the stage and move to their dens and their futures. They too will watch as the players of tomorrow take their games as gospel. Basketball death bears little resemblance to a person's true death -- it is the death of a hobby, and the death of a talent. But it is just as pressingly the birth of a retired benefactor, the start of a new journey for the player and the fans who adore him. A player hangs up their Jordans, their fortunes and legacies replete in their wake, and gets to watch their devotees defend their honor. The depression and the horror of watching our favorite players break down and suffer is deep, because a sport close to the vest can touch the soul. It is our gift and our curse, and it's part of what makes following professional sports so engaging -- it is all too human to feel pain. To care is to hurt.

But there are worse things in life than a retired player getting to watch their legacy evolve in real time. There are worse things in life than one's favorite sports stars entering the next stage in a life of purpose and luxury. And it holds true to perhaps the greatest gift in sports -- even as a player ceases to matter in present-tense of the game that they love, their last blaze of glory in the sport they love is never quite the end of a fulfilling and satisfying life. Children. New jobs. New challenges. Our sporting heroes do not die, not yet -- they merely drive upon a new road. Replete with personal purpose, and the promise of an unknown tomorrow.

And thank God for that.

Continue reading

Hey, folks. In our stable of rippling thoroughbred writers, we've managed to accumulate four writers whose names begin with "A." It's hard to fashion a feature out of the first letter of someone's name, though. We've also managed to accumulate two San Antonio Spurs fans and one Oklahoma City Thunder fan. Fitting with that, after every Thunder/Spurs game for the rest of eternity, the powers that be at Gothic Ginobili ... er, me ... will throw our three SAS/OKC rooting authors in the sarlaac pit to talk about the game and the matchup, all while being slowly digested by the most confusing creature George Lucas ever imagined. Today's broader topic: the April 4th, 2013 matchup in the Oklahoma City Thunderdome.

First question isn't a question. It's just a quote and a statement. "Home-court advantage mattered more last year because the Spurs were on a 20-game win streak." That was an actual thing Reggie Miller said on live television. No moral.

Alex Dewey: I agree with that. It makes perfect sense to me.

Jacob Harmon: What is he even saying there?

Alex Dewey: Oh, wait. Hold on. I'm that guy from Memento, I forgot.

Aaron McGuire: I have absolutely no idea. I mostly just noted it down it so we could gawk at it. What could he possibly be saying? What could that possibly mean?

Jacob Harmon: Who did it matter more to? The Spurs? The Thunder? I... I don't know.

Aaron McGuire: Is it... like... "the Spurs were on a 20 game winning streak therefore home court was... less important... because... they were 20-0 in the streak, and they won everywhere. The Thunder didn't care about home court advantage because the Spurs were 20-0 during the streak but 0-4 afterwards. Professional analyst, Reggie Miller, reporting for duty."

Jacob Harmon: Did you hear him say "Tim Duncan looking for the foul on the block by Tim Duncan"? Reggie's observations come from a place outside time and space, man.

Aaron McGuire: Fair.

Alex Dewey: Look, Aaron. You're being such a jerk about this. I'll have you know, Reggie was using an advanced maximum likelihood estimator with some factor analysis. He reasoned backwards from the 20-game winning streak and noticed that 10 of those came in the playoffs and 10 came in the regular season, therefore, home court was not the dominant factor in the Spurs winning streak.

Aaron McGuire: Haha, look at Dewey, with his nerd-rat pocket square statistics.

Alex Dewey: Real talk, though -- was Reggie Miller smoking a tailpipe blunt filled with neurotoxins on-air?

Aaron McGuire: That seems unlikely. Anyway, one last thing that has to be noted before we stop talking about Reggie. "MOMMY HAS SOMETHING FOR DADDY TO DO" has to rank among the worst dunk calls in the history of the sport, doesn't it? It just... it didn't make sense in the moment, and even afterwards, there was a lot of innuendo and sketchiness in that commercial in general.

Jacob Harmon: I felt the gutter thing was really meta. The innuendo is that this kid's mom is about to take Kevin Durant to town, then it turns out she just wants him to do chores. But he's cleaning the gutters, the implication being that the viewer's head is in the gutter for thinking that there was a sexual connotation to the "mommy has something for daddy to do" line. Was this obvious, or am I a genius?

Aaron McGuire: I thought something roughly similar when I first saw the commercial, but I never stated it as eloquently. Respect. Still, I'm struggling to think of any dunk calls that would be worse than that in terms of being creepy and out of place. Best I can think of are some don't-you-dare ones, like "BOOM GOES THE BOMB" in OKC or "THE JET PLANE HAS CRASHED INTO THE BUILDING" if Jason Terry hits a game-winning three in New York. Just these horribly offensive wastes of nature. That's how that dunk call struck me, albeit in a much less offensive-to-my-core-nature way. Come on, Reggie. Pull it together. Anyway. NEXT QUESTION, FOLKS.

• • •

Actual basketball analysis this time. Name one thing you saw in this game that isn't going to happen if these two teams meet again.

Jacob Harmon: I don't predict Derek Fisher being the Thunder's third-leading scorer again. Ever, really, but certainly not in a playoff series. That was insane. And I don't expect the Spurs offense to be so disjointed if either Manu or Parker gets back to a decent facsimile of their full form.

Alex Dewey: Tony Parker isn't missing three straight chippies again. Alternatively, the Thunder letting the Spurs back in it while the Spurs are playing that terribly.

Aaron McGuire: Mine's more of an anti-Spurs omen, unfortunately, but it has to be said. The Spurs are never ever going to shoot more free throws than OKC in OKC. Ever again. Period.The Spurs defense did a great job of defending without fouling, I felt, but the Thunder are built to go to the line. They're programmed to go to the line. And even when your team schemes them perfectly? They still go to the line. They're eldritch. That's simply not going to happen, and it's unfortunate for San Antonio that they were able to execute their defensive game plan really well and still come up so short.

Alex Dewey: True point.

Jacob Harmon: I'd agree with that. I don't remember the last time OKC spent so little time at the line.

Aaron McGuire: There's a good reason you don't remember it. The last time the Thunder shot 13 or fewer free throws was in a game against the Bulls... on January 4th, 2010.

Jacob Harmon: AHAHAHA JESUS

Aaron McGuire: And that one was on the road. Their last home game where they shot 13 or fewer free throws was April 10th, 2009. All this is to say I feel like I can be reasonably confident that the Thunder won't be shooting 13 or fewer free throws in the playoffs any time soon, even if the Spurs continue to defend them so well. Will they face a Spurs team with a 1-6 Tony Parker? Not in the playoffs this year, because if Tony's playing that badly, the Spurs won't make the conference finals. But the Spurs are going to have to live with the fact that the Thunder will inevitably be at the line more than they were tonight. And their offense really needs to step up to match that. Anyway. Next question.

• • •

Name one thing you hadn't thought of going into the game that could definitely swing a playoff game.

Aaron McGuire: Tony Parker getting injured, or Kawhi Leonard having a breakout series.

Jacob Harmon: Besides the obvious things, like "no Tony or Manu" or "Fisher getting hot from three"... I'd go with Kawhi giving KD some real problems. That surprised me.

Alex Dewey: I was thinking the opposite thing, actually -- that Kevin Durant could kill the Spurs offense if he keyed in defensively against Kawhi Leonard. Kawhi isn't a distributor like Manu or Tony, but he's grown to become a vital part of the Spurs offense. Doesn't mean he's not a heck of a lot smaller than Durant, and despite Kawhi's amazing game, there were times when Durant's length seemed to bother him a bit and it stagnated the Spurs offense.

Aaron McGuire: That might get fixed when Tony gets back, but it's a good point.

Alex Dewey: True.

Aaron McGuire: It didn't swing this game, but in a game where Fisher doesn't make 6 of 8 shots, it could've swung it -- Kevin Martin looked straight-up terrible against the Spurs. He's way less versatile than Harden is, and if this is the kind of ball he's going to play in the playoffs, he'll be worse than useless.

Jacob Harmon: I'm with you on that. He's been the biggest question mark all season and that hasn't changed. He's efficient as all get-out, but like... he's been incredibly inconsistent. Some people are saying it's because Westbrook and Durant don't get him the ball, but it's really not. He just looks completely lost half the time, even when he gets his.

Alex Dewey: Yeah. Dude doesn't have the offensive creativity or athleticism of a James Harden. Makes me think he'd be potentially dominated in a series against any team with a wealth of perimeter stoppers.

Aaron McGuire: Doesn't need to be a stopper. Just someone who gets close and puts fear in his eyes. Anyway. Net result is you have this player who's incredibly efficient, but whose teams rarely make the playoffs and who -- at least now -- is so far down the food chain that teams don't put an excess of energy into scouting him like they do with Oklahoma City's big three. In a playoff series, though? The other teams key in on everything. And that may make him way less useful.

Alex Dewey: I've been saying this since October! Remember Magic Bonner?

Aaron McGuire: Yes.

Jacob Harmon: Ibaka is the X-Factor. I worry more about those games where nobody looks for him than all the ones people gripe about where Martin gets left out. He's more important on offense AND defense. We've lost so many games where Ibaka leaks out, gets to his spots, sneaks open, puts his hands out for an open jumper he's automatic with... and just gets ignored. Completely and totally ignored. And his rebounding is inconsistent. It can be the difference between a dominant performance and a surprise upset.

Aaron McGuire: That inconsistency is huge. During OKC's big run to pull away in the first half, Ibaka had something like 6 rebounds. But during all of the Spurs runs, Kawhi Leonard would box him out and snag rebounds over him. It was a tale of two teams when Ibaka's rebounding was on and off. Ibaka shouldn't have trouble rebounding over Kawhi Leonard, much as I love the kid. He outweighs him by Ten Mo Williamses, the traditional unit of weight in the NBA. Next question.

• • •

Russell Westbrook has never missed a game in his NBA career. Please advise.

Alex Dewey: ...

Jacob Harmon: Russell Westbrook is a cyborg.

Aaron McGuire: Russell Westborg? Also, let's be clear -- without Westbrook, the Thunder lose this game badly. He dominated it.

Jacob Harmon: A lot of people think that fact is brought up constantly. I don't think it's mentioned enough.

Alex Dewey: ...

Aaron McGuire: It really isn't. No other elite point guard does that. Shouldn't he get a pass, sometimes, for having a bad game where he makes the court? Elite point guards seem to average, like, 70 games per season. Tops. He's always there. Isn't a 50% Westbrook better than one of those nights when Deron Williams leaves the work to New Jersey's third string, or Kyrie Irving leaves the work to Cleveland's anything-but-him string? It's HUGE.

Jacob Harmon: Exactly! How in God's name do you play at his level -- and specifically, the way he plays -- and NEVER miss a game or get hurt? It's not like he doesn't take hits. He takes falls that would put mortals in stretchers.

Alex Dewey: Well, uh... I um... I bet he misses a ton of games at... making... shots? I can't even believe the premise of the question. You're lying. This is a ruse. It's a troll you've cooperated on to expose my ignorance. There's no way Westbrook hasn't missed any games. That's impossible. Next question.

Jacob Harmon: No, it's true. Not in high school, not in college, not in the NBA. He's a robot.

Aaron McGuire: Dewey, click on this and look at his games played by season. I dare you.

Alex Dewey: ... DAMN, homie. Please advise. I scared. I'm shook.

Jacob Harmon: Honest fact and possible emotion admission from an off-the-reservation Thunder fan: I've felt like Westbrook has dominated this Thunder team this season. I find myself feeling he's "the guy" offensively more than Kevin Durant, nearly every night.

Aaron McGuire: While I instinctively disagree because I'm not Westbrook's biggest proponent, and I haven't seen every Thunder game this season... I can't disagree completely. I'm one of the leading proponents of the "LeBron isn't auto-MVP" argument in Durant's favor, but there have DEFINITELY been games that I've felt that Westbrook has been the more important star when you watch the Thunder get into their sets and move the ball. Durant's efficiency has come coupled with a drop in usage. Westbrook's has stayed flat. Westbrook handles the ball more and Durant's major flaw remains that he's arguably the worst elite scorer in the league at simply getting open to receive a pass. It's frustrating.

Alex Dewey: That's one reason that the Durant-for-MVP case never felt quite right to me.

Jacob Harmon: Possible sacrilege -- I've had a lot of trouble getting really enthused about Durant's efficiency feat this season. It's a really eye-test sort of thing to say, but I've felt he's been really unreliable this year. Scoring to the handle. ESPECIALLY the handle. I expect him to lose the ball every time he puts it down. Maybe that's just an emotional thing -- he hit a ton of huge shots last season that could be serendipitous. But I've trusted Westbrook more this year. And I understand saying this makes me very weird.

Aaron McGuire: This year's Thunder team demonstrates a funny truth about the usage/efficiency tradeoff. When a crazy-nuts scoring talent like Kevin Durant lowers his usage and has a subsequent increase in efficiency, people want him to use the ball more with the idea that he'll continue shooting the same way rather than revert to his prior form. Westbrook maintaining his usage ends up looking like he's cheating the fans, even though Durant returning to his former usage would probably lead to a return to his old efficiency. It's a catch-22 for Westbrook.

Jacob Harmon: Otherwise known as the ever-popular "if Westbrook would pass more, Durant could score infinite points per game" theory.

Alex Dewey: It's ironic because that theory is low-key opposite of the discourse 10 years prior. The narrative has shifted from Jordan to LeBron as the basketball ideal, except for crunch time and who hits the "big" shots. Probably an overstatement, but still -- we lionize Durant's 50-40-90 over the equally insane feat of playing every game ever and shooting like his life depended on it with slightly worse efficiency. I wonder if he'll always be relegated to that Dirk status of needing a perfect complement in order to have a chance at a title at all, now that Harden is gone.

Jacob Harmon: ...

Aaron McGuire: ...

Alex Dewey: Well OK that wa--...

Aaron McGuire: That's a Sean Elliot-level overstatement. OKC's point differential this year is nearly +10. They're winning games -- on average -- by blowout margins. This team is really really good. They have more than just a "chance" at a title. That's a clown statement, bro. Come on.

Alex Dewey: Yeah, that was the textual equivalent of a shot that felt bad coming off my hands.

Jacob Harmon: Yeah. Numbers-wise, the Thunder are a great team. There are just questions. There are always questions.

Alex Dewey: OK, fair. My main point was that Westbrook -- contrary to the prevailing view -- actually IS that perfect complement. He uses the possessions Durant can't get open for. He elevates Durant and fills in his weaknesses, and visa versa.

• • •

"If the Thunder lose the first round, _______ will be responsible for it." and "If the Spurs lose in the first round, _____ will be responsible for it."

Alex Dewey: Two questions, one answer. Rockets.

Aaron McGuire: Note -- doesn't have to be a team. Can be a player.

Jacob Harmon: The first round matchup I most want to see as a Thunder fan is Houston, but I don't think they've got a snowball's chance in hell of winning it. So that's out. Assuming the 8th seed is the Lakers, which I do? I mean... crap, man. I don't know.

Aaron McGuire: My answers would be Ibaka/Martin and Tony Parker, respectively. I can see scenarios playing out where Ibaka gets flustered by a rejuvenated Howard/Gasol pairing or overwhelmed playing center against Asik in an absolute worst case scenario. Or, as we discussed earlier, simply ignored despite being one of OKC's biggest matchup advantages against any of the low-seed teams. Martin... we talked about. I think him fading would hurt the Thunder a lot more than most people think -- he's important to them. As for Parker, when he has a "bad Tony" game, the Spurs can get beaten by anyone. Regardless of who else is on the court. He makes the Spurs offense coherent. The days of perfect pinpoint offensive execution are long gone -- the Spurs haven't looked like that since December, and I doubt it's coming back this season. They need Parker playing well to bring naught more than a vestige of order to the offense now that their Duncan/Splitter defense has evolved into an elite crew. Without him? Life's tough.

Jacob Harmon: Absolutely no doubt that Ibaka can't handle a rejuvenated Gasol/Howard. Thing is, I don't see any rejuvenation in their future. Between him, Perkins, and Collison? They haven't had much trouble all season. I don't think anyone should be scared of the Lakers. This question is tough for me, because I don't think either team CAN lose in the first round. But I'd consider picking the Rockets to steal a few games, simply because of Harden.

Aaron McGuire: The Rockets are credible nightmare fuel simply due to their overreliance on threes. They could get swept if they have a bad series from behind the arc, but get hot for a few games? They'll steal more than their fair share and they'll make it a hard fought series. Period.

Alex Dewey: Same with the Warriors.

Aaron McGuire: I think they're a worse team than the Rockets, but fair point. Anyways. One last thing...

• • •

_Alex Dewey _made this image tonight. Respond.

Jacob Harmon: What is this. Why am I looking at Matt Moore. What.

Alex Dewey: Yep.

Aaron McGuire: Dewey why.

Alex Dewey: Yep.

Aaron McGuire: Also, one tertiary question -- why in God's name do you use "puu.sh" for everything?

Alex Dewey: It's really cool, you just press CTRL-SHIFT-F4 and it lets you take a screenshot and then you puu.sh it to the server.

Jacob Harmon: Unh. Puu.sh it. Puu.sh it good.

Alex Dewey: Puu.sh it real good now.

Aaron McGuire: ... Forget I asked. Readers, these are my writers.

Continue reading

Last night's contest between the Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Lakers pitted against one another two disappointing teams fighting for their rapidly fading dreams. On one side, you had L.A.'s wayward title aspirants -- once ballyhooed as the greatest collection of talent since the 1996 Chicago Bulls, the end result seems to have erred on the side of the 2011 Boston Red Sox. Lots of glitter, lack of grit. Lots of glamor, lack of glory. Et cetera, et cetera. The Lakers entered the season with a singular dream: that of a dominant title-winning season, coupling a return to glory for Kobe and Pau with a late-career sparkle for Steve Nash and the first of many for their mercurial center.

Now, of course, they're scrambling to make the playoffs.

As for the Mavericks? Dominance was never in the cards for this Dallas team. They started the season without their centerpiece and featured a cobbled together roster of ancients and refuse, one of the greatest challenges of Carlisle's career as a coach. The goal wasn't a title, even if that would've been wonderful. The goal was to keep an even keel and show the world that the Mavericks don't back down. The goal was a playoff team. And not just that, perhaps, but a strong one that pushes a higher seed and provides the basis for Dirk's future. The tertiary lights behind a future title team. Home court? Inconceivable. But stealing home court? Perceptible, with Dirk's quintessence and possible throwback years from the likes of Carter, Brand, and Marion.

Alas, it was not to be. The Mavericks entered the year without Dirk Nowitzki, which wasn't their death knell; all things considered, their opening schedule was astonishingly easy and gave them the chance to tread water. And they did tread, standing at a respectable 7-9 at the dawn of December. Originally, we thought Dirk would be back then. A return just as the schedule started to get rough. But that didn't happen. Dirk's rehab took just a few weeks too long, and his original on-court manifestation was balky at best and depressing at worst. The Mavericks were 12-15 when Dirk returned, but Dirk wasn't quite Dirk yet -- he returned to the court in a 38-point loss to his team's bitter rivals, and the Mavericks lost 8 of the first 9 games Dirk played in. Thirteen wins to twenty three losses. Ten games under 0.500 -- it was a dismal record, one that Dirk Nowitzki had never seen before this season. The dream appeared to be dead. The playoffs were a distant, bitter memory in a season gone completely awry.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obsolescence. The Mavericks -- those downtrodden, downbeat Mavericks -- finally began to win again. It was slow at first. An overtime win against the Kings, a four game streak, a three game streak. Nothing world-breaking, nothing astonishing. In a season of 15-game win streaks and 55 win five seeds, nothing that moved the radar. But, life support or not, the dream wasn't quite dead yet. All of the sudden, after going ten games under 0.500, the Mavericks were 22-13... with four heartbreaking losses by 3 points or less in the stretch. They were virtually tied for the 9-spot. They were knocking at the door. Dirk was magnificent, although the team had no idea how to get him the ball. The defense was shaky, but Marion and Brand did just enough to pull out the wins. Players were in-and-out, but Carlisle was putting together a rotation again. The door was open, and in one fateful night, they had the opportunity to wrest it ajar and pronounce their arrival to the world.

The final margin -- that grisly 20-point margin -- looks rough. But it wasn't quite as rough as one would think. This wasn't a laugher. It goes down in the record books as a 20-point blowout, and the Mavericks season may go down in the record books as a generally awful sub-0.500 affair. But that understates the torment for the fans and the team and the general public. This uneven, unlucky season was much more painful than a garden variety blowout.

Consider the turn of events that decided the game. With 4:20 left to play, the Mavericks were within 7 points. Dirk Nowitzki had just entered the game, and Dwight Howard was headed to the line. And Dwight missed both! But Earl Clark, everyone's least likely Laker mainstay at the start of the season, corralled the offensive rebound and dished to Pau Gasol for an easy two. Suddenly, it was a ten point game. Carlisle drew up a play for a Nowitzki three. Clank. The Mavericks foul Dwight Howard, praying for the seemingly inevitable misses. He makes 1-of-2, but Dirk misses another three. Another Howard foul, which is again the right move -- probabilistically, Howard should miss 1-of-2, and it should remain a game. But he doesn't give away the points -- this time he makes them both. The Mavericks rush their next possession and end it with an awkward Vince Carter two. Clank. Another Howard foul, another 2-for-2 trip. Nowitzki gets fouled himself, but probability mocks these Mavericks -- Dirk goes 0-for-2, as Howard makes another 1-for-2 on the next possession. And then, to cap things off, Kobe Bryant drains a pretty two pointer with 1:46 left to play. The once-surmountable lead is now 19 points strong, and the game is over.

There will be no miracles. There will be no comebacks. These merry, plucky, bearded Mavericks trudge to the bench as Sacre, Dentmon, and Morrow take the court to play out the string. And as a proud Dirk Nowitzki and the remnants of one of the league's most impressive champions watch their season slip away in a single game, everyone's left wondering what might have been. Without Dirk's injury, do these Mavericks -- they of a 22-14 record with a healthy Dirk, I might remind -- challenge for the 5 seed? These Mavericks were beset by bad luck from the get-go, and over the course of the season, they've lost a startling 12 games by five points or less. For comparison, Golden State lost only 4 such games. Houston? Only 7. Sometimes, the chips don't fall. You don't hit your straight. You're one roll short.

On a warm spring night in the City of Angels, two dreams met on the field of battle. One left bolstered -- the other, defeated. The Los Angeles Lakers still have their unlikely title shot -- their flagging, fading, sputtering title shot. It's a shadow of expectations, certainly, but the expectations were too high to begin with. They've come accustomed to their new reality, and they're persevering in the face of adversity. But they're also one more thing, perhaps more important than anything else. They're lucky, once again.

The Mavericks are not. And as we bid adieu to the 2013 Dallas Mavericks, we happen upon their eulogy.

"You were alright, but you just weren't lucky."

Continue reading

I didn't watch the Portland meltdown live. No, I chose to watch it. I chose to pull up League Pass and watch the Spurs get their hearts torn out by a lottery team in front of their home crowd. It was sort of funny -- the Spurs themselves resembled a physical manifestation of what happens when I play small-stakes poker against my work friends, all of whom are actually very good at it. That's actually exactly what I did Friday night instead of watching the game. I got score updates periodically, and somewhat fittingly, I bought into the pot the last time when I noticed the Spurs were only down 12 with 6:00 left in the contest. Given how much of a better team the Spurs are than the Blazers, I figured San Antonio's luck could help me play out the string and get my original buy-in back. (The Spurs were outscored by 18 points in the last 6 minutes. In a related story, I lost my buy-in in less than 20 hands. Luckily, it's a small stakes game and the financial damage is completely dwarfed by the fun had playing the game. Unluckily, I detest losing games and still get rather irritated about it.)

Anyway. Point is, I didn't watch the game live. I got home, saw that they'd lost by 30, and found myself staring at the box score completely at a loss. How in God's name could the Spurs -- a team that's played the entire season as one of the three best teams in the league -- get obliterated like that? At home -- where they were once 22-2 -- to a lottery team. How could their vaunted system allow it? Especially given the fact that Duncan played, Manu was active, and Leonard was on the floor for over 30 minutes of burn. I was curious. I was so curious, in fact, that I cued the game up and watched the second half, on replay. Every aching moment of the flesh-flaying. And after the thrashing was done and the blood began to dry, I wrapped myself in the sheets and nodded off to a simple truth that often gets lost in the adulation and the fandom of a team as systemically great as the Spurs.

They're mortal.

• • •

For my Player Capsule series last year, in the form of a parable, I wrote about Manu Ginobili's craftiness in escaping the death of his talents. Were I to write a similar story after this season, it would be markedly different. Manu's escape from death is no longer quite the guarantee it used to be. He's playing well, statistically -- his per-36 minute numbers are well-in-line with career averages, and in theory, he's functioning admirably as the Spurs' point guard in Tony's wake. His assist rate has been high, his shooting percentage has been in-line with his averages despite a more central offensive role, and he's playing more minutes than he did at the season's start. His personal statistics are fine. The more you study statistics, though, the more you realize one attribute that rings true above all else -- statistics often lie. Bereft of context and common sense, a set of poorly-tuned statistics can fool you into thinking up is down and down is up.

And make no mistake. This year's incarnation of Manu Ginobili is the worst incarnation we've seen since his rookie year, his sterling value-added statistics be damned. Players age in an asymmetric but roughly parabolic arc -- they start at a certain talent level and improve throughout the years as they whittle their game to match the NBA's speed and style, before their talent attrites and their abilities fade. Ginobili has staved off this talent-death for years. He's still doing it admirably, statistically, but the numbers ring hollow. Manu's defense, once a formidable perimeter stopper in a brilliant system, has devolved into a semi-comical parade of stupefyingly poor decisions and tepid efforts. (The Manu/Neal lineup in particular has been so defensively suspect it's difficult to watch.) His patented standstill stepback three is as off target as I've ever seen it, although that hasn't stopped him from chucking it up at completely mystifying intervals. His turnover rate is up, despite the fact that he gets the benefit of the doubt with the home and away statisticians and often has turnovers caused by his completely unnecessary passes attributed to the player he's passing to. Worst of all? Manu simply looks spent a lot of the time. Like a wind-up car that's lost its pep.

He isn't the only player amiss with the Spurs, and it's been something of a low-key worry as the season trudges onward. Gary Neal's been atrocious. Matt Bonner has been done. DeJuan Blair is barely an NBA player. Boris Diaw is nowhere near his last-year form. Stephen Jackson has completely lost it. De Colo, Joseph, Mills? Not ready for prime time, whatsoever. For all the boisterous celebration of San Antonio's bench depth and the wealth legitimate players they carry on the roster, they've become an awfully top-heavy team. Are they deep? Sure, in theory, and the Spurs have a system that's good enough to "cover" for the occasional injury. But at the end of the day the Spurs are exactly as star-centric as any other team. At the end of the day, the Spurs are completely reliant on Duncan's defense and extremely reliant on Parker's offense -- with both on the floor, the Spurs are an elite team with a puncher's chance of winning a title. With both off the floor, the Spurs are a living, breathing bluff.

They talk a good game and whip the ball around enough to fool a team or two. But they aren't beating anyone in a playoff series on the strength of a bluff alone, and when the play tightens up and teams start blanketing Danny Green and forcing Tiago Splitter to post up instead of pretending Splitter is a Duncan-level talent, the system doesn't work with quite the same results. Doubly so if the Spurs on the floor, those ever-perfect mechanical Turks, start to believe their own bluff. If they begin to think their inherent superiority as a team unit and a team concept grants them levity to cut their own efforts and play lazy basketball. No system covers for a team that's playing out the string like they deserve wins solely on the cuteness of their passes and the brilliance of their movement.

The missing piece in Manu's play this year isn't simply that he's getting old. It's that he throws lazy passes that he expects to work solely because the angle is cute or the idea is brilliant, regardless of his poor delivery. It's that he chucks up prayers with defenders closer than they used to be, as though he's goaded into it by a game that's finally starting to pass him by. It's that he doesn't quite put it all on the table the way he used to, as though the Spurs simply deserve the wins and the accolades without really having to suffer for it.

Then, every once in a while, a team calls San Antonio's bluff -- like Minnesota and Portland just did.

• • •

Are the Spurs a good team? Obviously. They've rather strongly established themselves as one of the three best teams of the league, despite big concerns about 75% of the roster. But when media types and friendly fans repeat a lie so often, sometimes you start to believe it yourself. Even if you know better. The Spurs aren't a good team simply because of their killer system or their brilliant coach. They aren't a good team by dint of their own existence, as this recent stretch of utterly putrid basketball makes clear.

No, the Spurs are a team powered by stars in a league that requires them. They're a team that currently suits up the unquestionably best center in the league (and arguably the league's Defensive Player of the Year besides) and the 1B to Chris Paul's 1A at the point guard position. They have a freakishly proficient young stopper with an Iguodala-esque skillset at the three, a dependable defensive shooting guard with a knack for the corner three and a scant few other skills, and a second big man that's better than many playoff squad's first. If you have a top-three like that, you're going to be a contender. Add in a good coach and a lot of well-fit role players and you have the makings of a potential title team. They're in the conversation, no doubt, but given the quality of their top-line talent, that's hardly a big surprise. And that's all without getting into any of their questionable pieces who may recoup by the time the playoffs start -- Manu, Diaw, Jackson, and Neal have all "been there." None of them are quite as bad as they've looked in San Antonio's lowest moments. It's not impossible that they have a vintage playoffs. And if any of them do, San Antonio's chances are that much better.

But as one reclines to watch the Spurs get blown out of the water by lottery teams that shouldn't have a chance, the response shouldn't necessarily be one of absolute surprise. It should be one of recognition, and acceptance of the truth -- the Spurs are not and have never been a team defined by system alone. The system can cover a small talent gap, but it can't cover effort. At the end of the day, if the players on the court are playing a lazy game and relying on the system without putting forth their best effort, the Spurs aren't all that much more than a poker player with a decent bluff and a series of terrible hands. Every tired and lazy poker player goes on a run or two, where they play out a bunch of bad hands in hope that their bluff wins them the string. Even I can win a few, often with large pots. But at some point a player -- quality be damned! -- is going to call your bluff. At some point they're going to realize you don't always have aces in your pocket and they'll want to see your hand. You'll waver, and you'll defiantly push onward, and your losses compound with abandon.

Sure, the Spurs win games despite playing like crap every now and again, like the terrible effort they put forth against Dallas last night. Tim Duncan wouldn't let them lose that one. But what happens when Tim Duncan isn't in quite the mood to put up 28-19 against a hopeless lottery team? What happens when the Spurs lay off and assume that their 50-16 record is enough to win the game on its momentum alone? What happens when teams realize that they don't really need to play Manu Ginobili the same way they used to, or that giving up a semi-open long two pointer to Cory Joseph is just about as likely to produce points as letting Matt Bonner get to the hoop? What then, NBA? What will become of the Spurs in America? We don't need to guess, lie, or ponder anymore. Because now we know exactly what happens: they lose by 30 -- at home -- to a lottery team.

System be damned -- the boys are as mortal as anyone.

• • •

“What though the field be lost?
All is not Lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And the courage never to submit or yield.”

Continue reading

Bill Simmons wrote an excellent piece a while back. In it, Simmons asked sportswriters and fans to start taking an effort to discuss and disclose the impact and prevalence of performance enhancing drugs. To take the veil off the problem and bring it into the public discourse. The piece was excellent, one of the best things Simmons has written in ages. It was a return-to-form to his pre-Grantland work, and his work before "ESPN Bill" was a prominent side of his personality at all. Despite enjoying the piece, I had a few misgivings -- mainly with the way that the piece seemed to reinforce a few prominent ways of looking at sports, cheating, and the hazards of the game. Today I'd like to discuss that, specifically emphasizing one particularly important point.

Nothing in sports is fair.

• • •

In a general sense, the entire pursuit of sporting achievement is thumbing one's nose at the concept of fairness. We like to ham up the morality of the thing as we puff up concepts like the "right way" to play and the pop culture adulation of a well-oiled, well-regulated team. "Guess the victors got more hours in at the gym! More practice, more effort, more energy." On some level, most of us buy it. We consume media to that effect on a daily basis. The virtue of victory gets tangled up in the victory of virtue -- if they won, they HAD to be the more virtuous. They must be morally upright, winners of a wholly fair contest. But let's be honest with ourselves, if only for a moment. That's bunk. There's no socialist ideal at the core of a sport's being. No element of unique fairness-by-skill that levels the playing field. It's not a big deal, but it's the truth. Skill and talent aren't fair at all, and they never will be.

What is sport? Distilled to its barest form, it's a physical competition. Lots of different physical skills must be honed and built, with a few mainstays per sport. In the case of basketball, muscle memory plays a huge role. Soccer requires deft passing and maneuvering. Football takes heft. Baseball takes a strong swing. Tennis takes endurance and next-level vision. And so on and so forth! Becoming a star at a sport isn't simply a matter of going to the gym and developing skills. It's a matter of having the skills to begin with. A player needs to have the physical framework to develop their talents, the physical traits to excel with effort. People don't start at some identical square one -- there are players in the NBA who are athletic mavens, players who have barely played the game at all and succeed primarily by the strength of their incredible athletic gifts. And there are those who aren't like that at all, who made the NBA through incredible effort and hardship in the face of slim natural talent (only relative to the average NBA guy, of course -- professional players already pass a high barrier to entry).

The same is true in all sports. Much as we enjoy trumpeting fairness, there's nothing fair about the way talent is distributed in the realm of sport. We can talk a good game about teams getting over the top with practices and hard work. At the end of the day, how big of a factor is it? Do we really know whether last year's Heat practiced any harder than last year's Thunder? What's more -- does it really matter? It essentially boiled down to the same thing that crushed the Stockton-Malone Jazz and the Barkley Suns. The losers were playing one of the best players in the game's history at the peak of his powers. No amount of practice or hard work was going to really overcome that, if we're honest with ourselves. LeBron and Jordan were simply better. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with people having different inherent skill levels in any career-of-choice. But there's also nothing particularly fair about it. It's an unfair game for an unfair world, and that's the point.

• • •

Speaking of fair, there's a good teaching example here. Consider Roy Hibbert and Carmelo Anthony. How many of us have chortled at Hibbert's struggles this season, or sniped at Indiana and Portland for giving him such an exorbitant contract? Fair, I suppose, although more people need to pay attention to his essential dominance on the defensive end for Indiana. Regardless, pull the veil back for a moment. Fans get huffy and irritated at Hibbert for his struggles on offense or his tendency to get winded when he plays big minutes. In a vacuum, that's reasonable -- Hibbert has been offensively dismal this season and extremely frustrating to watch. In context, though? Doing so strikes me as somewhat callous. Hibbert isn't just any average athlete -- he's an athlete with asthma, who has to follow a strict practice regimen. He has an inhaler and everything! Hibbert has had to triumph over poor fitness and health issues over his whole career. He's persevered and emerged as an essential player on one of the best 7 or 8 teams in the league.

Isn't that an accomplishment worthy of praise?

Then consider Anthony's case. Whereas Hibbert had to deal with physical ailments, Anthony dealt with personal ones -- his father died when he was just two years old and he grew up in a single-parent household in an incredibly rough part of Baltimore. Gangs, killings, et cetera. Most of us already know this given the "stop snitchin'" gaffe, but it's worth thinking about in a broader context -- isn't it a massive accomplishment for Anthony to have made it this far out of such a harsh early life?

Isn't that an accomplishment worthy of praise?

Obviously, yes! It's a huge accomplishment and it's something that deserves a lot of respect. Comparing Hibbert and Anthony, though, how can one really delineate which player deserves the most __respect? Anthony clearly has more natural talent than Hibbert, but Hibbert had to battle through a physical ailment that Anthony never grappled with. But Anthony went through dire financial straits as a young child that Hibbert never had to touch. If you're expecting me to give you a final answer, I'm sorry to disappoint -- properly contextualizing the individual accomplishments of Hibbert, Anthony, and any set of NBA players isn't just a difficult problem. It's downright intractable. Part of the reason we ignore context like this is that it's essentially impossible to apply this kind of multifaceted understanding to the actors in a sport on a broad scale, and it's only useful when talking about individuals. But it's essential context, especially when you bring performance enhancing drugs into the equation.

• • •

"What's so amoral about PEDs, as a concept or an idea?" Sounds a bit ridiculous. But step back for a moment. The whole point of sports is to be the best that you can be. Optimize your talents within the confines of your chosen sport. PEDs in their myriad forms are one way certain competitors try to rise above others. Is the use of a PED all that different, in many cases, than simply being born into a family of greater wealth, superior genes, or better connections? There's nothing wrong with LASIK eye surgery for a point guard to see the angles. There's nothing wrong with energy drinks to wake up on a rough morning. There's nothing wrong with modern medicine to counteract what would've been just decades ago career-ending injuries.

Are some PEDs different from that? Indubitably. But if we're drawing a stark line and building a bogeyman that makes offenders of our code downright criminal in the public eye, where do we put that line? Make no mistake -- performance enhancing drugs run the gamut. Many are illegal, many are experimental, many are terrifying things with hazards we may never be entirely sure of. The threat that these drugs pose to our players later in life is a complete mystery. That's not good. And indeed, there IS a PED problem. But our PED problem manifests itself in so many different ways that it's difficult to pass moral judgment on athletes before we really figure out the nature of the crime. Rashard Lewis was tarred with the PED brush without even knowing he was taking a banned substance, for goodness sake! Some athletes inject terrifying substances into their blood -- others just try a questionably legal treatment just to stay ahead. Amidst a maelstrom of dust and wind, fans yell "cheater!" and cry foul. But, again: where's the line?

Having a discussion, as Simmons lays out, is a great step forward. We need to get the PED discussion out of the darkened smoke-filled barrooms and into the open. But whatever discussion we have about PEDs needs to be just that -- an actual discussion. It can't simply be a McCarthyist witchhunt without context or debate over the entire role that PEDs play in the sport. They are a bad thing, perhaps, but they're varying degrees of bad. And arguably, some aren't bad at all! Some are innocuous, others mortifying. And just as it's altogether impossible to properly put a player's background into context, as I tried to demonstrate with the Melo/Hibbert example, are we really ones to be screaming of fairness and broken trust in a contest that's unfair at its core? In short, while context is vitally important to any real understanding of our modern PED problem, we've been substantially deficient in applying it.

The PED caterwaul is a reflection of something a bit more fundamental -- cracks along the surface, perhaps, in a broader societal misunderstanding of virtue in sports. The zeitgeist conflates virtue with victory with little heed to the concept of lingering unfairness. The idea that an athlete used drugs to achieve their ideal necessarily undermines our assumptions of fairness. Which thereby forces us as fans to (finally!) re-examine assumptions that never made a ton of sense to begin with. Understandably, that makes us feel uncomfortable. But discomfort is necessary to advance the discourse, and as we're often reminded, not all discomfort is bad. Not when it's essential and core to the entire endeavor, at least.

Continue reading