Ever had a really bad case of writer's block? I had one when I started this post. It was possibly the worst block of my life. I was unusually absent not just on here, but also on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, et cetera -- not by design, but because I quite literally couldn't write anything. I'd tweets and delete them for being too banal. I'd write Facebook status updates and balk at the ill-fitting verbiage. I'd try to write something for ANY of the sites I write for -- here, 48 Minutes of Hell, Goodspeed and Poe, etc. -- and it just ended up being unfit for editing. I'd delete it and start over, and kept deleting it until I'd spent hours at a keyboard with naught but a cute little phrase to show for it. That's where I was for quite some time. And it was incredibly frustrating. Breaking out of writer's block is a difficult task, partially because you keep illogically raising the bar for yourself. You may know the type. I kept telling myself "to make up for this block, I need to make sure my first piece back changes the game. It needs to be one of the greatest things I've ever written. Because if it isn't, I'm letting down the readers who took the time out of their day to read my work." And then you get the yips, and you can't write anything even remotely close to your expectations. The cycle continues.

So this was my best effort yet to wrest myself out of my block, back in the block. I went going back to the basics. The very basics. Today I'll examine the main reason -- in my view -- that the NBA produces such a wealth of fun narratives in every game and every season. In pursuit of this, I drew together a pyramid of examples to examine what makes team sports -- and specifically the NBA -- so easy to frame into entertaining narratives. To pare the pyramid to its essentials: there are seven basic levels of granularity by which you can analyze the NBA. The levels range from dynastic narratives -- spanning multiple years and a full career -- to possessional narratives -- spanning singular possessions on offense and defense between component players and teams. In between, we have five different levels of granularity. And there's a split in each level between stories centered on players and stories centered on teams. I've put together a graphical representation of these types of stories -- with examples -- and will be discussing them in full, level by level. Let's begin.

DYNASTIC NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: Michael Jordan, the Duncan Spurs, the Dolan Knicks.

In a dynastic narrative, you examine an NBA story from the broadest possible view. That is, not on a single season, but on the accomplishments of a team as they go through a period marked primarily by either a single player or a single concept. Contrary to the general thought, a dynastic narrative need not be positive: you could make the argument that the 2000 Knicks are one of the stronger dynastic storylines of the last decade. They were defined by a single overriding personality in James Dolan, and the depths of their failure -- a decade without a playoff win despite being a taxpayer in 8/10 seasons -- is both memorable and virtually unprecedented. Looking at the NBA through a dynastic lens gets you to pieces like Dwyer's classic "Your Champs, in Your Eyes" piece on the appreciation of a dynasty, no matter when it may be. As I stated before, you can also look at each of these concepts through a singular player: for a lighter example, see John Krolik's "The Giving Z" for a demonstration of how you can look at a player's career without beating statistics over the head or obfuscating your point under mountains of excess words. (Example of that: everything I've ever written.)

SEASONAL NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: The title team, the upward movers, the franchise revitalists

Seasonal narratives are more common, though often less edifying. Most commonly one will find them in the form of season retrospectives -- team beat writers looking back on a long-fought season, or fans aggravated over their playoff exit leaving their keyboards bare as they excoriate their teams. And then there's the opposite pole: The team that actually wins the title. The player that put it all together a la 2011 LaMarcus Aldridge. The franchises that finally -- after trying so long -- get into the playoffs or get their first playoff win. A particularly compelling and memorable season retrospective for me was Silver Screen and Roll's 2011 retrospective following the Mavs sweep -- the format is memorable, the writing splendid, and the presentation worthy. On the player side, you have the Pinstriped Post singing songs about Dwight Howard's true value as a player after his MVP-worthy 2011 season.

STREAK/STRETCH NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: The 2011 Cleveland Cavaliers losing streak, Kevin Love's double-double streak, Jeremy Lin's rise

While this is a somewhat rarer story in the world of NBA blogging, perhaps that's an oversight on our part. If you look at any particular game, chances are there are going to be some element of noteworthy streaks at play. The streaks may last seasons, like the Spurs winning their umpteenth-millionth game straight against the Clippers in San Antonio until this year's flop. There were, however, an abundance of stories about the Cavaliers' losing streak last year -- this alphabetical take from Truehoop was always my favorite. And from the player perspective, I was going to use a story on LeBron's various 2009 streaks, but this game recap I read a few hours ago that goes into Love's current streak of eye-popping numbers spoke to me, and I had to plop that down in here.

GAME NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: EVERY GODDAMN RECAP EVER, single-game record performances, rivalry stories.

Essentially the gold standard of an NBA narrative. The recap. "How was the game?" Recaps don't have to be noteworthy to be a story, they simply have to conclude. I'm of the view that everyone should write a few recaps, but nobody should write more than 20-30. They're a bit creatively stagnant, usually, and they keep you mired in bad habits when you try to migrate to different levels of granularity, in my view. Still, my favorite aspect of the game narrative come in the form of recaps that go far beyond the facts of the game -- sure, team A beat team B, but what did it feel like? In terms of the AP recaps, I don't know if any of them can beat this late-2009 recap of a Wizards-Nets game. It pretty much has everything -- a nondescript game that demanded a larger story than just "Hyuck hyuck the Wizards won," a strange and disturbingly compelling storyline of a declawed Arenas, and a bunch of random details (the sunglasses Blatche wears in the locker room, Blatche discussing his work ethic, the fact that nobody but Blatche mentioned in this article is still on the Wizards just three years later, etc) that tie everything together. There are tons of excellent recaps among the blogs, as well. One of my favorites has always been this throwaway recap, primarily for the amazing title: "Lakers 99, Timberwolves 94: Lakers kidnapped, replaced by cardboard cutouts. Wolves still lose."

HALF/QUARTER NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: The Pacers' brilliant 20-21 quarter versus the Nuggets in 2010, the Brandon Roy quarter, Melo's 33 points in a quarter.

These are somewhat interesting in that -- like streak stories -- they tend to be ignored in the postscript but entirely compelling as they happen. Part of what makes basketball a beautiful game is just that aspect of it, and the entire reason I wrote this piece in the first place. There are amazing NBA articles written about virtually every stage of the game process -- from the dynastic to the possessional -- and as well, when watching the games, you quickly realize that any basketball game can be infinitely differentiated into the sum of its component parts. Every possession can be compelling. Every sequence can bedazzle. Every quarter has its own story to tell, if you're looking hard enough. Or, if you wait long enough, you're bound to get a single-quarter or a single-half story that's simply sublime -- this particularly close-knit portrayal of Brandon Roy's miracle quarter is the defining example of this type of pyramid story.

THE MINUTE/MOMENT NARRATIVE

Guiding examples: The Spurs' furious game 5 rally in the 2011 Grizzlies series, 13 points in 33 seconds, LeBron's last game for Cleveland.

Honestly, I don't think I can say anything that Joe Posnanski's piece on that last example doesn't demonstrate in full. At all. Just read it. That's what a minute/moment story should look like. That's how you write a story. Just look at it, now.

POSSESSIONAL NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: Buzzer beaters, game winning defensive stands, NBA Playbook

It's here that I have to stop and really think back to why I love the NBA -- and more than that, the sport of basketball -- so much.

I like baseball. I'm not a huge football fan, but I can see the attraction. Hockey is okay. But basketball stands alone, in my view, at allowing this kind of granularity. The narratives discussed above -- the game, the season, the dynasty -- all of those are truly applicable in any sport. But possessions? A possession is an infinitely differentiable conceptual puzzle piece, with a distinct beginning and ending, and a easily broken-up storyline all its own. That's special, and it's something you really only see in basketball. The offense versus the defense. The offensive player driving into the teeth of the defense. The pass, the cut, the jab step. Every little piece makes up a thread in the tapestry that defines a basic possession. Each possession, strung together, creates a minute. A minute strings to a quarter. A quarter to a game. A game to a streak. A streak to a season. A season to a dynasty.

Every aspect of basketball comes down to this -- a drama in one act, a possession where two tacticians move their sentient chess pieces and hope that nothing goes wrong. The stark calculus of the possession is probably the thing that I find the most fun, really -- a possession has a clearly delineated start, and a clearly delineated ending. In a way that no other sport but baseball really captures, the possession allows you to distill a free-flowing liquid game into a series of bite-size pieces. There's the knowledge that at any time, to enhance your knowledge of the game, you truly could take every possession of a basketball game and try to map out what's going on. In football, or soccer, or hockey... this isn't nearly as straightforward. It's as liquid or more, and as slippery to define. But a possession is a naturally occurring distinction. It's a definition that comes from the rules itself. Not all plays will be the Thunder's perfect play.

But in their own way, all possessions are different. Different defenders, different results, different tics. And it's in that ideal that basketball becomes beautiful. It's through this that a mere game takes on so many layers of differentiable brilliance, and in my view, what brings so many wonderful writers and thinkers into the analysis of the game we love to watch. The possession is the thing that drew me in, and continues to inspire me to write more. I can't say this piece itself broke me out of my writer's block, but it certainly reminded me why I love the game. And whether or not I can still write the 5 pieces a week I wrote last December (spoiler alert: probably not, though I needn't do that any longer), that's something we all need to do every once in a while.

In the end? I love basketball. That's why I write about it.

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How do you follow a truly dismal team in your favorite sport? Like grieving the dead, everyone handles a 20-win team differently: Some prefer irrational optimism. Others would rather verbally abuse everyone in and around their awful squad, especially the optimistic folks. Others still simply switch teams, because they can't handle watching their favorite franchise mire in the cellar. There's no one right answer. But there are a few ways you can make your life-as-the-cellar fandom a little bit easier. And for today's post, I'm going to share just that. This is my general guide to following a terrible team. Keep in mind that the majority of this post was conceived in 2011 when the Cavs were going through "The Streak." You might not think this applies to you, but remember: For every great team there will always be a terrible team. And to fans of that poor franchise, advice like this will always be timely. And today's two seed might be tomorrow's lottery-bound trogdolytes. You never know, with the NBA. (Unless you're a Laker fan. Then you can stop reading this post.) In any case, I hope it helps. Let's get on with it.

• • •

There are two main points to keep in mind, for the general mindset.

Don't watch every single game: The first part is somewhat obvious, but bears repeating -- if your team is slated for a <20 win season, I beg you, don't watch them all. No one will be upset at you. It's an unfortunate situation, and it's fine for you to be reasonable about it. Watch as many as you need to know your guys, sure. But you simply can't watch them all. I watched a handful over 50 games during the Cavs' 2011 season. And I'm a sports blogger who generally watches one or two games a night, or at least tries to on a regular basis. I think if I'd watched any more, I'd probably have lost it and torn my Big Z jersey in half. Honest.

Develop some other rooting interests: Don't be a bandwagoner, obviously, but if I were you, I'd certainly figure out guys on other teams that you have inexplicable ties with or to whom you take a general liking. For me, those highlights were Steve Nash, Andre Iguodala, and Manu Ginobili. Maybe those specific guys will work out for you, maybe they won't. It's not just to tide you over: In fact, my love for my adopted Spurs was generally rooted in my liking for Tim Duncan and David Robinson as Cavs fans suffered the the legendarily awful teams at the turn of the millenium, and now we have a blog named after Manu. Go figure. My point is that you can find things you like watching, if you want to watch ball.

These two points are related: If you subject yourself to 82 games of dreck, you will give up on the game of basketball. You're going to give it up. I mean, it's doubtful even your PLAYERS want to sit there for all 82 games -- you certainly aren't a lesser fan if you don't want to sit through that. If you want to maintain a healthy fandom towards the game (and by extension your own team), you quickly realize that you need to break up the monotony of failure with a healthy dollop of "hey, woah, Steve Nash is having a vintage night! I love Steve Nash! Let's turn the channel and see him do his thing." This transference serves a double purpose. First, it reminds you that someday your franchise will have a highly-regarded draft pick fall into its lap and you'll have your own Steve Nash to prance about. It's also good because it reminds you that life is not terrible and worthless. And that Steve Nash is still alive. That's always fun, you know?

That's not to say you don't ever want to watch your team. When you do watch your own team, however, you need to take a slightly different approach. One thing that always helped me through the doldrums for the Cavs was when I got irrationally optimistic over some of our bit players. On the 2011 Cavs, that was Jamario Moon's big role (and Manny Harris, to some extent). I went into the season thinking Jamario would prove himself to be a starting caliber small forward and average something like 15-5-5 with decent shooting numbers on a fringe playoff team. I was clearly... ahem... wrong about that. But Jamario was still a fun player to root for, night-in and night-out. His defensive effort was always atrocious but he had a playful circus dribble he'd developed as a Globetrotter and his bench reactions to big shots or crazy events were always essential. He was fun to watch, if you squinted and ignored the fact that he was atrociously unfit for the NBA game at this point of his career. There were certainly Cavs games where the only really fun moment was Jamario breaking out some insanely stupid cross dribble that inevitably would result in a turnover but -- despite the constant failure -- looked fun and entertained me. There have to be players like that, even if you partially find them fun because you revel in how awful they are (like, say, Gana Diop or Sasha Pavlovic).

I like to think of rooting for a bad team as being on a swing set. You know the type. Remember when you were in elementary school, and you'd always want to get on the swing set at lunch? One of your friends would push you as you feebly kicked your feet for momentum, and you'd go wildly back and forth until you got dizzy and wanted to get the hell off. That's how you can expect your emotions to oscillate during the lean years. You'll have games that make you think "oh, wow, Manny Harris is sure gonna be a starting caliber NBA shooting guard someday" or "wow, we're one piece and a little bit of coaching away from being a passable excuse for an NBA team!" You'll almost immediately thereafter suffer games that make you wonder whether your team has ever seen a basketball before, and games where you wonder if your team would be improved if it acquired Matlock in free agency as the point guard of the future. I'd say "try to keep these oscillations to a minimum", but that's honestly a bunch of bull. You can't. Try as you might, you are going to think all these things, if only fleetingly, and they will alternatingly please and haunt you. It's your lot as a fan of a bad team. A good approach to take is: "We're not as good as we look; we're not as bad as we look." Unfortunately, the truth lies somewhere that you, as a fan, will never be able to access it. Sorry about that, and enjoy what you can.

Having gone over the general state of mind of the depressed fan, let's run through some positives. There are a few.

• Cheap seats. Insanely so. One of my friends actually was continually able to scalp literally free tickets to the Cavs back in 2011. If not free, he usually got decent upper levels for 10-20 and lower levels for 40 and under. It's not quite as cheap as a bad MLB team, but it's certainly cheap enough if you pick the right games. And the lessened financial burden on attending games has a few fringe benefits. You can take some time to sit in different seats around the stadium and actually get a sense of where the most commonly underpriced-for-the-view seats are (for my money, upper right corner in most arenas). You can get to know some of the concessions staff and -- if you can afford lower deck tickets -- some of the scoreboard jockeys and get on TV. You can develop the sort of "street cred" of a longtime fan that's incredibly expensive and borderline impossible to build up if you have a franchise that's actually good enough to demand high ticket prices. (Or, regrettably, one that vastly overprices their seats no matter how good the team is -- I'm looking at you, New York.)

• Meet other depressed fans. This isn't totally a relevant story, but I'll tell it anyway -- my first long term girlfriend was a girl I met at a terrible sporting event. At the time, I didn't like baseball all that much, and she didn't either -- we were both at a huge baseball stadium to watch a game, I noticed she was reading a book, and the game was so awful I couldn't bear to watch much more. Lacking transport back to my dorm, I decided to walk over and see if I couldn't bond over the dismal show. Sure enough, the team being as bad as it was gave us something to break the ice, we went home, and that was that. In the same sense, you have a common bond with every single fan in that stadium -- you're watching a team that you desperately wish wasn't so bad. I realize that there are a lot of antisocial people, but lord, bad sporting events are GREAT places to (if you feel up to it) get a bit tipsy and meet fellow fans. Make a few game buddies. Meet some people in a new town, or some circles you didn't know existed. Who knows, you might even be like me and end up randomly dating one of them for a year.

• Players notice you. This is something I haven't dealt with personally, but something I've had ample friends have good luck with. Players on bad teams get significantly less mail and fan attention than players on good teams. That's a fact of life and a totally understandable bias. However, players on bad teams don't think they're bad players per se -- players on bad teams (and, really, people in all walks of life) prefer to think of themselves as people who are good at their job but who have been thrust into a bad situation. If you like a player on your team, or you want an autograph, or you want to send some fan mail, you're far more likely to get noticed and responded to if you're a fan of a bad team. I know one friend who sent letters to his favorite Piston during their title years -- no response. A year back, he sent another letter of appreciation -- got back a signed photo and a thank you note. It's easier for players to blow off fan support as bandwagon junk mail when the team is good. When the team is bad, fandom shines a bit more and players seem to be a bit more receptive to autographs, praise, and encouragement. Fact of life.

• • •

Few actually consider these benefits when they complain about rooting for a bad team. And there's a good reason for that. They're kind of inconsequential. Sure, you can luck into some really amazing benefits -- teams tend to reward loyalty during the doldrums, so if you actually maintain season tickets during a down period, you're quite likely going to end up with upgraded seats next time the team is good. And the amount of credibility you get with other fans for sticking with your bad team is nice. But the fact that you lose all ability to trash talk kind of sucks. The fact that most of these become null and void if you don't live in the same area as your team anymore. The fact that nobody but the fellow fans can really get what you're going through on a fan-based level -- the memories of a sports fan are rather fickle, and while I certainly remember my time watching a hopeless cellar dweller, my empathy is limited because for the most part I simply block out the terrible year and focus only on the hope for the future.

Which, in the end, brings us back to the single biggest thing to keep in mind when following a dismal team. It will end. Give a team enough high lottery picks, and it may seem like hundreds of years away, but your team will eventually be competing for a playoff spot again. We can debate all day exactly how much better that is than being a truly terrible all-time bad team. But anyone who's rooted for a "worst team of all time" candidate knows the truth. It's better. And everyone who's rooted for one of those teams -- excepting, of course, this year's Bobcats (yet) -- knows that it gets better. Your team will not be terrible forever. You will not be hopeless forever. And eventually, you'll see people tweeting about the next awful team and -- instead of writing those tweets yourself -- you'll knowingly nod, retweet it with a nod to your past, and ignore it. Because you'll be in the future, your team will be good, and you'll be far too busy playing 3D Chess with Q to really focus on the plight of Twitter's Cardboard Sarver.

Now, all that said, let's return to the present and join hands in a prayer for Cardboard Gerald.

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We'd like all our readers to give a warm welcome to the newest member of our writing staff, Adam Koscielak. You may know his work from his excellent work at Sun-N-Gun. He's an incredibly smart, witty fellow studying law across the pond in Poland. I thought I had things bad -- I went to college in a non-NBA city, and now work in a city two hours from DC and terribly far from every other NBA city of note. Adam, of course, has no sympathy for me -- he's in Poland, roughly 6000 miles away from the closest NBA city. For his introductory piece for the Gothic, we asked him to explain what it's like being a fan of a sport that's so far distant. He blew us away. Without further ado, Adam's excellent introduction.

5:00 AM — I’m prying my eyes open, trying to stay awake. This happens all the time. And if it doesn’t happen, it probably means I woke up a mere few hours earlier. There’s something inherently unnatural about sitting out in the dark, trying to keep quiet not to wake anyone around you up. And yet that’s what I do, night in and night out. I sit at my desk, a game is playing on my 24 inch screen, and ESPN’s Daily Dime Live is flying down on my laptop screen, along with a Twitter feed. An empty beer mug once filled with coffee sits on the table next to my desk. Does it stand or lie or sit? I never know: for all I care it could be flying right now.

The first quarter of the night’s late game is just coming to a close.

• • •

It started with hockey. During the 2010 playoffs, I suddenly realized I could actually watch games online. And so that year I sat there, rooting for the Canadiens (my dad’s second favourite team) to beat the Capitals. The Canadiens pulled an upset off. Then I watched the Penguins and it was the same story. They may have eventually fallen in the Conference Finals to the Flyers, but I kept on watching hockey. I saw Patrick Kane’s overtime cup winning goal, the confusion surrounding it, and the moment in which everyone realized the puck was in the net. Then I started watching hockey in the regular season, and finally I started watching basketball.

But let’s back up.

See, I've always been a basketball fan. Ever since I can remember, I loved playing it, I loved watching people play, and I loved any video games connected with it. The problem is that I was living in Poland, and found uncomfortably that basketball was unable to see anywhere. The timezones made it hard, the fact that the only NBA license in the country was on a paid channel made it hard, and the lack of exposure in the media made it hard. I was limited to watching Youtube videos filled with highlights of various players, reading Wikipedia entries and reading box scores. The closest thing I’ve seen to a full basketball game at that time might’ve been the one in Space Jam. And yet, year by year I'd find teams to root for, players to love and on-paper knowledge of the game. I may not have known what a pick-and-roll was, but I sure as hell knew who won the 2005 MVP award.

The first team I rooted for was the Chicago Bulls, or should I say, "Team Jordan". The only NBA name known widely in Poland at the time was Jordan. Every jersey was a Jordan jersey, and kids like me got their basketball knowledge from NBA Live games and from Space Jam. I remember having a Jordan jersey and a Bulls photo album commemorating one of their championship runs. That album made me think that Luc Longley was a very good player. Yep, Luc Longley. He was big, and had pictures of him dunking. It made total sense, I swear. I can also proudly note that even though I was a child, I just knew that there was something inherently wrong with Dennis Rodman’s sanity (if he ever had any of it, that is).

But as fast as the Jordan era came, it went away. Jordan retired, making way for guys like Shaq. Shaq was probably the only basketball name widely known in Poland for a long time. You wouldn’t hear about Tim Duncan, Patrick Ewing or Reggie Miller. Hell, even the swagger of Allen Iverson wasn’t really known. Just as hockey knowledge ended with Wayne Gretzky, basketball knowledge ended with Michael Jordan, with a little Shaq for good measure. And yet, I knew a few more names besides those two. I knew a team other than the Lakers and the Bulls. An illustrious crew, to be sure.

That's right. I knew the Minnesota Timberwolves.

• • •

See, one time my dad had come back from a business trip to Minny with a nice present: a Kevin Garnett jersey. At the time, I would choose my sports allegiances solely by my favourite jersey colours. The colours? Blue and green. The Minny jerseys at the time? That’s right, blue and green. The Garnett jersey was blue and green. Everything fit perfectly, so naturally I became a T-Wolves fan. Now, I don’t remember most of the names of back then. I mean, I know that guys like Sam Cassell played with them, but I just don’t recall knowing that. Honestly, I only remember two: Kevin Garnett and Wally Szczerbiak. I absolutely loved both of them. KG, because I had the jersey (of course) and because he could dunk the ball in NBA Live. Szczerbiak, because he had a Polish surname and was able to nail the three almost every time in that same game. This fandom remained until I got hold of the internet.

The first broadband connection I ever had came when I was 12 or so. I was a big geek back then (hell, I still am), and I got hold of it pretty quickly. Back then Youtube didn’t exist: It's funny to say, but at that time virtually all movies were formatted for viewing in either Real Player or Quicktime, slowly lagging through a bunch of pixels. Live streaming would’ve been considered a miracle, not a chance.

But there was Wikipedia, and so I had a way to check regularly on the players I’d seen in NBA Live. That's about when I became a Steve Nash fan. After all, as soon as I learned a Canadian - like my dad - was an All-Star, I jumped on the bandwagon. Two years later, I was in the 2-time MVP's bandwagon. Even though I was rooting for the Suns, I hadn't actually watched them. At least not until I'd found a weird motivation.

See, as with Nash, I'd been observing Marcin Gortat’s career with some interest before he joined the Suns. The only Pole in the NBA always deserves another Pole's attention, I figured. Still, with Gortat getting so few minutes in Orlando, it was hard getting excited about his rebounding rate in limited action. But when I heard Orlando made a trade with my favorite team Phoenix, I decided it might be time to start watching basketball more actively. I watched the Suns get blown out by the Heat in Gortat’s first game, and I watched Steve Nash live for the first time, outside the highlights, outside the montages, just in the flow of the game. I experienced the beauty of Steve Nash’s game firsthand. Ever since that game, I tried to make sure I’d watch every Suns game I could. Whenever school was starting late, I’d stay up and watch pixelated Steve pass to pixelated Marcin on a pixelated pick-and-roll. Slowly, I started getting involved in other facets of the game, ESPN’s Daily Dime Live, Twitter. I dove in, and emerged a blogger. I don’t know how it happened. It was probably Andrew Lynch’s inherent niceness and recommendation that brought me to Sun-n-Gun (I was blogging independently before that) but whatever the case, at some point I wasn’t a basketball fan anymore: I was a basketball maniac, up all night. And not even for games, for lockout news, because I wanted, no, needed basketball to come back. I don’t think many people in Poland did.

• • •

Most people out here still don’t know a lot of basketball. Don’t try to ask them about anyone aside from Kobe, LeBron, Marcin and Steve, they won’t have an idea. Tim Duncan? No. Manu Ginobili? “Is he a soccer player?” people’ll ask. This is perhaps the most awkward part of being a basketball fan in Poland. The hours are survivable, the distance between me and my team isn’t a problem with a League Pass subscription. But the weird looks you get from people when you tell them you’re a basketball blogger, when you sift through box scores on your laptop between classes. I can't even get past the first line of their defense, let alone tell them about an entire post of weird, unfamiliar names.

I’ve done a lot of nerdy things in my life, but I've never felt like a bigger nerd than I do right now. I end up as a bit of a closeted NBA guy. I don’t tell many people about it, I think around ten of the people I know in real life actually know what I do aside from studying law. It's sad to say, but here sports fandom makes you seem rather dumb. It's not surprising, considering how most sports fans in Poland are destructive soccer hoolies. And people here have yet to find an ambitious way - a different approach - to talking about sports. Here every story is a recap or a report, a boring approach lacking the fascination and passion that bloggers bring to the table. Almost nobody tries reading between the lines or appreciating the hidden beauty. They opt for a black-and-white view of a colourful world. As a result, nobody treats sportswriters seriously or thinks they can be serious. The subject matter seems too simple. No, ambition is reserved for film critics and literary journalists. In the end, everything seems to come down to a simple equation: “If you write about smart things, you’re smart. If you write about stupid things, you’re stupid.”

Yes, it’s a silly mindset, and it should change, as the writing evolves. But until that day comes, I won’t be waving around my “sports blogger” flag. It would take me too much time to explain everything, to go past the surface, and it's not worth the effort. And I don’t really mind: I managed to hide my Star Trek obsession without a hitch, and this should be easy. I don't mind, but on the other hand I’m the odd man out, a man displaced in time and space. I feel like half of my life is somewhere in Phoenix - in a media box behind the scorer's table in the US Airways Center - and the other half is in Warsaw. He's studying law and doing the things that young people usually do. He's the Bruce Wayne to my Batman.

• • •

6:30 AM — I lay the finishing touches on my piece as the game’s third quarter comes to a close. And as I feel the night coming to an end, I don’t mind. I don’t mind being tired, I don’t mind going to sleep at sunrise. After all, for the time zone switching, the weird sleeping patterns and the tiptoeing, I’m having fun, just because I’m watching basketball. I joyfully take in every jumpshot, every dunk, every pick and roll. And I wonder: How the hell did I go from a box score pruning jersey-based fan to a live-watching insomniac blogger?

I don’t think I’ll ever know.

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We've got a short collective memory in the blogosphere. This is probably a good thing: The rotation and D-league players on a team change drastically in the course of a calendar year, and "standing pat" in an offseason usually means making only one major roster change, as opposed to making several. Even the very best players have 15 short years to work in, and usually only 10 of these years are especially relevant. The MVP window is open for a vanishingly short 5 years, if a player is lucky. The average age of an NBA player is very young and the average span of a career is very short, able to change drastically on an awkward fall or a fortuitous random contract. You're better off forgetting most of what you could remember.

But I think if we're going to skim and forget, if we're going to drift over mounds of information like an incorporeal dune buggy, we ought to have a few rest stops out there. I'm talking about the stuff that makes you stop in your tracks, the best and most significant pieces that the NBA blogosphere has collectively produced over the years. The pantheon, if you will. These aren't the end-of-week links roundups, nor even the end-of-year bests, nor (in many cases) even the best an individual blog has to produce. No, these are the all-time greats, the shortlist. The articles that go far beyond what you could expect from them, the articles that change you as a reader, the articles whose first readings mark the timeline of your fan experience, the articles you bookmark and continually return to when you reminisce over the subject of the article. Articles that mark themselves as surely as a great sports event marks itself to its observers. Articles that truly stretch the game out for fans and writers, whether by their sentiment, their style, or their intelligence.

This page is intended as an ongoing index of our Pantheon, and we want everyone that sees something missing to post their favorites (and how such favorites influenced them) in the comments where we'll add your favorites/explanations (and the favorites we find as they're being written) as we see fit. And feel free to comment on the existing work here. Without further ado, here is The Pantheon as we've aggregated it so far.

• • •

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• The Consummation of Dirk by Jonathan Callahan
• What a Feeling, To Be Mortal by Rob Mahoney
• The Journey of Andre Miller, Point Guard (Part 1, Part 2) by Tim Davenport
• Brandon Roy Could Cook by Ben Golliver
• Dream Week by Various (featured on FreeDarko, curated by Brian Phillips of Run of Play)
• To Spursland and Back Again: A Foreigner's Tale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) by David H. Menéndez Arán
• Rolling with Leandro (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) by Gregory Dole
• One Last Bitter Moment by Joe Posnanski
• We Are All Witnesses by John Krolik
• Braess's Paradox and "The Ewing Theory" by Brian Skinner
• Requiem for a Shooter by John Krolik
• Your champs, in your eyes by Kelly Dwyer
• Where does Tim Duncan rank? Highly by Kelly Dwyer
• Got to Get Off This Never-Ending Combine by Rough Justice of There Are No Fours
• The Game Done Changed by Rob Mahoney
• Dirk Nowitzki and LeBron James: Black Swans? by tjarks at Get Buckets
• Traveling West Finds Cleveland by David Campbell (Includes _The Real Mr. West by Tzvi Twersky and _A Teachable Moment by Angelo Benedetti)
• Oklahoma City's Thrilling "Thunder U" by Bethlehem Shoals
• Federer’s Tears: Why LeBron and the Heat Will Probably Win the NBA Title, and Why That’s Okay by Shane Ryan
• QWOP: The World's Worst, And Only, Athlete by Jon Bois

UPDATE (1/21/2012)

• The Riverwalk Conspiracy by Rand
• The Pathology of Manu Ginobili by sungo
• David Robinson was a Fine Role Player by Timothy Varner
• John Wooden and the Culture of Ought and On Johnny “Red” Kerr by Timothy Varner
• The City’s Advanced Stats Primer and EZPM: Yet Another Model for Player Evaluation by EvanZ
• Regarding Moses by Matt Moore
• Tracy McGrady, 'freakish' talent and the peril of ease by Dan Devine

• • •

The Consummation of Dirk by Jonathan Callahan - A brilliant, hilarious, semi-insane short story that uses Dirk to talk about the nature of competition and that uses the nature of competition to talk about Dirk. I can't do "Consummation" justice with a blurb, but it definitely belongs in the pantheon just for the discussion of Dirk's hiatus* and Callahan's masterful command of prose. Written as a collage of different angles on the Teutonic superstar, "Consummation" features endlessly quotable individual sections filled with maddening, entertaining creativity. T.S. Eliot, interviews with no questions, send-ups of Bill Simmons and Hubie Brown, some of the most fun wordplay anywhere on the web. And it all comes together to bring to life a semi-fictional, ridiculous alternate reality that feels all too plausible.

*or sabbatical, or vision quest, or mystic performance-enhancing regimen, or journey into the heart of the silence, the light.

• • •

What a Feeling, To Be Mortal by Rob Mahoney - Not only does Mahoney's paean to the SSOL Suns have the best title of anything ever written, it also has a gripping spirituality about it. Only six paragraphs long, but it feels longer and truer as time goes by. Maybe that's because it's expressing the weight of six long, wonderful years.

• • •

The Journey of Andre Miller, Point Guard (Part 1, Part 2) by Tim Davenport (handle timbo on BlazersEdge) - Andre Miller is one of the sneakily great guards from the last decade. Davenport wrote this piece - culled from dozens of disparate/obscure sources - shortly after Andre Miller joined Portland. It's a model for good journalism and for finding a story that wasn't exactly hidden in plain sight.

• • •

Brandon Roy Could Cook by Ben Golliver - When I asked Tim Davenport above if he had any suggestions for the Pantheon, he suggested looking more deeply into Golliver and suggested in particular this great piece on Brandon Roy. It may be less than 14 days old as I'm writing this, but I'm pretty confident Golliver's piece is an instant classic. Golliver talks about the brilliant young guard forced too soon into retirement because of chronic injury and in doing so talks about Roy's impact on the Blazers faithful, on a captivated national following, and on Golliver himself. Like many of these pieces, I can't really do this one justice with a description, but I can safely say that it belongs.

• • •

Dream Week by Various (featured on FreeDarko and co-curated by Bethlehem Shoals of FD and Brian Phillips of Run of Play) - For a month, FreeDarko featured an exhaustive exploration on Hakeem Olajuwon from a bunch of great NBA bloggers. Each author brought to the table their own firsthand experiences and cultural perspectives on the center that so dominated the interregnum of Jordan's first retirement. It was a great week and in its totality easily clears the bar of the Pantheon.

• • •

To Spursland and Back Again: A Foreigner's Tale (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11) by David H. Menéndez Arán (handle LatinD on Pounding the Rock) - This is not primarily about basketball, but it must be mentioned in any Pantheon of NBA work. David is a diehard Spurs fan from Argentina that made a pilgrimage to America midway through the 2009-10 season. There he traveled around Texas and the West Coast to meet up with a bunch of regulars from the Spurs blog Pounding the Rock for his first trip (of many, hopefully) to the U.S.

Speaking and writing in half-broken English, LatinD rebuilds the fissured language with a crackling, deadpan wit, a smile in every sentence, and an observation about every corner. In the crowning moment of the series, David and Wayne from PTR have a buddy-comedy-esque afternoon (narrated in two parallax accounts) followed by a night of media access to the Spurs game, where the pair watched the games up close, asked Coach Pop a couple questions, and (a couple days later) met the approachable national hero of Argentina, Manu Ginobili. Coach Pop, on being introduced to LatinD, stole the show in his brief cameo; "Argentina? We actually have a player from Argentina, did you know?"

David's photo-filled, soulful, funny travel diary is simply one of the best things that has ever been put on the Internet, much less on the NBA blogosphere. The Pantheon is an afterthought. Forewarning: It's also insanely long. Put the coffee on.

• • •

Rolling with Leandro (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10) by Gregory Dole - Hot on the heels of "To Spursland and Back Again" is another masterful account of a South American's strange journey into the United States. Dole - a Canadian that lives in Brazil - helps speedster Leandro Barbosa around the country to NBA teams to be scouted for the 2003 draft, where he eventually found his way onto the Phoenix Suns (and became an important player on the SSOL Suns). Dole's account is by turns funny, sad, filled with emotional resonance and a bluesy sense that this is Barbosa's best (and possibly only) chance to become a pro basketball player. Barbosa tries to figure out if he belongs with the best, a sense of confusion compounded by tight-lipped organizations, bothersome injuries, and a historically deep draft.

• • •

One Last Bitter Moment by Joe Posnanski - The best sportswriter in America (with big personal ties to Cleveland) covers the last minute of the surreal Game 6 that eliminated the Cavaliers in LeBron's final game with the team. In what felt like a parody of the brilliant final quarter of the Cavs-Celtics game 7 from 2008, the team simply gave up and stopped hurrying the ball down the court, to Coach Mike Brown's eternal fury (fury followed quickly by disgust). I was following the Cavs then myself, and this minute was one of the strangest, most inexplicable moments in all of sports. And Posnanski nails it, evoking in me Steinbeck's famous orchard in the eponymous chapter from "The Grapes of Wrath" and setting the stage for that great topper: "The Decision".

• • •

We Are All Witnesses by John Krolik - Speaking of "The Decision," Krolik's has long been the specific piece I associate with the more infamous LeBron situation. An instant classic from the moment it was published, Krolik dropped this gem just a few hours before LeBron took his talents to South Beach. Krolik goes into an improvisational reverie about the LeBron era, reliving with celebration and introspection the wondrous seven years of Cleveland basketball in all its highs and lows. Krolik mourns for what would soon pass away forever, regardless of where James would decide to go, but in mourning gives us his personal testimony of seven years worth remembering.

• • •

Braess's Paradox and "The Ewing Theory" by Brian Skinner - This is what stats in basketball is supposed to be about. Skinner's clarity of prose greases the wheels of an unstoppable machine of enlightenment. Make a hypothesis, state your assumptions, build a model, test the underlying assumptions with data, and produce a theory. It's the simplest thing in the world to do, and the hardest thing to do well. Skinner does it well. And if you're not into math? Even better: This is what we're always raving about.

• • •

Requiem for a Shooter by John Krolik - At the height of All-Star point Stephon Marbury's very public meltdown, John Krolik came through with an extraordinarily nuanced narrative. Krolik's piece takes a wider view not only at Marbury, but also at the ones from Marbury's Coney Island neighborhood that didn't make it, including Marbury's brothers and Lincoln High School teammates. I don't think that Krolik's view is completely convincing (Krolik doesn't seem entirely convinced himself), but it's a well-thought-out, well-argued perspective that focuses more on demystifying Marbury than completely justifying or explaining the guard and the context in which he learned to thrive. Excellent stuff.

• • •

Your champs, in your eyes and__ Where does Tim Duncan rank? Highly__ by Kelly Dwyer - Kelly Dwyer's output resembles that of a great jazz musician - a few basic themes (with endless variations and repetitions), a vague, often unstated worldliness, a tendency to take on all the standards of his genre, and - most importantly - an endless, unfathomably large catalog, most of which is unnecessary for one person to experience in its totality. We're kind of KD connoisseurs, though. And inevitably (as any connoisseur will tell you), some of the best individual pieces and concerts get lost. Well, if that chain of logic made any sense to you, here are - analogously - "My Favorite Things" and "[Kelly Dwyer] & Johnny Hartman." These two gems are on their face rather inauspicious responses to two particularly dumb observations. But beneath the surface, these simple responses transform into two of Dwyer's best and most memorable pieces, and worthy representation for one of the best NBA scribes around.

Update (12/29/11): James Herbert submits this paean to obsessive fandom by Dwyer. It's a worthy addition.

• • •

Got to Get Off This Never-Ending Combine by Rough Justice of There Are No Fours - Deconstructing a traditional or simplistic narrative to find nuggets of wisdom seems to be the surest, shortest path to "Stretching The Game Out." It also helps if every time Aaron or I think of a word (in Rough Justice's case here, it's me and "athletic"), we're also thinking partially of your article. Because we've completely internalized your representation of it. Yeah. Everyone should write like that, okay?

• • •

The Game Done Changed by Rob Mahoney - Quoth Aaron: A great Rob Mahoney piece that nails the Positional Revolution better than any other post that came before or after it. "The most important development over the last decade of basketball was not Shaq’s dominance, LeBron’s ascendence, or Kobe’s redemption, but the recognition that square pegs need not be forced into round holes because the holes didn’t mean anything to begin with." is easily one of the best lines he's ever written and that's saying a ton given the sheer wealth of amazing things that have dropped from Mahoney's desk.

• • •

Dirk Nowitzki and LeBron James: Black Swans? by tjarks at Get Buckets - Quoth Aaron: This was a piece in mid-2011 that was quickly forgotten but became impossibly relevant once the 2011 Finals began and suddenly his theory was put to the absolute test. Great theory, great presentation, great post.

• • •

Traveling West Finds Cleveland by David Campbell - Quoth Aaron: This is one of the best basketball-related articles ever written. It's impossibly good. Just read it.

Update: For additional background and broader context about Delonte to Campbell's piece, check out The Real Mr. West by Tzvi Twersky and A Teachable Moment by Angelo Benedetti. They're both fantastic and worth reading in their own right.

• • •

Oklahoma City's Thrilling "Thunder U" by Bethlehem Shoals - The ideal Shoals experience is a paragraph-sized bundle of ham-it-up metaphors that acts as a one-time, one-way, non-stop metaphysical flight to the truth. And then, once you've taken mental pictures of the truth and spent a day there as a tourist, you go back to the bundle of metaphors that got you there and find that the paragraph has nowhere to transport you anymore and just stands there like a dead heap. The ideal Shoals experience is a portal that moves you exactly where it's supposed to with great emotional and metaphysical conveyance, then self-destructs and makes you wonder if it ever existed or took you anywhere close to the truth. While the trick is enlightening, and while quite a few of my mental pictures are thanks in part to Shoals, the trick doesn't exactly lend itself to posterity in the traditional sense (that is, in the sense of something like The Pantheon). The Thunder piece holds up, however: I'm on reading #10, and it still sends me somewhere. It's wonderful.

• • •

Federer’s Tears: Why LeBron and the Heat Will Probably Win the NBA Title, and Why That’s Okay by Shane Ryan - You know, the closest relative of this piece (ironically written by shameless Dukie Ryan) is probably Will Blythe's awesome book To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever. In "To Hate Like This," Blythe uses interviews, his upbringing, philosophical meditations, and sociology (basically any perspective you can think of) to describe and attempt to explain his (quite strong) feelings on the Duke-UNC rivalry. In the more restrained context of a short article, Shane Ryan's "Federer's Tears" is - in the same vein as "To Hate Like This" - a yearning, multifaceted, interdisciplinary meditation on power vs. elegance that attempts to capture Ryan's embrace of Rafael Nadal over Roger Federer and the unbridled joy of the immovable, hard-nosed warrior using pure power to stop the apparently-unstoppable geniuses of athletic prowess. In this piece, Ryan's logic is sometimes slipshod and baroque, his dichotomies sometimes simplistic and anecdotal, his basketball worse. But never has clipping a bird's wings felt so right, and this might honestly be my favorite piece in The Pantheon, even though Aaron sincerely dislikes it. In any case, it's good shorthand for the type of sportswriting that I aspire to, which is what this is all about.

• • •

QWOP: The World's Worst, And Only, Athlete by Jon Bois - Actual conversation that led to this piece's inclusion was essentially Aaron saying "THIS IS THE GREATEST POST EVER WE NEED TO ADD IT" to my "Fine. But if I do this, then the entire Pantheon is sullied, I hope you're happy." It's actually a pretty funny article. Not... really pantheon, in my eyes, but funny. Heh. (Editor's Note: Hey, Alex. Thought I'd add this on. Essentially, this is my favorite sports humor piece. Ever. It takes an absurd concept, repackages it, and turns it into this dystopian future that in an offhanded and probably completely unintentional way provides a sincere examination into the process behind sports fandom and speaks to me -- a Cavs fan -- on a relatively personal level. Bois describes QWOP as many fans of bad teams (or at least me, personally) imagine the players on our team -- a tireless worker who simply isn't very good at his job, but as he's the best there ever is or ever will be, there's no use in piling on. I don't know. It's not the best piece ever, no, but it's one of my favorites and I think it's about 20x more complex and interesting than most would think on first glance. So, if you want an actual reason as to the inclusion of this piece, there it is. It does with humor and dystopic sports-related foolery what the rest of these pieces do with immortal writing. And it does it right.)

• • •

UPDATE (1/21/2012)

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

• • •

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

• • •

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

• • •

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

• • •

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

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

• • •

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

• • •

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

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Joe Posnanski will use every detail in this picture - including
Joe Posnanski (left) - to disprove the viability of the intentional walk

As a recurring feature, Alex will be reviewing and analyzing various blogs and hoops sites. No number ratings or anything silly like that, just a good overview of the sites at hand with their strengths, weaknesses, etc. To see an index of previously reviewed sites, click here.

On a chilly day before dawn, I love a great essay or a short story. I just love that feeling when the piece ends, you know, when your neck shudders a little bit and you're the only one awake and the sky gets a little brighter? I don't care if the piece ends with fire or with insight - it ends with something meaningful, and something meaningful opens up in me. The heat of the sun gets my cold wet arms a little drier and warmer. I feel like I own the new day, and I see clearly what is real and earnest in life for awhile, and I see a little bit further ahead in my life. I just love that feeling. That's why today - just before dawn here - I want to talk about Joe Posnanski. But first I want to talk about Michael Jordan.

====

His Airness demonstrates his infamous
"Mockery of Tai Chi" dunk.

I don't know the path to greatness. I wish I did. It seems like you have to visualize an ideal and make your every choice in the shadow of that ideal. But I don't know, because even the great paths aren't so inevitable from the start. Michael Jordan may seem like destiny's child in retrospect - the unstoppable forward momentum of a singular champion. But nothing about 1998, 1996, 1986, 1989, or 1993, was so inevitable and historic in the moment. He was, sure, the heir apparent to Bird/Magic. But Bird's back broke down, Magic got HIV, and Len Bias overdosed. He was, sure, the best player in basketball for a decade. But his rise to prominence symbiotically coincided with the global rise of the NBA brand. He was, sure, the leader of two historic threepeats. But Ralph Sampson's back gave out, Portland chose Sam Bowie, and Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson brought the inscrutable Rodman to Chicago. Jordan's rise was a product of circumstance, and far from inevitable. Bill Simmons - following America at large - has his Alpha Dogs that win every game that matters and hit every shot that matters, but even a cursory study.of basketball history suggests that innumerable choices, literal lotteries, and economic realities guide what we in hindsight call fate.

Even though - or heck, precisely because - I believe this, I hold a lot of special reverence for Jordan. The world expected and demanded Jordan to take the lead as a showman and a winner every night - and every night Jordan delivered. He was, sure, genetically blessed and fell into perfect developmental circumstances and he was paired with a slightly younger, much poorer twin from rural Arkansas named Pippen that served as perfect teammate and foil. But Jordan's shots still had to fall, the killer still had to rise, and the motivator still had to find (or else invent) slights against him. Jordan still had to win. But he delivered on his promise again and again, even beyond what his circumstances and his gifts should have allowed. He may have been destiny's child in the other sense - the unstoppable thrusting of a man into greatness, but nothing about Jordan was remotely perfunctory. He cried after winning his first title in 1991 not because he was supposed to or because his handlers deemed it demographically lucrative. No, he cried because he loved what he'd earned and couldn't stand the idea of having been deprived of it. Jordan had no use for excuses - and he was too intelligent for any excuses to work. Jordan's was already a great throne when he inherited the kingdom, but he was a great king that elevated his throne still higher. Far from trivializing either the great Jordan or his great situation, hindsight only elevates both to more absurd levels.

====

"Alex, I'm glad you wrote it, and you wouldn't know this, but I already wrote
this exact same piece back in 1986 about my favorite sportswriter."

I'm sure Joe Posnanski has thought about Jordan in this way, because he has written everything that I have ever thought about sports and life into a curiously long and thoughtful post. Poz would probably figure out how the thought extends to LeBron: with his maddening playoff exits (inexplicable) and his maddening ceiling (higher and more fickle than perhaps any NBA player ever). I'm sure Poz would figure out how to work in all the greats of this era, some select greats scattered across NBA history, and a couple of personal anecdotes about tennis and baseball. Poz would work the Jordan thought into a winding yarn (but at all times simple and forward-moving). He'd work in a Buck O'Neill anecdote or a reference to Vin Scully or Joe Paterno. Wherever he'd go with it, Posnanski would think about this Jordan narrative for hours and turn it into a work of substance and entertainment. Or Poz would kindly and systematically point out all the flaws and banality and utter repetition of a bad narrative that he'd heard a thousand times but had never found the words to refute. And then Poz would find the words to refute the narrative, and in doing so would enrich all our lives with a work of substance and entertainment. That's just what he does.

I wonder if Poz senses that he has arrived and peaked (hopefully not fully) at exactly the right moments for his talents - the first burst of blogs and the first truly ubiquitous social networks, respectively. I wonder if Poz ever thinks about living in a time where niches like "Moneyball" become feature films and America can take an ironic distance towards baseball and still love it without question again. I wonder if Poz ever senses that we are living in a golden age of technology that still demands the scarce great storytellers in sports. I wonder if Poz realizes the weight of expectations his fervent readers place upon him, if he realizes the impact his best work has on us and the hours of joy his total work has brought to us. I wonder if he allows himself to be the avatar for virtue in his own narratives, as he is in ours as aspiring bloggers. I wonder if he realizes that he's in Chicago, so to speak, surrounded - as Jordan was - by a group of admirers that hang on the results of his craft. I wonder if he's proud of himself that he disappoints our expectations so rarely and transcends them so frequently.

I wonder, but I already know the answer: No, of course not. Even if he had the time (he writes a mile a minute and acknowledges that sportswriters have a shelflife), Poz can't find such narratives terribly interesting: He responded to a "Best Sportswriter Award" by making cheesy 70s references and making self-deprecating humor about himself as a blogger. Plain and simple, he's not going to let an award for best sportswriter go to his head. All he did was appreciate the praise and then he moved on; there's baseball to write about, y'know? Even if a great writer cornered him into talking about his own greatness, I'm sure he would just chalk it up to circumstance, teammates, and perseverance, like Jim Thome or Tim Duncan. His work passes through his head from his soul but seems to miss his ego, or maybe his ego just isn't very big to begin with. His advice to aspiring writers? Use active verbs, stay humble, don't think you're above the story. And that's it. Don't add flowery language, don't rest on your laurels, don't talk about your achievements, talk about your favorite stories. Don't go for the big-name contacts, go for the story and the people you're interested in hearing about. And maybe his simplicity is the whole trick. He's a master at it anyway: With a single active verb he says things that take me hours to express.* He puts Vin Scully's elegant simplicity into 4000 words or so, year-round on weekdays. He came about, sure, right when his talents were called for, but he has delivered - with virtue, sincerity, compassion, and humor - even beyond his thrust to greatness.

*Every few pieces there's just a show-stopping sentence, and Poz seems to know just where to place it. Example: "What followed felt too awesome, like those imaginary games we all used to play in our backyard with impossible comebacks and ridiculous twists and all those things that real sports so rarely become." on the Cardinals' improbable Game Six victory. Another examples: "I would not try to explain how Ron Washington manages baseball teams -- it seems to me some combination of feel, improvisational jazz, likability and Wile E. Coyote -- but it seemed pretty clear that he did not want other teams best players to beat him. ". Poz also loves his "Posterisks," which are long, asterisked parentheticals like this.

I read a lot of my favorite Posnanski pieces this morning to feel that certain joy and enlightenment. Before I read it all, I'd had an earlier version of this post. Oh, it had a lot about how he was different, about how he is a special guy, compassion pouring from his every word, his personality bursting from his every anecdote, etc. It started, "Every day on his blog, Pos shares a couple stories, anecdotes, or thoughts. Most of them deal with baseball." And I think that's all I need to keep from the earlier draft as a chilly dawn approaches here in Madison.

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