Hey, everybody! This is the third edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple -- STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams' SRS projections before the season. So -- during the season -- we've been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week's results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE's projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Wizards fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 10th.

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

A few observations, as I continue to create a proper format for these ranking posts.

THREE UP, THREE DOWN

• UP: IND, DAL, UTA. Two weeks in a row for Utah, who ranks as one of the more interesting teams in the league right now for me. They have a relative dearth of quality wins, but they DO have one of the more impressive blowouts of the week with their scorched earth obliteration last night of the Los Angeles Clippers. Paul Millsap is playing all-star ball, and they're on the edge of a top-10 ranking on the defensive end. I didn't really believe STEVE NASH when it predicted Utah would be a fringe playoff team, but that's exactly what they look like right now, their 9-4 schedule notwithstanding. As for these other two? Indiana finally is starting to play up to their record, and though the model has been hesitant to declare what we've seen as gospel, it's finally starting to see them as a mid-tier playoff team that'll challenge for a top-4 seed. Mostly on the back of Hibbert. And finally? STEVE NASH apologizes to Mavs fans -- two thirty-ish point blowouts will make any model think better of your team, and the Mavs have finally eclipsed the 0.500 mark (handily, in fact) and are looking like a decent bet to make the playoffs, now. And they even have a shot at a division title!!!

• DOWN: PHX, SAC, POR. The Suns have been bad this season, and this week -- a dispiriting blowout loss to the Bulls, a 10 point sans-Nash loss to the Nets, and a respectable (but disappointing) 11 point road loss to the Spurs -- represents all facets of it. Not at all enough minutes for Gortat and Markieff, and some puzzling decisions by Alvin Gentry. He doesn't seem to have a good sense of what he wants to do with this team, and while he looked like a solid and decent coach in the Suns' exciting 2010 conference finals trip, his minutes distributions lately have been utterly counterproductive and if he bears any front office responsibility for not trading Nash while he had value he's not worth keeping as the team goes forward. Not like Sarver will do anything about it. Sacramento has been abhorrent, despite DeMarcus Cousins' improvement. And the Blazers? They had a pretty poor week, for a team that looked REALLY good to start the year. They had a more-embarrassing-than-it-looked 3-point home loss to the Magic, were victims to a murder at San Antonio in the middle of the week, lost a tight overtime game to a reeling Rockets team, and barely eked out a win against a remarkably bad Hornets team. They're still top tier in the West, but they look less like a world-beater and more like a solid playoff team with a punchers chance at making an NBA finals. Like the Grizzlies, I suppose.

• • •

GENERAL DISCUSSION.

In the spirit of fixing errors, I realized this week that the weighting mechanism I was using was maintaining week 1 reweights on our week 2 ratings. As a result, a few teams got the short stick in last week's writeup -- for instance Portland was in 5th when the model actually had them in 2nd in the West (hence their fall this week). In a related story, when calculating playoff percentages, the model was assuming there were only 7 spots per conference, not 8. I've updated the probabilities in each week, which doesn't really change the broad narratives I talked about, but does change some of the numbers. I'll try to go back and edit it at some point. Apologies for that error.

I would comment on interesting trends, but there aren't too many of them. The Spurs have been awful enough on the road that the model now predicts they'll end with a final road record of 16-17 -- which, given that they're oh for five so far, may seem like an almost charitable assessment. We see a pretty clear separation between the contenders and the pretenders in the East, with the Heat/Bulls/Sixers troika all ending up around 45 wins (which translates to around 56-57 wins in a full season). The Thunder are lapping the competition, record-wise, in the West -- their two biggest competitors (Spurs and Nuggets) both have had underwhelming low points to their starts, and it's tough to see either seriously challenging the Thunder when all's said and done. I thought, before the season, that the Thunder had about a 50% chance of winning the West. NASH has finally come to an agreement with me, it appears.

And in our weekly note on the matter -- NASH sees the season turning out, despite all the hype the East had entering this season, exactly like recent years in terms of how the lower-tier playoff teams look. The West has no less than three teams who project to miss the playoffs in the West despite better records than the Eastern 8 seed. The East has two playoff teams under 0.500 and the three worst teams in the league. For all the talk about the East coming back? Certainly doesn't look it.

• • •

I'd like to say more, but man, am I tired. I'm going to watch a few games and go to sleep. Night, world.

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I consider myself a relatively well-read man, at least when it comes to Russian literature. I haven't kept up with my reading as much as I used to before college (which seems to be the case with any literate math and science major), but I've become really fond of picking up my old favorites and reading a few chapters every now and again as a reminder of why I loved them. That and short stories, which is the reason I've had a quite unfinished post on Popovich through the eyes of Solzhenitsyn bouncing around in the 48 Minutes of Hell drafts page for at least a month now. I'll finish it, someday. I promise. This is all relatively beside the point. I love Russian literature. I love the cultural sensibilities at play in many of the Russian greats, and the general cossack voice that seems to lend itself to the limits of character complexity and motivations that lie at the heart of work operating at the apex of literature.

Alex and I would both attest to having spent many long hours discussing amongst ourselves the best NBA analogues to some of the characters from our favorite novels. Who's the NBA's best representation -- both rhetorically and in their aesthetic realization of the character's themes -- of War and Peace's Pierre Bezukhov? Solzhenistyn's Ivan Denisovich, or even Cancer Ward's Oleg? Gogol's incarnation of the poshlost, in the knavish Chichikov? Lermontov's Pechorin, Goncharov's Oblomov, Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin. All incredible characters -- are there any NBA analogues, of their ilk? There are, for some. Some are reaches. And others are Eddy Curry. But that's beside the point -- one could frame relatively entertaining and insightful posts around the eternal search for an analogue of each classic character I described, if they'd like. Someday, we may do that.

Today, though? Let's talk about Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Kobe Bean Bryant.

• • •

Last night, in a mostly ignored tweet, Doug Hastings stated -- in his usual semi-rhetorical way -- that it was almost irresponsible to analyze Kobe Bryant without discussing Stavrogin. I read the tweet, laughed, and immediately felt that I'd read the defining description of Kobe Bryant's approach to the game. I'll explain that in a bit, but assuming most of our readers haven't read Dostoevsky's Demons in the last year, I'll attempt to explain who Stavrogin is. Necessarily, there will be some spoilers (though I won't spoil "At Tikhon's", as that's one of the greatest reveals in all of literature) and if you're planning on reading it and can't handle being spoiled I'd proceed with caution.

Stavrogin may be the most intrinsically talented and intelligent individual in any Dostoevsky novel. Russian literature doesn't tend to have "perfect" characters, but on paper, Stavrogin fits the bill. Strikingly handsome and brilliant, Stavrogin is desired by every character in the book, for a time. He's the town's most eligible bachelor, the smartest man in the book, and (to the young nihilists upon whom the book is based) a lightning rod who they eternally desire as their leader. He doesn't necessarily want to lead, but the nihilist masses see him and his talent and believe him to be their savior. He has a face that -- to quote the book -- "reminded some people of a mask" in its perfection. It couldn't be that handsome, he couldn't be that talented, he couldn't look and feel like such a sterling specimen of a man. But he was all those things. On paper, in appearance, and in all ways of summarizing a person before you really get to their soul. Unfortunately, the soul is a tricky thing.

"Today as before, I'm still capable of wishing to do something decent and I derive some pleasure from this, but the next moment I want to do evil things and that also gives me pleasure."

-- Stavrogin to Dasha, p. 690

Stavrogin was a severely flawed man. As flawed as a man that fits all the descriptions above could possibly be. His talent insulated him from the concept of empathy, leading him to spend much of the novel exhibiting a complete and utter lack of a conscience. Or, really, a soul. There are conflicting periods in the novel -- some where, as he describes, he wishes to be decent and some where he wishes to be evil -- and in the end paint him to be a deeply contradictory individual. He shows both kindness and wickedness. He tells the nihilists he won't allow them to murder his friend to make a political statement, then stands idly by as they do so. He feels pain at his wife's suffering, then has her murdered. He is a classic Byronic hero, in a warped sense -- talented and perfect on paper, but bored of life. Completely indifferent to the friendships of others and driven to ennui and disrepair by the world that exists on a level lower than his potential.

Stavrogin shows no ability to make relationships, and no ability to cash in on his talent and potential in any way beyond his reputation. In a sense, one could effectively summarize that aspect of Stavrogin as a lack of motivation to assimilate with the less talented. Stavrogin never met a single person in Demons who he felt was his equal. Everyone was lower-class, a subhuman compared to Stavrogin's on-paper excellence. This lack of empathy and lack of ability to do anything but assert his own superiority when faced with interacting with lower-tier citizens reflects on his actions, but also on how he lived his life. Stavrogin takes on ridiculous, unnecessary feats just to see if they would affect his countenance and force him to feel. Stavrogin's extraordinary abilities desensitized him to normal stimulation. Stavrogin felt he needed to go one step further, for his own sake -- he couldn't simply duel someone he wronged, he had to fire intentionally in the air to mock his dueling parter's poor shot, then shrug and leave without shooting his dueling partner as he wallowed in his failure. He couldn't simply have an affair, he had to kiss the wife of a nobleman in front of the nobleman's face, at a party. He couldn't simply mock his heritage by marrying low, he had to marry a mentally challenged slave.

The acts of Stavrogin aren't acts of bravery or courage -- often, as in the duel (where he was nearly hit three times and intentionally missed his own shots as an inexplicable and mocking joke), they're the acts of foolishness and completely detached from reality. But foolishness isn't the right word for his primary motivator -- for Stavrogin, they're acts of curiosity. A man who feels he is above God -- as Stavrogin says in his culminating confession -- attempting to find his philosophical limits and his stance on good versus evil. And disturbingly discovering he had no limits to his depravity, no personal line between good and evil. He could not bring himself to feel as a rule, only for the most absurd of his sins could he come close to approximating what it was like to feel. Stavrogin did great things, and he did terrible things. And the scariest part, perhaps, was that he had no real motive behind them. He simply did them to see if he could ever do anything to affect himself.

• • •

As a person, Kobe is not Stavrogin. Nor anything close. Stavrogin is a depraved and challenging character, and in making this comparison, I'm in no way trying to make a personal judgment on Kobe's head or heart. He is not Stavrogin. But in his game, there are aesthetic similarities. And in the philosophy that guides his decisionmaking, the similarities would be (as Hastings said) somewhat irresponsible to ignore. As a basketball player, Kobe is similarly talented to Stavrogin. Molded from a young age to be a basketball star, Kobe's spent his entire life in pursuit of excellence for his talent. And psychologically, that slightly differentiates him from Stavrogin. Because Stavrogin is good enough that he needs not pursue anything tangible, or any validation of his skills. But this isn't to say Stavrogin is absent a pursuit of his own -- in his previously described attempts to find his limits, Stavrogin discovered he could not feel.

In his fruitless pursuit of empathy, and in pursuit of humility, Stavrogin squanders his talents and commits remarkable sins. They are sins that make his final confessions the out-of-place final chapter of Demons (banned in the original Russian but was eventually unearthed and re-added by Dostoevsky researchers) -- titled "At Tikhon's" -- one of the most disturbing chapters in all of literature. Stavrogin's sins cannot be properly assessed within his moral code, until one realizes he never really had one. As an aesthetic complement to Kobe Bryant, you can't do much better than the unconscionable self-obsession of Stavrogin and his lack of human empathy. Kobe is not a player opposed -- on its face -- to winning "the wrong way." He doesn't mind taking half his team's shots, because he has no patience or time to spare for those of lesser talent. You watch Kobe play, and for every time a teammate shanks one of his perfect passes (as Kobe is a gifted and talented passer, despite his distaste for showing it), you can see in his mind the wheels turning. The mental note. The sense that -- for the rest of the game -- Kobe feels he can't rely on that player, even if the player worked hard and the miss was in no way their fault. Because they missed. In his mind, Kobe doesn't miss an important shot. A shot off one of his passes is important, to Kobe, and a player who misses it is a persona non grata.

Curious of what I mean? Look at some tape. Watch Andrew Bynum, and how quickly Kobe decides to stop passing to him every time he misses the ball. Watch as Kobe takes on ridiculous feats -- not in pursuit of feeling, as with Stavrogin, but simply because he desires the challenge. Kobe is notorious for playing through injury, and at this point, the parallel between his injury habits and Stavrogin's detachment from reality is too ripe to pass up. Kobe is essentially blowing up his future body in pursuit of revisiting his younger days. He's taking up too many possessions, playing too many minutes, and has no motivation to assimilate with the less talented Lakers around him in a coherent offense. He and his fans are desensitized to the reality of his injuries -- to the terrible arthritis he will live with for the rest of his life, the balky knee that will require incredible feats of medicine to stay healthy as he gets older, the tear in his wrist that would normally require serious surgery -- all in yet another attempt to challenge himself. To continue winning and scoring and being all-caps KOBE despite his age and the gradual decline of his game. The desire to beat father time, to leave the game on his own terms, to take as many shots as he possibly can even when it hurts the team.

Kobe's motivations, while generally malleable towards winning, have never been solely about the rings or the scoring titles. It's been a story written about Kobe, about winning on his own terms. A man whose career was solely about winning would never have let his game 7 meltdown versus the Suns happen. He wouldn't continue to take completely inefficient possessions and ignore the incredible second options the Lakers have always provided him that he more than any Laker fan seems to properly value. In a close game, you aren't playing the Lakers. You're playing Kobe, by himself, because winning isn't nearly as important as winning on his own terms. He has no conscience about the shots he takes and the damage he does to his body, because to him, this is a challenge. It's Kobe versus an army of imaginary haters, Kobe versus his body, Kobe versus Jordan. These are the standards Kobe Bryant often seems to hold himself to, in the game of basketball. This is his legacy, though he doesn't care much for it. Kobe doesn't care where you place him on a top ten list, really -- he cares only insofar as he wants to prove those that dislike him wrong. That's as far as he'll go.

• • •

Stavrogin ends the novel proper in a manner that, to the reader, continues to make him as inscrutable as a character could possibly be. In short? He kills himself. For a man so devoid of emotion, so lacking in human empathy, so impossibly detached from the world around him -- doing that really makes little sense. There are two primary ways to understand it. Either Stavrogin kills himself in one final self-destructive pursuit of something that makes him feel, or he kills himself because he's been lying on his face the whole time. Stavrogin does in fact feel. And his sins -- too weighty to disclose here, the reveal too important to the novel for me to spoil it for you -- finally weighed upon his soul enough that he could no longer live with himself.

When Demons was first brought to America, it was brought by Constance Garnett (an object of my loathing, but that's a subject for another day) under the title The Possessed. The Russian title is actually "bez-ii", a word that is loosely translated as a plural form of "evil spirit." The problem with the original translation is that it ends up completely changing the meaning of the novel -- the characters in the book are simply not possessed by forces external, and it's silly to think so. To think that is to utterly misunderstand Dostoevsky's point. Rather, the characters themselves are the possessors. They are the ones whose ideas and depravity possess the minds of the men that follow them. They are the ones to come up with their own philosophy, and they are the ones responsible for their own actions.

Kobe Bryant is not an equivalent to Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, and they are not comparable on most levels. There is no need whatsoever to list off Kobe's sins, or even attempt that comparison. Because as a person, Kobe could never reach the complex and inscrutable level that Stavrogin arrives at as a character. But in his game, and in his utter lack of respect for his own future -- as a human being, not as a basketball player -- the parallel both to Stavrogin and the novel itself becomes noteworthy. Kevin Harlan can yell about Chris Paul having no respect for human life all he wants. He'll be right -- Paul's empathy is similarly lacking, for better or for worse. But Chris Paul's lack of empathy will never come anywhere close to the philosophical purity of a player like Kobe, and in his late-career return to his prime 2006-2007 game, Kobe seems intent on reminding everyone who the reigning king of detachment is. It is he, and no matter what kind of new talent enters the league, not a soul will ever match him.

Kobe's self-obsession and his desire and need for an eternal challenge will be his real legacy. And the way he has taken the Jordan dichotomy and altered it to fit his designs points to the original flaw in the title -- it is not Kobe who is possessed by his own designs, but Kobe who is the possessor of others. He has full ownership of all that he's done, and the mindset he's brought to this league. He is the one who has, to some extent, remade the league in his image. And he is the one who, when all is said and done, succeeded. At what cost? Good question, especially if you're one of his fans. Because worrying about his health is something that even I (a man who doesn't much like Kobe) have been partial to do. But please, don't kid yourself.

If he cared about that, do you really think he'd be playing on that wrist right now?

I am afraid of showing greatness of soul. I know that it will be another sham again—the last deception in an endless series of deceptions. What good is there in deceiving oneself? Simply to play at greatness of soul? Indignation and shame I can never feel, therefore not despair.

-- Nikolai Stavrogin's suicide note.

Hey, everybody! This is the second edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these is rather simple -- the ratings intend to take the predictions that STEVE NASH spat out before any games were played and update throughout the season with what teams have shown so far. The long and short of it? They're a simple re-weighting of current season SRS with the STEVE NASH projections then ran through our Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. Upon re-weighting, I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City and calculate predicted home wins and predicted road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Which leads to the STEVE NASH end-state projections of what this season will look like -- an odd way to do Power Rankings, but hey. We're an odd blog. Without further ado: the updated NASH rankings. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Mavs fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 10th

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

A few observations, as I try to create a proper format for these ranking posts.

THREE UP, THREE DOWN

• UP: OKC, PHI, UTA. An interesting group, these three. The Thunder's rise in the rankings has less been the model becoming convinced of their dominance (note their predicted SRS is just 3rd in the west, barely ahead of the Lakers) and more based on their simply continuing to win games. The model currently predicts the Thunder will go just 31-24 to end out the year, but their torrid 9-2 start has them in pole position to win the West's top seed. In Philly's case, it's simply the model updating the preseason projection (6th seed and a 0.500 record) to match what we've seen already -- a team that has destroyed all comers and looks far superior to most teams in the east. Utah is an interesting case -- nobody really knows WHY they're doing so well, but they're doing pretty incredibly well at this point, and need to be taken seriously as an actual threat to make the playoffs. Not that they really want to make the playoffs, as that'll set their rebuilding back a year, but still.

• DOWN: DET, HOU, MIN. Less interesting. All of these teams had terrible weeks -- Detroit got blasted by a team ranked rather low in the NASH view of things, and Minnesota continued to punt winnable games with low execution. And, you know, get blown out by the Cleveland Cavaliers. That doesn't help. Houston, on the other hand? They're coming off of a remarkably dismal performance against a poor Charlotte defense, and (like the Wolves) continue to barely-show-up for games they should have in hand. Kyle Lowry being out is the main driver, but really, their atrocious defense falls squarely on McHale's broad shoulders for imposing a terrible system and refusing to properly leverage the pieces he has to make a coherent whole. Just a disappointing team overall, and while NASH still has it in the playoffs, you have to assume the picture gets darker fast if they don't shape up.

• • •

GENERAL DISCUSSION.

This week, in an effort to fix a few errors in the last edition (the spreadsheet is updated, tho the image that accompanied the post isn't) I enacted some changes. First, I reweighted the predictions post-generation in order to have a season with the correct number of games won and games lost. In STEVE NASH's case, it was predicting teams would win about 930 games this season and lose 1050. That may seem like a wholly reasonable prediction given how dismal many of the games have been this season, but that isn't actually possible. I also added a home/away component. The rankings are now well aware of how many home/away games a team has played up to this point, and generates its predictions with some help from Evan's aforementioned HCA rankings. So those are some model improvements that are immediately evident. The "previous week" part of the rankings is a re-ran version of week #1's rankings to account for these changes. They aren't all perfect, but they're improving.

Overall, the picture is rather customary of what we tend to see in the regular season. The model predicts that the worst western team (the Sacramento Kings) will still manage to post a better record than five Eastern teams. Which is crazy, silly, but completely expected given the paucity of talent on those particular five eastern teams. The West is wide open, though the Thunder have finally pulled away from the pack in the NASH rankings. Even though it projects the Thunder to end the season with an SRS below San Antonio and Denver, the Thunder now have around a 30% chance to win the West in STEVE's estimation. And beyond the Thunder, the West is stuck in what essentially amounts to a holding pattern with four teams tied for second. The Spurs and the Nuggets are projected at 41 wins, with the Lakers and Blazers both projected at 40. On the plus side for fans of those 5 teams, no team in the West looks remotely as good as any of those five, giving each of those five greater than 90% odds of making the playoffs. Beyond those five, a remarkable 8 teams have > 10% chance of making the playoffs -- from Minnesota to Houston -- which points to how incredibly wide open the Western playoff picture is right now.

As for the East, it's as starkly contrasting as the West is open. The Bulls and Heat are easily the two best teams in the East, and there's an 80% chance that one of those two teams gets the 1 seed. The Sixers are still on a starkly upward trajectory, and rate out as the only other 40 win team in the conference right now. Beyond them? Only 9 teams have a >10% chance of making the playoffs (as opposed to the West's 13) and there's an incredibly stark dropoff after the 3 seed, with a bunch of middling teams vying for just-over-0.500 records (including the disappointing Celtics and Knicks). The only real drama that STEVE predicts comes from Milwaukee's quixotic playoff quest -- despite their awful turn without Bogut earlier this week, they still project out as a 0.500 team the rest of the season. If they can get some luck with injuries and their defense resumes form, STEVE believes them to have a great shot at knocking either Atlanta or Indiana out of the playoffs.

And that's about all we've got for you today. Go back to bed, STEVE NASH.

• • •

That's all for now, friends. We'll be back tomorrow with, most likely, the resumption of our Player Capsules series. Perhaps some other stuff. We've got a lot of content coming down the pipeline for you all, it's just a struggle to find time to get it all done. But we'll live. Hope tonight's games are fantastic, and we'll see you next week as STEVE NASH is proven wrong in hilarious fashion about the Mavs once they go on a 20 game win streak (in one week) and lead the league with a 243.2 SRS in seven days' time. That's how it goes, sometimes.

A 19 year old boy was shot and killed on Sunday. Over shoes and a coat. They were a $200 pair of shoes. Three or four men, at a bus stop. It was a shade after 2:30 in the morning. According to police reports, the men rolled up in an SUV. They got out. Shots were fired -- some by the assailants, and some by another person whose identity is currently unknown. They stole his shoes, his coat, and nothing else. He leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend, his almost-finished high school diploma, and a family that loved him. He is dead.

I repeat: a boy lost everything over a pair of shoes.

• • •

There's a concept related to this that became -- for a very short period this summer -- ubiquitous in the NBA blogosphere. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article about it for Grantland. I refer to the concept of "psychic value." Essentially, psychic value is the mental value we assign to things beyond their actual worth -- it's what makes a Van Gogh worth far more than the canvas and the paint it's composed of, and what makes the hilarious signed photo of Matt Bonner being guarded by Shane Battier in my living room more valuable than any other photo of Matt Bonner I've ever seen in my life.

It's also the reason that, upon losing the clipboard I'd used as a drawing board and notepad since the age of two in one of my class buildings, I spent almost a year keeping in touch with the building's janitors trying to find it. I basically did their job with them for a week, searching desperately for my beloved clipboard. And I called/visited often after I ended that stage of the search. I told them (and my friends that were wondering why I was mopping floors and cleaning classrooms) that it was because there were important papers on the clipboard. Really? There weren't anything but sketches and loan paperwork. Nothing I couldn't redraw, nothing I couldn't re-print. The papers didn't matter. It was the clipboard. Even though it was, again, a broken wooden clipboard from the early 90s. So many hours of my life, quite literally wasted. I don't really regret it. Because if I'd given up on it, I'm sure I'd feel even worse about losing it than I already do.

The reason I mention all this is to highlight just how far psychic value can make you go in pursuit of your psychic desires. If you value something enough, you can quickly become obsessed. Which (admittedly) isn't always strictly a bad thing. I certainly can't say that. Obsession can be good, in a backhanded sense, if it's in pursuit of excellence. I've certainly spent much of my life obsessed with the pursuit of success. Being good at what I do. Being appreciated, content, et cetera. In sports, we tend to idealize obsession from our heroes and laugh about it in our villains -- for instance, Tim Duncan's offseason workouts with Danny Green and James Anderson were an awesome story to me. The story of Kobe staying after a game and taking umpteen-hundred shots was (on the other hand) an object for laughs. Begrudging respect, but laughs all the same.

But this obsession -- the extremities of psychic value -- is essentially why David Lee Robinson is dead.

Really. Let's get some perspective here. An SUV costs quite a bit of money. Even a used one. A new one can run you anywhere from $25,000-$40,000 -- assuming it's heavily used, that's still going to run you up to $10,000. SUVs are expensive. Handguns? According to the Washington Post, it costs about $833.69 to get a handgun in Washington D.C. I doubt they went through legal channels, but it's still a $500 and up proposition to get yourself your own handgun even through the seedier means. Or perhaps they stole both, though I'd never deign to assume theft, even in these situations. Because I don't know the people who robbed and killed David Lee Robinson. I don't really want to. But the fact remains -- they definitively owned both those things. Far more valuable than the shoes by any metric of economic value, no matter how they got it. And they still felt that a 19-year-old's shoes were reason enough to rob a man, and reason enough to pull a gun on him. Reason enough to end his life. That's the psychic value that they -- and a non-insignificant number of people -- assign to sneakers. Jordans. Nice kicks.

There is a line that separates this kind of a sad, distressing obsession from the normal obsessions that we experience and thrive upon in our everyday lives. It's really a hazier line than we'd like to think, when you get to the fringe cases. Try drawing the line between the obsession that drives a man to value a pair of sneakers over the life of his fellow human being and the obsession that drives a fan to make furious and serious death threats against Otis Smith and his family. The line between this ridiculous crime and the obsession that drives Charlie Villanueva to threaten to kill Ryan Hollins (and later charge the Cavalier locker room searching for him). There are darker spots in the NBA. Things that we'd rather not talk about, much less consider ourselves a part of. And for the most part? These aren't your everyday fans or your everyday players I'm talking about -- most of them are, like you and I, in it for fun alone. We watch and play this game because it's fun. It's a way to make a great, amazing living. A wonderful time sink. It even helps people.

But here we are. Nobody should ever value a thing like a pair of sneakers over a human being. Hate humanity all you'd like, but love your fellow man -- at least above a pair of kicks. We can be fools and louts and all sorts of things. We can do terrible, awful things as collective masses. But value people as people, not objects or concepts or items. We are tangible. We are real. We are human. In the end, to the man that killed David Lee Robinson, his victim was worth less than that. Less, even, than the shoes on his feet. And there's not a damn bit of good that can come out of that.

I really don't really know what more to say. Rest in peace, David Lee Robinson.

Hey, everybody! This is the first edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these rankings is pretty simple -- the ratings intend to take the predictions that STEVE NASH spat out and update throughout the season with what teams have shown so far. I am rather busy, so I'm going to delay an explanation of how exactly we're going to do this until next week's edition -- this week, I'm merely going to post the rankings, some observations, and my thoughts on teams under/overrated in them. As a basic note: they're a simple re-weighting of current season SRS and the STEVE NASH predictions then ran through our Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. Without further ado: the updated NASH rankings. Keep in mind these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all.

• • •

Click the image for the spreadsheet itself, where you can also view the model's updated predictions by conference.

A few key observations:

• THREE OVERRATED BY THE MODEL: Spurs, Grizzlies, Jazz.

  Well, what'd you expect? The model doesn't know that Manu is out for two months, to this point, and the Spurs were quite a bit more impressive in their first five games than the 3-2 record would suggest. The model still predicts them to win the West, though at only 1.5 rounded wins ahead of a whole gaggle of teams at the 37 win mark. The Grizzlies, as well, are overrated -- they'll start to come back to Earth soon, but without Randolph, their big man rotation runs about one man deep. Which is awful. Marrasse Speights will help, but he's no cure-all. The Grizz have looked awful so far and Randolph's injury couldn't have come at a worse time. And finally, the Jazz -- they've looked quite a bit worse than a 30 win team thus far, and they've faced teams with key injuries and players in absentia (Lakers with Bynum out, Bucks with Bogut out, et cetera). They're likely to come down in a few weeks. I'd expect the Spurs to be down to 2nd or 3rd in the West in a few weeks (barring me adding a Manu adjustment to push them down sooner) and the Grizz to a well-below 50% chance at the Western playoffs pretty soon.

• THREE UNDERRATED BY THE MODEL: Blazers, Mavs, Sixers.
  
  The Blazers are rather self explanatory -- they've been playing like the best team in the West (and arguably the entire league) so far, and it really isn't that close. The Mavs looked atrocious to start the year but are beginning to round into form, and with games this week against the reeling Spurs, the depressing Hornets (sans Eric Gordon!), the Pistons, and the way worse than expected Celtics? They could relatively easily pull off a 4-0 week that has everyone completely forgetting about their early season struggles. The Sixers have impressed, but I'm not sure the model or anyone else is properly rating how great their early season has been -- they have yet to play a home game (or, shockingly, a single game against an Eastern conference team) and yet they're 3-2 on the year with a load of refuse ahead. Their home opener is on Friday, and I'm guessing they'll beast it. This team isn't getting nearly enough credit for the insane performance they've had so far this year.

• COMMENT: WHITHER DOMINANCE?

  Just an interesting note. This model is designed to regress towards the mean, it's true. So the win totals probably are going to get beaten pretty handily by the end of the year. But it's actually rather fitting with the season thus far -- there simply hasn't been a fully-put-together dominant team in this season yet. The Thunder were 5-0, yes, but they won them on incredibly narrow margins and weren't dominating anyone -- the Mavs and the Blazers both took advantage, and they look thoroughly mortal as the favorites in the West. The model certainly wouldn't call them favorites (though I would) -- the Blazers, Nuggets, Lakers, and Spurs (had Manu not gone out) all looked to be stronger picks for the West's regular season champion at this point in the season. The Heat, on the other hand, have impressed about as much as expected, but STILL haven't really solidified their hold on the East because the Bulls look absolutely stellar a few games into the season.

"The Italians have a phrase, inventa la partita. Translated, it means to “invent the game.” A phrase often used by soccer coaches and journalists, it is now, more often than not, used as a lament. For in watching modern players with polished but plastic skills, they wonder at the passing of soccer genius—Pele, di Stefano, Puskas—players whose minds and bodies in not so rare moments created something unfound in coaching manuals, a new and continuously changing game for others to aspire to."

--Ken Dryden, "The Game"

A couple weeks ago, Aaron wrote this must-read piece about tenacious Spurs rookie Kawhi Leonard that got a lot of traction. The money quote is probably this take on Duncan:

"Never mind that Duncan on defense has always been one of the most beautiful things the league has to offer. The defensive structure of the Spurs as a whole, really, but Duncan especially: Tim’s defense has always inhabited a brave world oscillating between the bounds of reactive and impressionistic fluidity on one end to a prescriptive and predictive rigidity on the other. Duncan’s defense has always been equal parts shutting down what the offense gives him and preventing the offense from giving him anything he can’t handle in the first place, through reputation and savvy alone."

This quote hints at what makes a player great or interesting, as opposed to merely good or simply lacking. When we're making projections and figuring out which team will hold the trophy in June, we sometimes talk about where in the rotation the D-league players come up. We also like to talk about the black holes on offense, the players that make terrible rotations on defense, the players that can't buy a rebound, and so on. And this makes sense: Often when a team gets eliminated you can point to a single thing that went wrong, a single matchup or difference in depth at a position that got exploited over and over. But this is only half the story.

Basketball is not just a game of mistakes, of - you might say - mere violations in the fabric of a designated right way. We all know about players that defend a star perfectly and have to live with a mismatch or an offensive clinic. It's that Dirk triple-move on poor Nick Collison and more generally it's Dirk's greatness in creating space. It's Chris Paul slowing the game to a halt or bringing it to its true, blistering speed. Skills and creativity determine far more than mistakes and holes at the highest level of play. There's a affirmative, creative, impressionistic, reactive part of basketball that brooks no law and finds no need of patterns, and it's where the soul of a great basketball player is found. It's the oscillation between the reactive/impressionistic and prescriptive/prepared - and the total, competitively-motivated embrace of both tendencies - that seems to me the essence of a baller and the poverty of a scrub.

• • •

What do I mean? Well, take Manu Ginobili. Or Kobe. Or Wade. They are all students of the game, all with relatively great vision. All of them are fundamentally solid and laden with substance and knowledge in every facet of the game. They know when to set screens, they all can play in the marginal inches of space enough that tiny rules changes actually mean something big to them, and (most tellingly) they all troll for free throws and any cheap, marginal advantages they can get without being dirty. They all seem to love contact, and besides a nasty tendency towards the heat-check three, each of them is about as efficient on offense as you could imagine shooting guards of their respective builds to be. Opponents regard the trio well, or, at the very least, begrudgingly regard them as great competitors. They are about as solid and as substantive as possible for players whose job is to hurl a ball 30 feet at a rim with roughly 38% accuracy. They all understand the game and have - through practice and dedication - simply plugged all the holes. They don't often make mental mistakes because the rulebook and the playbook are burnt into their brains.

And yet, if that was all these players did, well, they wouldn't be so familiar to us. It's not just that their minds and actions are one dull stream of hit-your-free-throws-and-pass-to-get-a-better-shot-and-set-a-screen-to-get-open straight out of Hoosiers. No, they live in the moment and see the floor in its totality and use their intelligence, the perceived "flow" of the game and how they can change it, the observed behavior of their opponents, and their creativity: all of it they use to react to the situation at hand and create plays and strategies that no one has ever seen before, and possibly that no one ever will see again. They put their individual (and in the case of great tandems, their collective) stamps on the game and in doing so embody both the letter and the spirit of the game. That's what it means to be a baller. If you could take out the outcome, the possibility of injury, and all the exogenous factors, these guys would still be appointment viewing in a 5v5 scrimmage, because they can still make goals for themselves and plans for the team and then execute them with frightening intelligence, efficiency, tenacity, and creativity.

A scrub, on the other hand, lacks some great deal of either the improvisational or the prescriptive. There are a lot of endogenous and exogenous reasons for a player to be a scrub: Maybe it's because they're cynically jacking up threes for the stats and a big payday. Maybe they lack the fundamentals or a strong grasp of the flow of the game. Maybe their style (especially in the short term) clashes with that of their teammates or the officiating crew. Maybe they just don't live too much in the moment and have drilled a lot of shots in practice and in college without thinking about say, the inefficiency of a contested 20-footer. There are a lot of solid reasons, yes, but in the end tally (almost without exception) all the discerning viewer will note is a note of disgust or boredom, perhaps with a side of vexed confusion. Examples: "Why did you screen that random player on the weakside after passing to the wing, Mike Bibby? What possible purpose could that serve?" or "Why did you jack up that three, Antawn Jamison? Don't you realize there are much better shots your All-Star-level point could have helped you with?" or "Why are you in the game, Roger Mason Jr.? Is this the end of days?"

When I was bouncing previous drafts of the post off Aaron, he brought up the "teaching example" of Kevin Martin, who qualifies as a scrub despite being a legitimately above-average player. Every single one of his games he pulls out the same three tricks on offense built on a good mid/long-range shot with a high release point and an ability to get to the line. There's hardly any creative force behind it, and any narrative you try to project into his will as a competitor is probably false. He knows what to do with a pass and an open shot, and he can get open. Is Martin a bad player? Of course not, but he's not the force behind the points he gets. His highlight films are random sequences of mostly-assisted jump shots and lateral fades along with apologetic dunks. As Aaron puts it, "When Kevin Martin scores 10 points in the 4th quarter, he scores them. When Manu scores points in the 4th quarter, he causes them. They each are great shooters and may be equally assisted. But the way they score, the way they improvise, the way they read defenses? Drastically different. When Manu scores, you remember it. When Kevin Martin scores, the recap notes it." Extrapolating, I'll add that Kevin Martin is like shopping at K-Mart to buy one item, while watching Manu is like an eclectic imports store that has the same item. You'll remember to mention the imports store when you tell your friends where you got it.

P.S. In video-game circles, there's a pretty famous "Playing to Win" article which also designates "scrubs" by their approach. I mention it only because it's a similar, but mostly orthogonal take. The nearest analogous concepts in basketball would be Hack-a-Shaq, flopping, and other strategies on the margins of the rules or that conflict with the social conventions of basketball, and the "scrubs" there would be players with objections to these strategies. It's an interesting article, at least.

• • •

Okay, I think I've explored this dichotomy of ballers and scrubs enough, and I'd like to set the stage for a conclusion that actually uses the title. After all, I can hear your questions: "What's with that title? Do you think you're FreeDarko or something? Who the hell do you think you are? Are you just trying to drive traffic by using a popular athlete in your title? Come off it: it's not clever. Die or retire." Whoa, ouch. That's very painful, Internal Voice of Doubt. Let me explain the title: Steve Nash has led dozens of inexplicably awesome random regular season games in the last decade, more than any other player. And Nash is unquestionably a baller. Sure, his defense is hilarious sometimes, but on offense, and in terms of the general flow of a game, Nash is the consummate intelligent, fierce, grinding competitor, making scrubs legit, making already legit players into ballers, and taking ballers into another sphere entirely. When you have enough ballers like Nash, Ginobili, Kobe, Duncan, KG, CP3, and so on in a game, and their talents are allowed to flourish, and the talents involved on both sides are close enough in skill level, then you have the potential for a game to reach the highest emotional, logical, and spiritual heights that basketball has to offer.

John Nash's famous "Nash Equilibrium" is a concept from mathematical game theory. John Nash's games (and forgive the glossing-over) often involve developing strategies in the presence of perfect knowledge; that is, "knowing that your opponent knows that you know that he knows..." out to infinity, reaching an stable equilibrium in a surprising number of cases. Basketball (unlike John Nash's often simple, stark games) isn't a sport of perfect knowledge, but a sport where a discerning player's mind can create a gigantic space of possibilities at any moment that his willful body can navigate efficiently. When a game has 10 such discerning players, each pulling and tugging and pushing at the fulcrum points of a game with screens, cuts, switches, and flares, the game moves asymptotically towards a sort of equilibrium that is absurd and singular and revelatory and transcendent. That's the Steve Nash Equilibrium to me. And given all the incredible games he's given us (and given the sad possibility he might retire without an NBA title), I thought it'd be only fair to give Steve Nash the title of this concept. Call it a consolation prize if you must, but at worst it's a special, important consolation prize that captures what is great about Nash.

Of course, despite all this talk of transcendence, perfection, and stability, the element of chance is still present, even when you have 10 ballers at their peak abilities. There are always going to be factors the players can't control, like imperfect calculations and straight-up missing information in every player's literal blind spots (not to mention physical limitations), and chance is the natural outcome of such imperfect knowledge and control. And even the best game can hinge on the inches of chance. But the forces of chance present in the best games are not quite the same as the forces of chance present in those awful games filled with two teams full of scrubs jacking up threes. The mathematical probabilities might be identical, but the whole tenor and aspect and casual chains are different. Almost by definition, these scrubs rob these forces of chance of its connection to human intelligence and animal spirit, making chance into nothing but inelegant, dismal, impersonal luck, no different from a crap shoot or a hand of blackjack. By contrast, the type of chance that dominates a game of 10 ballers - in its look and its reach to the heights - aspires to the will of the gods.

“Lord, thank you,” [12th-man Bell, the only senior on the team,] said, “Thank you for letting us be a part of this game and this season. Thank you for letting me be part of this team and for the people in this room. I know they’ll come back and win this tournament next year and no one will cheer harder for them than me. Thank you for making them part of my life.”

--Forever's Team, John Feinstein, after Duke lost to Kentucky in the 1978 NCAA championship game

But ask us after a game. After we’ve played the Bruins or the__Islanders; after a playoff game. If you don’t understand the excited__tumble of words, look at our gray-white faces, at eyes that glitter and__pop at you. Look at our sweaty smiles, at hands that won’t shut up. An__hour later, a day’s tension sucked away, look at our bodies. All gangly__and weak, so weak we laugh it feels so good. Look at our faces, at__smiles distant and content.

[...] Coaches like Vince Lombardi and George Allen have told us we must play for certain reasons. As children, our parents and coaches told us something else. But after the Bruins series, Chartraw came much closer, "I don't play for money," he laughed, "I play for the party after."

--The Game, Ken Dryden

So the other day, Aaron linked me to Craig Lyndall's fantastic article about chasing rings. I think a lot of it rang true and if you're into the experience of being a fan (quite a general category), it's a must-read. The piece is earnest, filled with credible self-doubt (who doesn't like Big Z?), and attacks a foundation of NBA culture, namely that the ring is king.

Lyndall successfully deconstructs the notion that a ring is meaningful in an absolute sense and in and of itself, which is a common premise used to justify ring chasing by players ranging from players with such diverse backgrounds as Wilt, Barkley, Chris Paul, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas. Essentially, Lyndall argues that a given ring is only meaningful in the context of the complex circumstances which produced it: The ownership, the fanbase, the locker room, the coaches, the games, and finally, the players themselves as individuals. This is a very clever and important point: A ring (especially for an older vet like Ilguaskas) only matters to the extent that that player is able to make meaningful relationships with the others (most importantly to Lyndall, the fans) involved in the title.

And Big Z, Lyndall argues, would have gotten something transient and ultimately meaningless in his ring if the Heat had beaten the Mavs this June. Without the total emotional involvement of the Cleveland fans that had stood by him for so many years in recovery, without a fanbase that had come to respect him as a great player cut down by injuries, and a class act and a franchise cornerstone at that, a title for Big Z would be a relatively hollow achievement. There was a deep and mutual respect between Ilgauskas and the city of Cleveland which would have made a ring with the Cavaliers as sweet as any title could ever be, at 5 mpg or 35.

On the other hand, the Heat fans, not having much of anything to do with Ilgauskas beforehand, would instead (by and large) see him only as a limiting factor at C that rode in on LeBron's coattails. They would see only the clumsy veteran that couldn't get it done anymore, and possibly never had gotten it done. Juwan Howard was and is in much the same boat. (Both these players, it should be noted, have apparently had a real and positive impact on team morale which has been widely reported. Still.) To all but the most careful of Heat fans, the emotional connection between Ilgauskas and the fans simply wouldn't have existed. That doesn't sound like a very special thing.

One reason I like Lyndall's approach is that it forces us to confront bare statements about certain players being better than others because they have more rings. The question then becomes: What rings? To what extent were they involved in producing them? Did their ring represent a culmination of their career and fan narratives, or was it just a vet-min, 15 mpg swan song in a different city? Bill Simmons' Alpha Dog-Everyone Else approach is problematic, but really, it's one step away from a much better question: Was this player directly responsible for their ring?

But look at the actual wording of a few crucial paragraphs of Lyndall's piece and see if the wording doesn't clash with your own experience (bold mine):

"Championships are complex things. It is a complex achievement in team sports because it relies on so many relationships. It encompasses relationships between players, teams, coaches, owners and most importantly fans. I hate to put fans first as some sort of cheap ploy to get everyone on my side, but it is true. Holding up a trophy is meaningless without a bunch of crazies in the seats screaming their heads off. You can’t get showered with praise in a parade if there aren’t a million fans lined up along the route. We can’t win the championships as fans, but we also shouldn’t sell ourselves short as a part of the equation. NBA players, almost as a rule in this day and age, sure are selling us short."

"Let’s pretend that the Miami Heat defeated the Dallas Mavericks last year. Zydrunas would have gotten a ring. He would have attended a parade. He would have held up a trophy. Then what? Professional athletes rely on their history and legacy and their relationships with fans usually far outlast their time playing the sport. Zydrunas Ilgauskas was never going to set up shop as a fixture in Miami. Some Cavs fans might have felt good for Zydrunas, I guess, but there’s no longevity to it. In the end it is a really fleeting feeling."

My problem with this is not that the stuff about fans is categorically false: All of the above holds true very often, but holds true in a highly contextual way. Sure the fan-athlete relationship outweighs the time spent playing the sport. But what about long-lasting athlete-athlete relationships? What about the brilliant coaches in college sports that have (in their own ways) changed the way we look at team basketball? It's telling that the neatest context for Lyndall's above statements comes from Cleveland sports. It's not a "cheap ploy" to invoke the fans; it's the very context from which Lyndall is writing: A Cleveland title would be inseparable from the long train of "almosts" and archetypal Four Horsemen that have conspired to push Cleveland to the edge of titletown, only to pull it away at the last second through fluke, opponent miracle, or dark, cynical work. The city hasn't won a title in something like 50 years, and yet they have followed their teams with tenacity and dedication. The team that finally wins a title will be heroic, enshrined inseparably from the fabric of the city. It will truly be one of the city's titles, not just that team's.

But in so many other cases (including the two accounts I started this piece with), the fans seem to be tertiary to a) the satisfaction of the players and coaches' intrinsic competitiveness and b) the relationships the team has among themselves as a collective. Bill Russell and Boston had a tenuous allegiance that easily veered into outright hostility at times (which had a lot to do with racism in that era). Russell and the city have patched up a great deal of their differences (albeit very slowly), and surely that must matter to Russell. But, if anything, doesn't Russell's jaw-dropping, undeniable success mean more in the context of the adverse hostility he faced? And, given that Boston wasn't behind Russell 100%, isn't it fair for Russell to look instead to the beautiful collective basketball he and coach Red Auerbach envisioned and implemented, to look instead to the relationships he made with his team and coach as far more than a consolation prize? What about Russell's legendary respect for the other greats of his era? Where does that fit into a fans-first narrative? Sure, the screaming fans may have added something to his enjoyment, and their gradual reconciliation with Russell must mean something big, but in the meantime doesn't Russell have a lot of history, legacy, and - in the end - a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic joy behind his rings to look back on? Wasn't he throwing up every night because winning mattered to him more than anything? Couldn't you say exactly the same thing for Jordan? What about Mo Malone, Julius Erving and the 1983 Sixers? Wasn't that mostly about a group of players (Malone included) that had made it right to the edge of the mountain so many times but couldn't quite clear the top? Of course the rabid fanbase matters. Of course the title is very special for the City of Brotherly Love. And of course I'm playing The Sound of Philly by MFSB right now (people all over the world!). But that title had its own narratives, its own relationships, and its own sense of special history, even without reference to the great fan base.

My point is not that fans don't matter, but that in nearly every single primary account I've ever read from athletes and coaches (no exceptions really come to mind for me), it's the internal obsession of the athletes and "the party after" the win that matter most, and the fans form a much smaller (though important) part of the equation. The fans pay the salaries, yes, the fans help us make sense of the greatness of an athlete, and, in the Cleveland perspective from which Lyndall is writing, the fans are an inseparable part of a team's success. But in general it's not the first well of feeling or justification for an athlete or a coach to drink from.

This season, Big Z could've won a title with one of his longtime friends and teammates who would get much of the credit, but who would gushingly praise Ilguaskas and his work ethic, character, and accomplishments. Despite playing for a completely indifferent fan base, Big Z could have provided a real and important consolation prize to the city that dislikes his new team but still loves him dearly, and he could have had a small vindication for his career by being a small basketball and a large spiritual presence on a team that would have been objectively the best for that moment in time.

The fans from the city that made him a man surely must matter. But regardless of this, or of how you feel about the Heat (or the Mavs), if the Heat had won, that locker room thousands of miles away still would have been special and the fond feelings for and from a gentle giant would have stayed with him for a lifetime. That vindication - that feeling of ultimate success - truly matters, and not just as a transient afterthought.

“Who’s going to pull the button on it? When Chris says he has to be traded, how’s that going to go? … Someone’s going to have to make a very nonjudgmental decision on that part that’s not going to irritate anyone else in the league.”

-- Phil Jackson. December 29th, 2010.

Los Angeles pulled off a coup, Thursday. Nobody thought they could do it. But they got him. Best player at his position. 2008 MVP (should've been, too, though LA fans don't like to admit it). There have been other suitors, mind you. There have been better offers, depending on what you think they're looking for. But the team bowled him over, took a bigger-than-reported risk, and expects it'll pay off. And really, when you're fresh off a new TV deal, fresh off a labor dispute, and fresh off a lot of bad PR for the city and sport? Why not, you know? Take the chance, roll the dice, and get the best player you can. When I saw the news, I was shocked. I sincerely wondered if I'd been dreaming. Was it an illusion? Don't think so, I'm starting to come around, but I'm still going to go check. ... Yep. Pujols is still a Los Angeles Angel of Anaheim. You thought I was talking about Paul? Maybe tonight, but not as I write this post.

That was your Thursday. The NBA opened today. Welcome to the madhouse on Madison Boulevard, folks.

• • •

I don't really want to be flip about this. But I'm going to start with some context. This year has starred sports scandals of unparalleled depravity. Sandusky/Fine, the Turkish football debacle, the Miami stuff earlier this year -- we've had a rough year. And the Lakers? It's arguable that this trade going down in flames is a very good thing for them. It wasn't a stellar trade for them. It may still happen. But if it doesn't, in the same way I will wake up tomorrow and return to my life of basketball bloggissista-ing, the Lakers will wake up tomorrow and return to laking. They've dominated this league since before I was born and they'll dominate it after I die. Don't get CP3? Fine. They'll corner the market on the next young star, win a few rings, and remind everyone who they are. This particular scandal isn't important in the grand scheme of the world, much like anything related to sports.

In the context of the NBA, though, it's big.

The trade-that-wasn't shines a whole lot of light on things that Stern would've rather kept in the dark. There's no more than two or three people I've talked to who actually approve of what happened -- how it went down or that it went down. Which is, frankly, the key distinction between this and the LeBron debacle or the Melo trade. The fundamental difference that makes this so much more important to the league. In each of those situations, you had a significant number of people who were angry -- furious, even -- and some significant disapproval of the thing that happened. But in both of those cases, even with those who disapproved, you could still extract the obvious "it's HOW it happened, not THAT it happened" caveat that makes the gripe so much more reasonable. It isn't that LeBron left in free agency. It's that he did it the way he did! It isn't that Melo got traded, it's that he did it in such a way that ruined the Nuggets' season. Never mind we don't really have a better alternative. It's still not a critique of the mechanisms that put the deal into place, or the trade itself. It's a critique of the manner it happened, the players involved, the externalities unaccounted for. But this? The outrage over this trade? This isn't outrage over the manner it went down (although, frankly, it went down worse than Melo or LeBron in terms of bad PR). This isn't outrage over the players that any of the franchises were going to get. Really, it's not. This isn't outrage over the external problems the deal itself would create, like the TPE tailored to fit Hedo.

The outrage is rooted in the blatant disregard for protocol that Stern showed by changing the rules mid-stream, I think. Look at it this way. Stern gave Demps the authority to wheel and deal. Demps did his job -- he saw the market, talked with his star, and got the best deal possible. There were things to quibble with, but overall, the Hornets got a decent haul and would be able to flip their new assets for picks relatively easily. There were always going to be teams in the league that wanted those assets, if the Hornets decided they were selling. But Stern didn't like that Demps had simply done his job and done what was best for the Hornets, and he didn't like the media explosion that went on as people realized what had happened. Just like that, Stern went and did something that would look bad even if he was a normal, everyday owner. See, at first I thought this was at least slightly reasonable -- I considered the fact that owners can, and sometimes do, refuse to go through with trades. Stern owned the team. Ipso facto, it was similar to those situations. Right?

Wrong. The thing is, it wasn't an owner straight refusing to go with a trade. It was the owner accepting the trade by granting his implicit OK, beginning the machinations, allowing the trade to come to completion and fruition... then immediately relenting when he realized what he'd done. Owners don't usually do that, because that would be completely ridiculous. It would show no confidence in your GM, your front office, and essentially make you the team's overlord. Not the team's owner. There are unwritten rules and mores that owners follow. Now, Stern didn't think things through when he allowed the Hornets to shop Paul, that's obvious now. He should have just told Demps they weren't trading him, and that was that. Perhaps Demps would've resigned then, instead of at the end of this mess. What Stern did was laugh at the trade proceedings, accept them on a theoretical level, then did a complete about face and shot everything down at the last second. He stretched the credulity of the mechanisms involved and broke protocol that was previously well-established -- the league's front office simply doesn't make this kind of a call. Did he own the team? Sure, under a sketchy definition of ownership. But an owner doesn't reject a trade after its happened. An owner makes sure the GM is aware that the trade will require his approval before the fact. A real owner does that, and that's the protocol of GMs in an average owner/GM relationship. But in the case of this trade, he led Demps and all parties involved to believe that Demps needed no final approval to make the trade. Demps was the Hornets. He represented them. Hence why it was reported a done deal. Then, out of nowhere, to strike it down?

That's where it simply gets absurd. It stretches the mechanisms that make the league work. It hurts the GM to league relationship between Demps and Stern, and whether intentionally or not, left everything so vague last night that nobody really had any idea of what capacity Stern had rejected the trade in. Did he reject the trade as the league's commissioner? As the Hornets' de facto owner? As simply David Stern, the all-time representative of the league's power? Nobody really knew, and in a case as strange and unprecedented as this, ambiguity begets assumptions. Assumptions that are unilaterally worse than the truth, but also completely understandable -- in a situation where someone does something so utterly absurd that you have no idea how to respond to it, all you can really do is make assumptions. Cut through the hazy ambiguous waters of the bloody sea nobody really knew even existed.

That's why this was so incredibly strange, concerning, and altogether disheartening. That's why, when I saw the trade had been cancelled, my confusion turned to sadness turned to anger. Even as someone who really, really doesn't like the Lakers. In erasing that which he'd already approved, he changed the game. He completely transcended the rules he had himself created, destroyed protocol, and created a monster drenched in ambiguity. The next time a big trade gets made, NBA fans aren't going to remember that the league owned the Hornets when they rejected the deal. They aren't going to remember all the reasons Stern technically wasn't as in the wrong as people say. They're going to remember the feelings of confusion, regret, and not-knowing. The feeling that nothing the NBA front office said could be taken at face value anymore. They're going to remember that Stern balled up his fist and had a tantrum, and destroyed a perfectly reasonable trade on his whims alone. May not be true, but it's perception and it's how it felt to all involved. That matters. It's dangerous, for a league trying to expand, to become less of a running joke among some. And yeah, I think the trade happens tonight. But even when and if it does, the feelings of confusion from last night are going to drench the league among the ones who saw it for years. It's singlehandedly upended "The Decision" as the hallmark moment of the NBA's followers in the last few years. And it's not a good thing. For anybody.

So, the answer to Phil Jackson's question one year ago? "No one knows." It's one year later. We still don't.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the third and final installment of Basketball Vintages. BV is a mini-feature I've been working on. The idea is simple (and shamelessly appropriated from the great Joe Posnanski): For every year since 1934 (Russell's birth year), we grade the "vintage" of the NBA players born that year. It's a neat concept, and so far we've made it up to Gary Payton (born 1968). Today we're going to finish up and plow right through to Chris Paul and Dwight Howard (1985). You can check out the Dream Team in Part II, and the first couple decades of the shot clock era back at Part I. Hope you enjoy.

1969

Best Player: Shawn Kemp

Other Nominees: Larry Johnson, Christian Laettner, Sam Cassell

Vintage Grade: B

Comment: Sam Cassell was a part of four completely separate generations of contending franchises: the 1994-95 Rockets, the 2001 Bucks, the 2004 Wolves, and the 2008 Celtics. That's... pretty strange. I'm not going to try to explain it, though I'm sure I could figure it out if I threw enough numbers at the table. There are some things should remain a mystery to the world, and Sam Cassell is one of those things.

Shawn Kemp was the best player on the beloved 1990s Sonics, a short time after which his production began to seriously decline. Kemp (as you likely know) fathered several children and, in the decline, dealt with drug, legal, and weight issues. Kemp's public image largely centers around his infamous post-lockout training camp, in which he showed up a couple stones overweight (for you British readers). Of course, he was a starter on a team that fared well against the 1996 Bulls. Based on his stats, it's safe to presume Kemp's decline had less to do with the 1999 weight gain, and far more to do with the natural decline of a big man scorer's quickness on the wrong side of 30.

Seriously. Think you know Shawn Kemp? Look at his stats from 1998 and 1999. Try to find a single thing he did worse in 1999 than he did in 1998. You will quickly discover an odd and unheralded truth -- there's nothing worse. By all statistical measure, Shawn Kemp's 1999 edition was as good or better than the 1998 edition. Sure, this doesn't account for his defense, which took a tumble. And the team around him collapsed. But that isn't necessarily his fault. Kemp's falloff post-Sonics had less to do with his weight gain and more to do with the natural way things go for players with his kind of a game -- Kemp never had an especially polished post game, for all he did in iso situations. His athleticism and quickness was his money skill, and when that went, his ability to contribute left him as well. Perhaps he would've lasted longer if he had unimpeachable conditioning. But probably not.

1970

Best Player: Alonzo Mourning

Other Nominees: Robert Horry, Latrell Sprewell

Vintage Grade: B+

Comment: Latrell Sprewell is a decent scorer mostly known (deservedly) for choking P.J. Carlesimo in 1997. But he was a great volume scorer on the 1999-00 Knicks and the 2004 T'Wolves. One of my favorite Duncan games is in Game 5 in the 1999 Finals. In that game, he and Sprewell got into a master-class shoot-out where the two players alone got roughly 25 points combined for a stretch where no one else on either team seemed to score. My most enduring image from that series is a shot taken from the corner of the backboard as Sprewell fiercely drove the ball from the opposite side, his fiercely-arched eyebrows holding pearls fixed right on the camera through the webbing of the net. It was the Knicks' defining moment of a finals defined mostly by Tim Duncan destroying all comers. And Zo's in this class, too? With Horry, whose game is consistently unfairly denigrated due to his clutch instincts? (Really. Watch him on the 90s Rockets. He's a good player in his own right, not just in the clutch.) That's a B+.

1971

Best Player: Bruce Bowen or Penny Hardaway

Other Nominees: Allan Houston, Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones

Vintage Grade: B+

Comment: Tremendous upside in this class. You have three explosive players (Houston, Penny, Van Exel) that are encoded in a thousand of those seven-second slow-motion videos that made the rounds before Youtube. And yet - thanks largely to their injuries - the most "accomplished" of this class is probably Bowen, who won a slew of All-Defense 1st teams for his tenacious, frustrating, dirty perimeter defense in three Spurs titles. But it wasn't just injury that made the difference: Though Bowen wasn't a star, he played a role in the Spurs perfectly suited to his talents, a role that is practically archetypal now. In the wake of the Heat's somewhat underwhelming offense it's easy to go back and frame everything in terms of redundancy, but really, the Spurs didn't need a great finisher, they didn't need a dominating shot-creator: They needed someone that could play great defense on the opponent's best player, one through three, could make good rotations, and could learn to shoot a corner three. Bruce Bowen was exactly the skillset the Spurs needed, with no extra cost or baggage. Bruce didn't leave anyone to wonder if he could possibly be more efficient with his skillset (nope), if he had unexplored upside (nope), or if he would shrink or rise to the occasion on the biggest stage (rise). And then when his corner three stopped dropping, he got traded in the deal that brought Richard Jefferson to San Antonio, a more talented, more skilled player that would try desperately and futilely to recapture what Bruce had done with less, and the Spurs would despair.

1972

Best Player: Shaquille O'Neal

Other Nominees: Grant Hill, Kurt Thomas

Vintage Grade: A

Comment: Solid A. These are the first active players we're seen so far, Shaq having retired a few months ago.

For 13 consecutive years Shaq finished in the top 10 of the MVP vote. For a few of those he was a marginal candidate, yes, but it's still pretty insane. Shaq only ended up with one MVP, and while he probably should have gotten AI's in 2001, his career accomplishments speak for themselves. On blogs we always like to contextualize (and even to mitigate) greatness for no good reason except to show that we truly understand a situation, but I don't know that Shaq's physicality on the court and causal presence off it can be given a proper context or understanding. Shaq for a few years gave you the sense that he could score without much skill and defend without much effort simply by being so large and developing a basic but effective skillset to go along with it. And in the end that's exactly what he did. Sure, Shaq could have done more, he could have hit more free throws*, he could have had better help defense, and so on. But this misses the point: Shaq in his prime was an inherent flaw in the logic of the sport of basketball until finally his body wore down and his opponents found ways to respond and mitigate (most infamously the Hack-a-Shaq, now a standard part of strategy). And in the importance of his presence and the competitive response, Shaq became part of the now-slightly-broader logic of basketball, like Eddie Gaedel given 20 years in the big-leagues or like the Liar's Paradox becoming central to our understanding of the limitations of formal systems.

*I kind of doubt that Shaq could have done much better with free throws whenever I see fierce, far more well-regarded competitors like Tim Duncan or Ben Wallace or Bill Russell shooting the same mediocre percentages. It's more plausible to me that the same size which allows them such greatness in other areas also gives them especially tired legs at the ends of games, big hands to botch apparently simple motions, and trouble getting into the self-starting, unnatural rhythm of a free throw. Seems a lot more likely than the tired "Shaq is too lazy/busy with other ventures to care" narrative (even for an infamous sandbagger).

1973

Best Player: Chris Webber or Jason Kidd

Other Nominees: Michael Finley, Juwan Howard

Vintage Grade: A+

Comment: Very solid class. Four of the Fab Five (Howard, Webber, Jimmy King and Jalen Rose), two first-ballot HOFers (Kidd and Webber), an insane and unstoppable force at one point that basically ended the Stockton-Malone Jazz's run singlehandedly in 2001 (Finley), a totally ubiquitous and ridiculous player that shows up in every important regular-season game from 1998 to 2008 (Howard), an hellacious point guard that seems to control the flow, structure, and tempo of every single possession he encounters on both ends (Kidd), a bunch of players that played for the Mavericks at random times or otherwise might have, and Eric Snow (that guy that inexplicably played on three different overmatched Finals teams -- the 96 Sonics, 01 Sixers, and 07 Cavs). Shock the world.

1974

Best Player: Steve Nash

Other Nominees: Ben Wallace, Rasheed Wallace, Jerry Stackhouse, Derek Fisher, Antonio McDyess, Marcus Camby

Vintage Grade: A++

Comment: Okay, so my eyes are basically sparkling right now, guys, I'm not going to lie. This is the single most likable class in basketball history. Steve Nash, Ben Wallace, Antonio McDyess, Marcus Camby? That's fantastic. A treat. It's no coincidence my first attempt at writing this class devolved into feverish chuckles and imagining what it would be like to meet them. Hey, Steve Nash, how are you? Care to show off a pull-up jumper, today? Do you have any amusing opinions about the events of today that you would like to share?

Seriously, Steve Nash has always been somewhat politically active, spearheading the virtuous "Los Suns" jersey campaign in the 2010 playoffs in the wake of an Arizona immigration debate. Derek Fisher, for all you can critique his handling of this dispute, by all accounts is a tremendous, hard-working person. McDyess (along with Nick Van Exel) literally spent a year in the Nuggets uniform helping the troubled young player Chris Herren stay out of drugs, eating dinner with him every night just so that he wouldn't relapse into his many addictions (Herren wouldn't relapse until traded to the Celtics). McDyess (like Nash and Big Ben) is known as a great teammate. "If you don't like Dice, then I got a problem with you," Ben Wallace once said. I think that about says it all for this class. Great class. Very... classy.

"These new rooks... don't have any respect for the history of the game."

1975

Best Player: Sugar Ray Allen Iverson

Other Nominees: Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Jason Williams

Vintage Grade: B+

Comment: I'm starting to realize that this is what a very decent, above-average class of players looks like, a couple HOFers, a couple likable players with high upsides and good stories, and 10 or 15 good rotation players. Pro Basketball is really strange that way: There are only about 8 players that really matter on a team, and only about 30 teams, and the best careers are fairly long, and you only need three very good players or one great player to make a team worth watching and caring about. It's a simple queuing problem with a simple solution. Put simply you don't have to have a lot of exceptional classes, either in birth year or in the draft: You just have to have a few great players on average in every class and you'll wind up with a fairly rich league, but basketball is also well-structured enough to accommodate even richer classes in the future. Maybe this is why it's such a great sport: It's so scalable and malleable to the talent available. As long as you have a ball and a hoop, you can play.

1976

Best Player: Tim Duncan or Kevin Garnett

Other Nominees: Andre Miller, Chauncey Billups, Antawn Jamison, Brad Miller, Antoine Walker

Vintage Grade: A++

Comment: Yes, those extra pluses are becoming gimmicky. I apologize. More glaringly, I apologize for putting Duncan and KG on the same level. My justification for this is only that KG is not one of the "other nominees," he is a clear 1b, obviously a HOFer himself, a champion, an intense and an indelible image, an archetypal character, a raw and complex personality, and someone that is just plain fun to make fun of and use as a hypothetical. What's more, in terms of physical command and intellectual understanding of the game he is frighteningly on the ball, and has been for 15 years. If he had been on a better team earlier, who knows what he could have accomplished? Of course, he made his bed, and given how much of a prick he's been as a contender in Boston it's not so tragic that he didn't accomplish more in the playoffs. But KG signed a $100 million dollar, decade-long contract with the expansion Timberwolves, who proved over this decade that it is in fact possible to mismanage a franchise as skillfully as R.C. Buford managed the Spurs. GM Kevin McHale scorched the earth quite thoroughly, even attempting a hilariously inept underhand deal for Joe Smith that cost KG's team like four first-rounders. This would have been a lot funnier if it hadn't come right around the time of teammate and friend Malik Sealy's absolutely tragic, horrifying death at the hands of a drunk driver (on KG's 25th birthday, after his party. Damn.). With his ineptness, McHale turned KG's fierce loyalty into a dark tragedy, as if the Wolves were trying to prove Jerry Krause's (infamous and possibly misquoted) "organizations win championships" statement right by counterexample. Ugh. No, KG, love him or hate him, is not an "other nominee". Call it a lifetime achievement award.

Tim Duncan, though, is easily my favorite player in the league today, great and without any of the qualifications I gave to Garnett. Taking just his career at the elbow (on both ends), he would still be a first-ballot for Springfield. Taking either his defensive or his offensive contributions, he would still be a first-ballot for Springfield. Taking just his clutch, his poise, and his fierce, understated competitiveness, he would still be a first-ballot for Springfield. But put it all together and you have someone, something new that nevertheless fits into history like a glove. We're going to probably have millions of Duncan posts before we tie our laces. I'll refrain from over-coverage and move forward. Extra plus is for Andre Miller, a friggin class act, quiet and understated. Fast and effective. A point guard's point guard. His longevity and his dependability take him up about 20 notches from where his talent would place him. Great player, decent dude.

1977

Best Player: Manu Ginobili or Paul Pierce

Other Nominees: Vince Carter, Jason Terry, Stephon Marbury, Peja Stojakovic

Vintage Grade: A-

Comment: Another great class. This might be over-familiarity biasing the results upwards, but it seems like the classes are getting better, on average. Am I crazy? League Politics Alert: Manu is a HOFer. I'm biased as hell towards Manu, but seriously, every solid advanced metric I've ever seen puts Manu well above even the most favorable "decent, exciting, above-average" reputation he has among casual fans, and the eye test really bears this out. He's considerably above-average, he has been the Spurs' best player for a few years, and is constantly a threat to dominate any given game or series (and has been since about 2002, before he even entered the league). You're hard pressed to find 10 SGs in the history of the league that are better than him, and you're even more hard-pressed to find any player like him. Paul Pierce may have an equally crafty, solid resume, but I'm a Spurs fan and Manu is my horse in this... wine race.

On a sidenote: It's kind of cool that KG/TD directly precedes the Manu/Pierce year, and Ray Allen is one year before. Maybe my biggest disappointment of last season is that we didn't get to see a Spurs/Celtics Finals. If any two teams embody some sort of Platonic ideal for great all-around, solid, professional, well-constructed teams with a few dirty players sprinkled in... in the modern era, it's these two. (Thanks a lot, Danny Ainge. I hope Jeff Green works out for you.) Plus, they have very similar strengths and the matchups would have been legendary. Ah, well, them's the breaks of the game. Also, if you want a fun read, try Darcy Frey's "The Last Shot" from your local library, about Coney Island high school basketball, featuring a 14-year-old (!) Stephon Marbury riding a big wheel, all like, through a chain-link fence or something (90% of this sentence is true).

1978

Best Player: Kobe Bryant

Other Nominees: Dirk Nowitzki, Shawn Marion, Shane Battier, Jermaine O'Neal, Rip Hamilton

Vintage Grade: A+

Comment: Dirk absolutely dominated the playoffs this season, showing such insane clutch and tenacity in the face of a poor reputation that you really couldn't have scripted a better turnaround in perception. He also inspired this, the spirit animal for everything I've ever written. Kobe scored 81 points in a single game and while he will never reach the heights of Jordan (not even bringing up Kobe's league-average defense against Jordan's well-above-average D), Kobe has taken certain elements of MJ and distilled them even more thoroughly in himself, and has one of the highest ceilings for a game in NBA history, on any given night. Marion is a statistical freak, the ultimate grounding of the SSOL Suns in something remotely (but not totally) tangible. Battier is his own brand of statistical freak.

1979

Best Player: Tracy McGrady or Elton Brand

Other Nominees: Baron Davis, Ron Artest, Rashard Lewis, Lamar Odom, Hedo Turkoglu

Vintage Grade: B+

Comment: A lot of weird public perceptions here. McGrady is heralded for his scoring prowess but is widely seen as having missed much of his potential, even inspiring his Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy and his GM Daryl Morey to publicly diss him at the MIT Sloan conference earlier this year. I absolutely agree with Dan Devine's skepticism of this narrative here, and the "what can't superheroes do, right?" and the killer, perfectly-on-point:

"Still, I can't help feeling like selecting McGrady as the poster boy for wasted chances is at least partially a function of our own propensity as writers, observers, executives and fans to jam talented players into a hyperbolic chamber, imbue them with whatever dreams may come and then get all pissy when they don't pop out, pure and perfect, exactly the way our imaginations envisioned."

Ouch. I bring this up because, to some lesser or greater extent, almost everyone on this list has suffered from disappointed (or even exceeded without notice) expectations. Artest with the melee, Baron Davis and Odom with their inconsistent production, Hedo with his frustrating sequence of trades and his...highly contextual success, and Rashard and Brand with their...perfectly-well-deserved-but-ill-fated contracts. On the other hand, all of these players have contributed a lot to their teams, and with all the expectations we place on these players, it's easy to overlook that.

1980

Best Player: Pau Gasol

Other Nominees: Yao Ming, Richard Jefferson, Matt Bonner, Roger Mason, Matt Barnes, Luis Scola, Nick Collison, Mike Miller, Luke Walton, Jamario Moon (Warning: All but Yao and Gasol may have been chosen partially for comedy value).

Vintage Grade: B

Comment: Pau was the linchpin for this latest Lakers dynasty. Bynum deserves... ... Hi, Alex. How are you today? Well, I finally latched on to a host. That means I'm 1 for 4 today. Guess I've earned myself the Finals MVP. Don't you think so? Well, a lot of Kobe fans would agree. ... HELP ME. GOD, I'M BEING OVERTAKEN BY THE SPIRIT OF BILL SIMMONS. NOOO ... Hi, Alex. ... NOOO, MUST NOT MAKE POP CULTURE REFERENCES THAT OTHERS CAN POSSIBLY RELATE TO, NOOO, MUST RETAIN UNDERGROUND CREDIBILITY, NOOO, I'M LOSING CONTROOOL... So, Aaron. Screw this post. Let's pitch a sitcom called "The Association" about the 1980 birth year in basketball. You know. Like The Wire. We can have, say, Christian Bale as Richard Jefferson, Tracy Morgan as Jamario Moon,... GET OUT OF MY HEAD, SPIRIT OF BILL SIMMONS, THAT DOESN'T EVEN WORRRKK. IT'S AN EMBARRASSING MISAPPROPRIATION... Fine, I'll go, but don't blame me when you don't get any readers and you die a cold and lonely man.

Anyway, like I was saying, Pau was the linchpin for this latest Lakers dynasty. Bynum deserves a lot of credit, and speaking in terms of pure basketball, Kobe played incredibly well, finally getting an MVP at the dawn of the dynasty. But I think Pau did more to determine the success of the Lakers when they won and the failure of the Lakers when they lost. Simple as that. I can't give his class lower than a B, especially when you include an important player with immense skills (Yao), my favorite hapless player (RJ), the Medium Fundamental (Matt Bonner), and... that guy that could have ruined the season (Roger Mason Jr.)? How u.

1981

Best Player: Zach Randolph or Carlos Boozer

Other Nominees: Joe Johnson, Jason Richardson, Kirk Hinrich

Vintage Grade: C+

Comment: All Spurs fans are biased against Z-Bo, but really, everyone should be. The Jailblazers era is on him, for better or for worse, and just as Indiana fans will never forgive Artest for the melee, the average NBA fan shouldn't forgive Z-Bo for his indiscretions. Though that might just be my Spurs bias flowing through. Really, I don't like him, I don't like Carlos Boozer, and I don't like Joe Johnson, and it's not like any of them have been overwhelmingly good too often. Have they had their moments? Of course. And Boozer gets a lot of extra credit for his 2001 title and his play with the Jazz (21-12-3-1 on 56% shooting in 2007 is pretty damn good, and he actually ratcheted it up another notch in the playoffs, getting to the WCF. Not bad at all.), and Randolph of course was the main reason the Grizz beat the Spurs in 6 games. Replace him with even an above-avg PF and the Spurs are on the right side of the tracks in that series. But overall, dominating one playoff series and doing quite well in the second round is hardly grounds for the HOF, or anywhere close. This isn't about disappointed expectations, it's about results, and I don't really see it, at least compared to the last several classes. Solid, decent class, just not so great. Boozer has a great post game, though. This is the political risk of siding with Duncan's style: you have to side - at least a little - with the players that embrace it, even if they're Carlos Boozer.

"Okay, guys, we'll run the May Pole play on 3. Ready? Hands up? Let's start spinnin'."

1982

Best Player: Dwyane Wade

Other Nominees: Amar'e Stoudemire, Tony Parker, Gilbert Arenas, Boris Diaw (and Leandro!), Gerald Wallace, Tyson Chandler

Vintage Grade: A+

Comment: Ooh, nice. We have three crucial SSOL players, "Flash" (hey, it's better than the dyslexic hell of "Dwyane"), Crash, Tony Parker, Agent Zero, and crucial Maverick champion Tyson Chandler. This class has it all: Crash and Flash, Run and Gun. I'm sorry. But seriously, look at all those great finishers, shooters, and great defensive workers, all brought together by the all-around superhuman Dwyane Wade. Sneakily, it's a hell of a class. Also, weird that the bulk of the SSOL Suns seems about 8 years younger than Nash.

1983

Best Player: None

Other Nominees: Let me just list the top 10 in minutes played now

Ben Gordon, Danny Granger, David Lee, Kevin Martin, Devin Harris, Jarrett Jack, T.J. Ford, Delonte West, Nenad Krstic, Channing Frye

Vintage Grade: D+

Comment: I don't see anyone that looks like a star. I see a lot of likable players, a lot of players with upside, players with decent seasons (Harris and Lee come to mind), but they're 28 going on 29. I don't feel too bad about going with a D+, but I hardly see my arbitrary stance bringing them up to even a C- over time. Now we're really into the "legacies still being molded" section. Devin Harris for all we know might be the Finals MVP one year, God forbid. It's a bit too early to tell, you know?

1984

Best Player: LeBron James

Other Nominees: Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony, Brandon Roy, Andre Iguodala, Deron Williams, Andrew Bogut

Vintage Grade: A++

Comment: You have considerable depth at every single position. You even have Nate Robinson, Gary Neal, JJ Barea, and Kendrick Perkins to draw from. It's ironic (at least working from the assumption that that one Apple commercial is the main cultural staple of the year 1984), but you hardly have to "think different" in order to appreciate how to make a lineup from this team.

"Yeah, I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right:
I totally should have an MVP by now."

1985

Best Player: Chris Paul or Dwight Howard

Other Nominees: Josh Smith, Luol Deng, Al Jefferson, LaMarcus Aldridge, J.R. Smith, Darko (!), Marc Gasol

Vintage Grade: A++

Comment: I'm pretty high on both CP3 and D12 and I think it's rather odd that LeBron has 2 MVPs, Derrick Rose has 1, and these two combined have 0. They are both spectacular, emblematic examples of their position, and as far as I'm concerned, they're easily the best (though I suppose CP3's injuries are a real concern for the MVP voter). Hopefully this is the year. Dwight in the regular season and Paul in the play-offs had absolutely vintage breakout seasons, with Dwight running roughshod on the league and CP3 doing the same to the Lakers. The A++ is a projection that one or both of them will put together such dominant seasons in the next few years that Springfield will be an afterthought. Might be off base, but I doubt it.

• • •

When you're making projections about a class of ten players whose two best players very possibly haven't peaked yet, it's time to stop and conclude. We're running around 9000 words, most of them my own, and so it's been a long journey by blog standards. But I hope you enjoyed this look into basketball history sorted by the rather arbitrary classes of birth year, and I hope you learned something, had light shed on your own questions, or had a laugh at my embarrassing ignorance of the sport of basketball. This is Alex (1989) signing out.

One more shout-out to 1974. Heh. Heh.