Hey, folks. This week, Gothic Ginobili's normal content is going to be put aside for a weeklong awards/storyline handicapping feature. For the first few days, we'll be going over each of the NBA's season-ending awards and handicapping the field, discussing the top players competing for the award and the dark horse candidates to keep your eye on. Along the way, I'll be writing meandering essays regarding various thoughts about the meaning of each award and the vagaries of sporting awards in a general sense. Fun stuff! Today we'll be touching on two awards, loosely connected by a single thread: the importance of playing minutes.

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DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR

Defensive Player of the Year is one of my favorite awards to think about, even if the winner doesn't always stand up to history. (See: Marcus Camby.) The concept is simple -- you find the player having the best defensive season in the league and you give the man his due. You watch the defensive end with a hawk's gaze and try to pick out the player who's acquitting himself best on the defensive end. Questions about this award are rarely questions about what the award represents -- rather, they're questions about the ways we measure defensive performance and heft. How do you measure the comparative value of different defensive roles? How good can a plus defender be on a bad defensive team, and how bad can a minus defender be on a good one? Where does the coach come into the picture? Et cetera. I can't give you definitive answers for any of those questions, but I can give you my view on the matter.

When it comes to the comparative defensive roles, my philosophy is simple -- bigger is better. The larger the player is, the more important their role on the defensive end. The amount of defensive responsibility allotted to point guards and small wings is significantly less than that allotted to large wings and forwards, which is in turn less than the responsibility that falls on the team's biggest bodies. In order to put together a dominant defensive possession, the big guys have to be constantly engaged. They need to stick to their man while shading the rim and setting bruising screens. They need to be sedentary but mobile, touchy but laid low. Conversely, a perimeter stopper has to spend the possession following their man (and keeping aware of the necessary switches), but generally lacks the responsibilities inherent in the screening/rim-protection/rebounding-dominance a good defensive big man has to do. Ergo, while I think perimeter stoppers play a valuable role in the NBA, I rarely think of perimeter stoppers as deserving of awards for being best-in-class. For a perimeter stopper to really be having the greatest defensive performance of the season, they'd need to be having one of the best defensive seasons for a wing of all time -- a big guy merely needs to be "really really good" to exert just as much influence on that end.

As for the good/bad team point, I think that's a key factor as well -- the NBA is a team game, and nowhere is that more obvious than on defense. But "team game" doesn't equate to equally proportioned roles -- a good defensive player tends to encapsulate the idea of a "system-in-a-box." When Dwight Howard was at his best, the general thought was that you could place four terrible defensive players around him and you'd still have a remarkably top-tier defense. That's always been my feeling of the general award, and it's one of the reasons I generally can't stand for the idea of good defensive players on bad defensive teams winning the award. It's not necessarily their fault that they aren't on a team with good defensive pieces, and if their performance is incredible enough they certainly aren't excluded from consideration. But a bad team defense has to reflect, in some way, on the bigs and the stoppers that roll out each and every game. And they lessen the candidacy of anyone unfortunate enough to be on a poor defensive team. (Inversely, I'll occasionally refocus the eye test if a player's team is good enough defensively -- sometimes you lose track of how good a player is under a deluge of numbers and statistics. But if a player's defensive team is top-5, someone is doing something right. And it's on the voters to figure out who that someone really is. ... Even if that's the coach.)

Given all that, there are three main players-to-watch for this year's award. (NOTE: The rankings come from a poll of ESPN Truehoop Network bloggers. They were given five main candidates. Average ranking is simply the average of all ranks 1-to-5 that player received. The number afterwards represents where that average ranking ranked among all players in the poll question.)

1. Joakim Noah -- Avg. Ranking: 2.0 (1)

2. Marc Gasol -- Avg. Ranking: 2.1 (2)

3. Tim Duncan -- Avg. Ranking: 3.2 (3)

Each of these players has a good case. For Noah, it's the sheer minutes total combined with Chicago's continued defensive dominance in the wake of Taj Gibson's generally disappointing year and the loss of Omer Asik. Noah is incredibly active on the defensive end, yelling out orders and getting the entire team communicating. He's about as nimble as a 7-foot behemoth can be, switching madly when he needs to and keeping offensive players on their toes as a general rule. He blocks shots, he blows up pick-and-rolls, he covers when his perimeter backup loses their man. He's a beast. Result-wise, the Bulls are the fourth best defense in the league despite losing key members of their defensive core. Noah's at the heart of everything they do on the defensive end and he's taken on a larger role as needed.

On the other hand, it's hard to look past Marc Gasol. While Gasol doesn't have quite the rebounding chops of a Duncan or a Noah, the general identity of the Memphis Grizzlies lives and dies with Gasol's contributions. The bruising style that's made Memphis famous comes straight from Gasol's long arms, with Gasol notorious for his ability to dart around the rim and body up anyone who tries to get a shot. Early this year, the Grizzlies absolutely obliterated the Heat -- and it wasn't a fluke! When they're rolling, the Grizzlies shut down the other team's at rim game like no other. They force teams to pull back around 3-4 feet out using Gasol's enormity and heft as a deterrent. As with Noah, Gasol's an active communicator -- he barks out orders and points his teammates around with the best of them. It helps that the Grizzlies are the 2nd best defensive team in the league, and that the Grizzlies might be first if they didn't play so many more games in the offensively absurd Western conference

Our third candidate's case is a combination of factors. The first is obvious -- Tim Duncan is quite frankly having one of the best defensive seasons of his career, a renaissance year where his mobility has returned in full form. He's destroying pick and rolls with the vigor of a younger man, and his aptly chanced weakside swats have gotten increasingly well-timed as he's aged. Traditionally, Duncan has struggled mightily to defend athletic big men and keep them in check. While he's had his occasional trouble with DeAndre Jordan and Serge Ibaka, he's mostly reversed that trend this year -- very few big men have "gotten under his skin" so to speak, and the ones that have aren't just "any athletic big whatsoever." Kawhi Leonard and Tim Duncan have led the Spurs into a defensive renaissance; for the first time in 4 years, San Antonio's defense is markedly better than their offense. They're not a title contender for their blistering offensive pace, they're a title contender because they completely shut teams down. More than anyone else, that's on Duncan.

Picking a defensive player of the year out of these three is actually rather difficult. You can boil their cases down to a simple choice of preference. Duncan is the low-minute (1481 minutes played -- 29.6 per game), max-efficiency (the man barely ever takes off a play in the scant minutes he gets on the floor), mid-results (3rd best team defense) candidate. Gasol is the mid-minute (1899 minutes played -- 34.5 per game), mid-efficiency (occasional slacking, mostly locked in), max-results (2nd best team defense) candidate. Noah is the max-minute (1987 minutes played -- 38.2 per game), low-efficiency (almost every Bulls game there seems to be a lull around the time Noah plays his 25-30th minutes, before he reaches his second wind, where he's sucking air and playing it easy on the defensive end), mid-results (4th best team defense) candidate. How you rank them depends entirely on how you rank those individual barometers of defensive success. If you most value a defender who's giving you rock-solid defensive productivity in an insane amount of minutes, Noah's your guy. If you most value the best defensive season for one of the best defensive players of all time in generally minimal minutes, Duncan's your guy. If you straddle the fence and believe the conference matters (as many do), Gasol's your guy. None of them are strictly wrong choices -- they're simply different. They're all having absolutely excellent defensive seasons and nobody should be particularly nettled if any of them win it.

Me? I'd probably vote Duncan. I think Noah pulls it out in the end, though.

DARK HORSE PICKS: For each of these awards sections, I'll also be going over in brief the year's top dark horse candidates for each award, along with a quick blurb on each stating their case and their problems. Three sentences apiece. THREE! THAT'S IT! In this case, most of the dark horses has a reasonable path available to win the award, even if many are quite flawed and stand on significantly less merit than the above players. Our three dark horse picks are...

• ROY HIBBERT: Most people wouldn't have him in contention for the award, and that's a mistake -- this is a defensive award, and his offense really SHOULDN'T come into play. Hibbert's the essential old-school center at the core of Vogel's grind-it-out defensive system, and his shot blocking/heft is integral to what the Pacers do. On the other hand, his offense is so startlingly bad he'll have trouble getting votes for any award, and he's been helped significantly this season by West and George both having banner years defensively.

• KEVIN GARNETT: Without him, Boston would've been a well-below 0.500 team for the past 2-3 years, and he's doing the same stuff he always does this year -- furious screaming, insane switching, and the dirty screens fans of the opposing team know and loathe. On the other hand, the Celtics started the year off poorly on the defensive end, and a lot of that fell on Garnett -- he's getting old and it's starting to really show. Garnett should've won the award last year, and if the Celtics recover and end up as the NBA's best defense, I imagine he'll win it this year.

• ANDRE IGUODALA: As expected, Iguodala has been Denver's only particularly competent defensive player. The schemes haven't worked quite as well as Karl would've liked, but Iguodala's dominance of the opposing team's perimeter game has taken the Denver defense about as far as it can possibly take it. That's probably not far enough -- nobody really fears the Nuggets defensively, and regardless of Iguodala's heft, their swiss-cheese interior defense puts a hard ceiling on the Nuggets' defensive acumen that sits decidedly around "average."

• • •

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

Unlike DPoY, Rookie of the Year tends to be pretty straightforward. Very few of the RoY races we've watched in the last decade have been competitive whatsoever heading into the season's stretch run; a full six of those ten races could be most effectively described as coronations (Kyrie, Griffin, Rose, Durant, Paul, Roy) and a further two were won by a large enough margin to make the proceedings elementary (Tyreke, LeBron). It doesn't tend to be hotly contested after the all-star break. If you ask most people, the pattern's stuck for this season -- Lillard is headed for a wide margin victory with little left to watch for. I entreat you to look a bit closer, though -- there IS a race here, much like for Defensive Player of the Year. It just takes a bit of reorientation and a bit of statistical chicanery.

Our two candidates are...

1. Damian Lillard

2. Anthony Davis

Okay, yeah. That was pretty obvious. I probably didn't need to state the two. But, indeed, the mere fact that there are two is a testament to the quality of the two players. Lillard's case almost doesn't bear repeating -- Lillard stepped in as one of Portland's first options from his first day on the job and didn't skip a beat, showing the kind of savvy domination that befits a much older man. Most rookies spend a season or two adapting to the NBA speed, especially from the point guard position -- there was no such adjustment period for Lillard, who was faking out and completely outsmarting NBA defenders from the second he stepped on the court. He's been indispensable for the Blazers from day 1, and while they're (somewhat predictably) fading from the playoff picture as their schedule catches up to them, Lillard has remained relatively solid despite lacking a backup and being quite a bit more scouted than he used to be. Every single rookie that's averaged his stats has been named Rookie of the Year. He's been very impressive.

All that said, Davis isn't completely out of the running yet. In fact, a few odd ducks would place him as the better rookie on the basis of his efficiency. And that's not an inconsequential argument. For all of Lillard's flash, he's still shooting 41% from the field and 34% from three despite jacking up six threes a night. That's... not ideal, even if the Blazers lack many other good options from behind the arc. Lillard has a very high usage rate for a point guard and doesn't quite have the efficiency to warrant it -- Davis, on the other hand, has been quietly phenomenal for a better-than-their-record Hornets team. Defensively, he's been incredible -- a maelstrom shot-blocking force that can't be stopped by conventional means. As he's gotten more muscular and NBA-fit, he's improved his one-on-one defense and clearly ranks as one of the best rookie big-man defenders I've had the pleasure of following. He's no slouch offensively, either -- he's converting on 51% of his shots from the field, with a nice baby hook, a solid floater, and a fundamentally sound jump shot. He's averaging 13-8 in 28 minutes a night, which translates to 16-10 per 36 minutes. Combine that with his incredible defense and Lillard's abysmal defense, and you start to wonder why exactly Lillard's conventionally seen to be winning the award by such a large margin.

And then you come across the reason -- as with Duncan, there's a single statistical category that separates Davis from the winner-in-waiting: minutes. While Davis has missed several games to injury with a concussion and other small maladies, Lillard has stayed firmly on the court in the face of an insane minutes load and accumulated ridiculous statistics to go with that. He's one of just 26 players in the history of the NBA to play 38 minutes per game as a rookie, and most of them either won the award outright or put up a strong challenge for it against a ringer of a candidate (Gasol, Rose, Walter Davis, et cetera). When you accumulate so many minutes that your on/off numbers become virtually irrelevant due to small sample size, you know you're playing a lot. As a rookie, one of the most impressive accomplishments you can muster is the ability to play large minutes -- most coaches resist playing rookies through mistakes and follies. Lillard sidestepped that by simply eradicating mistakes and follies from his game -- Davis still makes the occasional blunder that causes Monty Williams to yank him early, and he's still extremely raw. He's productive, but he's raw -- and at some point, simply being able to count on Lillard for an extra 10-12 minutes of rookie star-level performance does actually come into play.

All that said, while I think Lillard is going to win the award (and win it relatively handily, provided he doesn't completely melt down in these last two months)... as with my picking Duncan above, I can't completely overlook what Anthony Davis is doing for the artists formerly known as Hornets. He hasn't played as many minutes due both to injury and Monty Williams playing it safe and keeping their future star fresh, yes. But you can't completely eliminate him based on that alone -- Davis has been markedly more efficient when he's seen the floor than Lillard has, and he looks like he's got quite a ways to grow. I don't know if anyone outside of Portland believes that Lillard is going to be the better player of the two in 2 or 3 years. All that said? I'd probably STILL vote Lillard, simply because I love what he's done and I love what I've seen from him. As we enter the season's stretch run, I'd take as much time as you can to turn an eye to these two -- the race is closer than you think, and both are scintillating to watch and enjoy.

DARK HORSE PICKS: For each of these awards sections, I'll also be going over in brief the year's top dark horse candidates for each award, along with a quick blurb on each stating their case and their problems. Three sentences apiece. THREE! THAT'S IT! In this case, there's really no way -- barring catastrophe -- that any other candidate will make a strong run for the award. Here's 2013's single dark horse candidate.

• ANDRE DRUMMOND: Who else? Mini-Shaq represented the bourgeois's best shot at a competitive race -- when he went down with a back fracture, that essentially ended his candidacy. He's been arguably the most efficient of all this year's rookies, and he may end up the best player; the award's for a season of action, though, and the injury makes it unlikely he'll see enough time to garner more than 1 or 2 token votes.

• • •

Hope you enjoyed this first installment. We'll continue tomorrow, handicapping more awards. See you then!

Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. Sometimes Thursday, like today. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. What more could we provide? Today's short pieces are as follows.

• MIA vs OKC: A Crisis of Confidence (by Jacob Harmon)
• TRADES #1: Sacramento Gives Up, or: Morey's Margins (by Aaron McGuire)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

__MIA vs OKC: A Crisis of Confidence
___Jacob Harmon_

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to our insistence on taking our own All-Star break, we tabled the publication of this Outlet piece until now. It discusses Oklahoma City's 110-100 home loss to the Miami Heat last Thursday. It's here now, though!]

_ “We’re not as bad as we played tonight.” - Scott Brooks_

Having suffered through yet another match-up between Miami and Oklahoma City, critical examination is tough -- it’s hard to know where to begin. Lots to process, especially as a fan of one of the concerned teams. Going into the Finals this past summer, my confidence in the Thunder’s ability to win was overwhelming, and not for reasons I felt were artificial, or reasons couched in narrative. I was confident in the pick because despite all the hype, OKC vs. Miami has never been about Kevin Durant vs. LeBron James. It's about the supporting casts around the stars. And in evaluating the match-up I've always felt the Thunder had the decided edge. I still do, on paper. Maybe the problem really is coaching, as people often emphasize. I can't argue with most of the questions. Why does Scott Brooks insist on fielding a lineup of two bigs against the Heat when they get continually obliterated by Chris Bosh and LeBron James? Maybe it's all about confidence. Putting the same guys out there and putting them through the fire in the hope they'll put it together. As a fan, I'm not sure about the wisdom of that strategy, but I do think that aspect of the Thunder's cohesion is something worth looking at. Because more than anything, I think Oklahoma City's repeated inability to execute against Miami has less to do with a lack of talent or ability and more to do with an intangible problem.

The real rub of this matchup (as far as I see it) is psychological. If anyone's expecting Miami and Oklahoma City to be the Celtics/Lakers of the new generation, they’ve miscast the roles. To me, this feels more like Pistons/Bulls. Different conferences, different levels of play. But psychologically? That’s what it feels like. It’s the stark disappearance of role-players, the physical play, the inability to confidently exploit advantages, and the dogged futility of the less experienced leading men trying to will the team to glory. It’s the visible mental frustration that manifests in different ways; whether it be Kevin Durant’s furious slapping of the hardwood or Thabo Sefolosha’s blank stare as he watches a loose ball bounce to a slow roll and does nothing. The Thunder have a dogged inability to "play their game" against the Heat, and it always seems to be less a talent disparity than it is the inevitable breakdown of execution that happens when you’re playing a game that only two or three players actually think they’re capable of winning. Watching the Thunder offense, it’s difficult to accuse Westbrook or Durant of hero ball when they’re scanning for an open pass that no one else on the floor looks interested in shooting. Miami's defense fluctuates on a nightly basis, especially with Ray Allen on the floor, and they do an excellent job at guarding the inside pass, so it's little surprise when Kendrick Perkins or Serge Ibaka bobble what would be an open look under the basket. But it's not the Miami defense that prevents Kevin Martin from losing his man on a screen, or Serge Ibaka spotting up at his usual spots, or getting in position to rebound. There's no reason for Durant and Westbrook to settle for long contested jumpers even when provided mismatches to exploit. On defense, there's no reason Shane Battier is continually abandoned on the wing despite being virtually useless anywhere else on offense. These are all issues that the Thunder don't really have on a nightly basis, or against teams that are the Heat's peer in execution (like the Spurs or the Clippers).

Of course, in modern NBA analysis we don't make much of the psychology of a match-up. It's all a little too "the look"-y. But once you've gone beyond evaluating the tangible how and why of a loss, there remain questions of the how and the why those issues cropped up, and continue to crop up. It's the same reason a talented kid can struggle mightily to beat his Dad or older brother at the object of his talents. The Thunder strike me as both convinced they should win, and frustrated mightily by their inability to meet that expectation. They find it impossible to play their rival like they're any other team, and that inevitably sinks them. Much like the Bulls and Pistons rivalry all those years ago, there will come a time when this changes. Miami has an old roster, Oklahoma City a young one. The passage of time and the inevitability of the NBA’s salary restrictions favor the Thunder in the long term. But there are no certainties in this league. The threat of injury, competition, and other unknowables looms large and threatening over any assumptions one can make. There’s only the now, and in the wake of an ugly game and another loss to a bitter rival, the Thunder seem to need confidence above anything else.

• • •

TRADES: Trade Talk, Trades Today, & Trade Tectonics (with Aaron McGuire)

Hey, folks! Today's a very special trade deadline Outlet. Here's why. As the day goes on, I'll be updating this post to react to today's various trades with short reaction pieces and other such accoutrements! Isn't that fun? Isn't that just the dickens? (It isn't, but pretend with me.) To start us off, I've got a few reactions to the hilariously minor trades conducted yesterday evening. Amazing! (EDITOR'S NOTE: Why are you so excited? [EDITOR'S NOTE #2: Wait, you're also the editor. Why are you talking to yourself in the third person?]) ... Let's go!

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MOREY'S MARGINS (Or, Sacramento Gives Up)

SACRAMENTO GETS:

Patrick Patterson (2-yr/$2.5 mil per), Cole Aldrich (1-yr/$2.5 mil per), Toney Douglas (1-yr/$2.1 mil per), $1 Million.

HOUSTON GETS:

Thomas Robinson (4-yr/$3.5 mil per), Francisco Garcia (1-yr/$6.1 mil per), Tyler Honeycutt (3-yr/$0.8 mil per).

I'm not Daryl Morey's biggest fan. As a statistician, most assume that I'm all over his work -- not quite. I've always respected his focus on process, and I think he generally wins trades in the aggregate. But I've also always had a general feeling that Morey focuses a bit too much on the margins. His drafting has regularly been shaky, and with the single exception of the Harden trade (among his greatest accomplishments, in my book), the vast majority of Morey's moves have seemed lateral in nature rather than fundamental course-changes. This is a bit of a problem when his team has only once been a particularly legitimate title contender, and it seemed like Morey's moves consistently got the Rockets ensconced the NBA's most hopeless state: stark mediocrity. When Morey was criticized this summer as having thought his way into a box with his marginal trades and his work was panned as a blow to the NBA's statistical "movement" (insofar as one exists at all), I was a bit irritated.

See, statistical thinking and applying analytic rigor to one's decisionmaking certainly doesn't necessitate Morey's overarching strategy. There are plenty of counterexamples to that, like Rich Cho, R.C. Buford, and Sam Presti. In fact, I'd argue that Morey's focus on the margins while ensconced in mediocrity is decidedly non-statistical, but that's a discussion for another day. There's a broader debate here that's way too complicated and multifaceted for a few paragraphs of exposition. The point here is simply to point out the obvious. These small moves, these little nudges? That's Morey's calling. Isn't quite the be-all and end-all of the job, but it's a very important part of it. And it's a role that Morey plays extremely well, as yesterday's trade demonstrated. Just look at this move from the Rockets' perspective. Their outbound value is extremely low. Patrick Patterson is a decent player, and a lot better than I thought he was going into this season. Seriously. He's been awesome. But he's somewhat low upside on the whole, and he's making only maginally less than Thomas Robinson is -- and he's only got one more year left on his deal, while Robinson has four! Cole Aldrich has disappointed over a compressed career, and Toney Douglas is... well... Toney Douglas.

Then you look at their haul. It's a no-brainer. Thomas Robinson isn't an excellent player, yet -- he's also a rookie. Robinson has played fewer than 1000 NBA minutes and he's spent his career-to-date at one of the worst player development teams in the NBA. The man has talent, even if it hasn't been exceedingly obvious in his NBA burn so far. Garcia is an expiring contract who happens to be an excellent locker room guy (and who should provide a fine substitute in the Marcus Morris role for the rest of the season), and Honeycutt is an extraordinarily cheap prospect whose contract is only partially guaranteed for $100,000 next year if the Rockets decide they don't want him. All things considered? It's a lateral move -- they don't move the needle much on this season's potential (a fun first round series, possibly challenge for a 2nd round bloodbath) while opening up the prospect that Robinson develops into a solid big man and helps address their long-term gap next to Asik in their front line. It's a trade made on the margins from which Morey makes his mark. It's possible Robinson never develops and the trade ends up being a loss for the Rockets, but as it stands, it's hard for the trade to make them that much worse or that much better. Some beautifully lateral movement on a promising young team.

Which is all well and good, but there are always two vantage points by which to analyze a trade. In that respect, Houston's success at getting the better of Sacramento must be juxtaposed with Sacramento's complete inability to develop their players, as well as their complete inability flip them for good value. Just about every year in recent memory, the Kings have flipped a promising asset or two for virtually nothing. The players tend to go on to be decent-to-good on other teams, blossoming into legitimate NBA players they may have never indicated in the dysfunction and miasma of their Kings tenure. This trade is no exception. Robinson is no scrub, even if he's playing like it -- he's the reigning 5th pick in the draft, and with some good player development, it isn't hard to see him becoming a minor force in the league. But trading him for value would've involved less financial savings, you know. The Maloofs sent out $10.3 million in salary to receive $6.6 million in salary -- a savings of $3.7 million, without even mentioning the $1 million they pocket that the Rockets threw in for fun. Morey won another trade on the margins, but by god -- it was a trade with the Maloofs. You know the old trope about how one man's playing chess and the other's playing checkers? It's worse than that for Joe and Gavin. In a league of men playing three dimensional Star Trek chess, the Maloofs aren't just playing checkers -- they're damn near playing Parcheesi. I'm so sorry, Kings fans.

• • •

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE (or, Exception Handling)

MEMPHIS GETS:

Dexter Pittman (1-yr/$0.8 mil per), MIA's 2013 2nd Round Pick.

MIAMI GETS:

$850,000 trade exception, the rights to Ricky Sanchez.

I'll be quick with this one -- this was a decent deal for both teams. Really! Many would balk at the Heat's inability to get anything better than a trade exception for a second round pick, but in this particular case, it's not a useless exception -- the Heat look to be capped out for the forseeable LeBron-featured future, and the trade exception lets them be buyers the next time a team like Golden State puts a low-salary second rounder like Charles Jenkins or Jeremy Tyler on the market (as I'll discuss later). Or, alternatively, when a team like the Knicks puts Ronnie Brewer on the market! These aren't moves that are going to rock the world, but freeing dead weight space to take on salary becomes exceedingly important when you're as capped out and lacking options as next year's Miami team. (As does freeing up roster spots.) Keeping LeBron James in Florida is going to take a few low-price assets. Trading away an obvious clunker in Dexter Pittman for the possibility of a future low-priced trade steal is always decent deal, even if it costs them a nearly worthless second round pick. As for Memphis? Pittman's a relatively terrible player that can nevertheless play a few minutes a game to give their real stars a bit of rest. That should help them out a bit. The second round pick is nearly worthless, but given their increased budget on scouting and analytics, they'll probably be able to squeeze a bit of value out of it.

No, it's not a blockbuster. But it's a decent trade for both sides. Good stuff.

• • •

WHAT IN THE WASHINGTON (or, The Celtics Get Lucky)

BOSTON GETS:

Jordan Crawford (2-yr/$1.7 mil per).

WASHINGTON GETS:

Leandro Barbosa (1-yr/$1.2 mil per), Jason Collins (1-yr/$1.3 mil per).

Alright, I understand that Jordan Crawford hasn't been an exceedingly good player in Washington. But he hasn't been an unmitigated failure, either -- giving him up for naught more than an ACL-torn Barbosa and a balky (and generally useless) Jason Collins reeks of making a move simply to make a move. It doesn't help matters that the move saves Washington no money this season and just $2.1 million dollars next season -- hardly a sum worthy of a trade to free up, even if it nominally puts them "under the cap." I realize, again, that Crawford isn't a phenomenal player. But you can do __a lot __worse for a salary that low, and trading for absolutely no benefit has never made much sense to me. In Boston's case, I'm not sure this trade helps them that much, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Crawford can be a stopgap point guard for 5-10 minutes a game, and he'll help the Celtics put shots up when they get into one of their classic Boston ruts. As things stand, he's essentially a copy of Jason Terry. But at least Crawford's a young piece with a bit of upside, and the potential to get better. It's a lucky deal for Boston that should help them solidify their playoff push. And it's a confusing deal for Washington that doesn't help much, either now OR later.

• • •

BASSY BIG MOUTH GOES NORTH (or, The Raptors Sign Sebastian Ellis)

TORONTO GETS:

Sebastian Telfair (1-yr/$1.6 mil per).

PHOENIX GETS:

Hamed Haddadi (1-yr/$1.3 mil per), Toronto ??? 2nd Round Draft Pick.

In this case, it's a matter of both sides filling a need. Phoenix needs to free up playing time for Kendall Marshall, Toronto needs a backup for Kyle Lowry that isn't John Lucas III. Telfair isn't having a terrible season, and as a time-share backup, Toronto could do worse. As for Haddadi... he hasn't played a minute for the Raptors since the Rudy Gay trade, and it's highly unlikely he plays any in Phoenix. Barring a magical recovery from his shortness of breath and generally poor fitness, he's never going to be able to play more than 5-10 minutes a game of comfortable play, no matter how efficiently he acquits himself in those minutes. There's a place in the league for guys like that, but it's a short and fleeting place. And one that I'd reckon Haddadi's already spent up.

• • •

ERIC MAYNOR: FREE MAN (or, Portland Please Don't Kill His ACL)

PORTLAND GETS:

Eric Maynor (1-yr/$2.3 mil per).

OKLAHOMA CITY GETS:

Trade exception of $2.3 million, the rights to Georgios Printezis.

In Eric Maynor's player capsule, I discussed how I thought his addition to Oklahoma City would portend an improvement in the Thunder's chances of winning the finals. A good backup point guard like Maynor would, theoretically, take some of the onus off of Westbrook and Harden to dominate the ball and allow the Thunder to work on their off-ball movement. When healthy, Maynor was one of the better "true" backup point guards the league had to offer. He passed well, shot decently, and had decent-if-not-spectacular ball control. His defense didn't disappoint TOO much and his overall game was aesthetically pleasing. That's all been absent this season, where his play has been one of Oklahoma city's few disappointments in what's been an overall excellent season. Maynor's been bad enough that this move -- a trade where they're giving Maynor away for what amounts to nothing more than a player that'll never wear a Thunder jersey and a trade exception that a cost-cutting front office is unlikely to ever get use out of. In this case, the Thunder don't seem to be trading Maynor away for an asset. They're trading him to give him a better shot at his next contract with more minutes and a bigger role, given that Reggie Jackson has entirely supplanted the role Maynor was slated to fill in the first place. A stand-up move from a stand-up franchise, even if it didn't really result in any value-added to their team picture.

As a final note: Portland? Please don't let his knees explode. Much obliged.

• • •

DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC (or, Interchangeable Parts)

DALLAS GETS:

Anthony Morrow (1-yr/$4.0 mil per).

ATLANTA GETS:

Dahntay Jones (1-yr/$2.9 mil per)

Anthony Morrow, despite being one of the greatest three point shooters in the history of the league (I'm not kidding! Go look!), hasn't gotten a whole hell of a lot of burn in Atlanta to date. This isn't for no reason. Despite being a phenomenal three point talent, Morrow is among the worst defenders in the league and does virtually nothing else on the court -- he has nothing remotely approaching a passable close-to-the-basket move, he doesn't have a handle to speak of, and he has an annoying tendency to foul more than a wing safely should. Still, he's among the best three point shooters to ever play the game, and that's worth a few million to most teams out there. As for Dahntay Jones? He's a decent defender who's having one of the worst seasons in his entire career -- he's shooting 35% from the field and 21% from three, and doing little of note otherwise. That's remarkably bad no matter how good you are defensively, and with his defense having a relative off-year, he's a rough player to watch. Still, his acquisition saves Danny Ferry a few hundred thousand in the transaction by chopping off their late-season payments to Morrow for the lesser Jones, and with Morrow unable to crack their rotation, it probably won't be a big problem if Jones plays poorly and doesn't make the cut himself. The Mavericks have to improve quite a lot just to get to the Western playoffs -- Morrow doesn't necessarily help them do that, but it has a shot of helping them further amplify their strength behind the three point line. And in any event, rolling the dice on a Jones replacement probably makes sense. Not exactly a game changing move, but that's not a surprise -- none of the moves ANYONE made today changed the game.

Have you ever watched Community? It's a good show. Today, I find myself inspired by an early episode, specifically "Remedial Chaos Theory" -- the 3rd episode of the show's 3rd season. As a refresher, for those who aren't familiar: due to a damaged apartment door, it's determined that somebody has to walk down to get the pizza delivery. To decide which of the seven characters present gets the pizza, a die is rolled, and six different timelines are created. SPOILER ALERT: There are only six faces on a die. There are seven people. In a seventh "bonus" reality, they realize that one of their number is conning the group. Alas. In honor of the episode, I decided to create seven different timelines for the NBA trade deadline. Rather than trading seven different players, I decided to use one alone. The events had to be mutually exclusive, after all. Who? That was the easiest part, after a well timed tweet from Adrian Wojnarowski concerning Josh Smith. It had involved six teams. Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and (of course) the possibility of staying with Atlanta. One more team was needed, and in a ironic twist of fate, that last team was none other than the one I'd abandoned a week ago; my former Phoenix Suns. And thus, the table's set.

Here are the NBA's seven mutually exclusive Smith-based timelines.

• • •

Timeline 1: Josh Smith to the Milwaukee Bucks

In this scenario, Atlanta feels they need another incredibly annoying volume scorer. They get Ekpe Udoh's plus-minus too. Meanwhile, Milwaukee gets Josh Smith, to pair with LARRY SANDERS! to make for a really athletic team. This year, they even get to the 6th seed, and upset the 3rd-seed Bulls. Which is all well and good, until ~ the Josh Smith curse ~ hits them and the team collapses in a heap. This happens over and over again, through all five years of Smith's surprising extension. And so, in his thirties and depressed by a lifetime of early exits, Smith joins the 3-time champion Cleveland Cavaliers on a mid-level contract. The Cavs, of course, have LeBron back alongside Kyrie Irving. They're hyped up in the preseason as the best team in league history, which turns out to be pretty premature. The Cavs fall short in the second round the next 3 years in a row, losing game sevens in the second round each and every time, usually on a bricked Josh Smith jump shot.

Eventually Smith retires, disheartened, while LeBron ends his final season sans-Smith with a last championship to top off his career. It later turns out that Josh Smith had been cursed back when he decided to declare for the draft rather than to go to college. The curse stipulated that Smith can never go beyond the second round with a small-or-mid market team. After finding this out, Smith joins the Los Angeles Lakers -- now with Shabazz Muhammad and Damian Lillard -- and wins a championship as a veteran sixth man. Satisfied, he retires, never to be heard from in the NBA circles again.

• • •

Timeline 2: Josh Smith to the Washington Wizards

The Wizards add a bevy of draft picks to support the rather weak core, Jordan Crawford returns to Atlanta, and Josh Smith gets to play in the nation's capital. Fun times. After the first season is lost due to the impossible playoff hole, the Wizards end up facing off with the Chicago Bulls in the second round in the 2014 playoffs. An intense series goes seven games, with an reinvigorated Derrick Rose fighting off a breakout season from John Wall and an insanely well developed Bradley Beal, while Josh Smith anchors the defence.

With 10 seconds left in a decisive Game 7, the Bulls have a 89-88 lead with the Wizards getting the final shot. President Obama is in the stands. Smith gets the final shot, a buzzer beating decoy three off the inbounds play. The ball bricks off the rim and hits President Obama's head on the way down. The impact is so strong that Obama falls over his seat, breaking his neck in the process. He dies in the hospital. America's 45th President, former Senator Joe Biden, chooses to place the blame squarely on Smith and ensures he'll be charged with negligent homicide. Somehow the courts actually accept the premise of the prosecution and convict Smith, who is sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in prison.

Coach Randy Wittman commits suicide after realizing that it was his ridiculous play call that not only lost him a playoff series, but also killed the President. President Obama is said to have died happy. Years later, an investigation shows that minutes prior to the shot, a Secret Service agent was toying around with the rims as the crowd was distracted watching cheerleaders. A thorough report reveals that President Obama ordered the rims to be tampered with to make them extra bouncy, in an effort to make sure his Chicago Bulls wouldn't lose by a lucky roll or a shooter's bounce. Josh Smith is set free and makes several completely pointless runs for the Presidency on a variety of hopeless third party tickets.

(He maxes out at 5% in the 2064 elections.)

• • •

Timeline 3: Josh Smith to the Phoenix Suns

Josh Smith is heading to the Valley of the Sun! ... And as soon as he arrives there, he's greeted by Michael Beasley, who's just coming back home from buying some "soothing herbs." They become fast friends. For the rest of the 2013 season, Beasley and Smith play every game completely high. This unleashes their true potential, as the two Suns bricklayers suddenly forget how to miss shots. The Suns sneak into the playoffs, and the power of the wonder-weed apparently breaks Josh Smith's small-to-mid market curse. The Suns reach the NBA Finals, upsetting every big team in the book. But their luck runs out in Game 1 of the Finals -- they run out of weed, and even though Jermaine O'Neal tries his best to convince them that "Jermaine's Special Stuff" is just as good (it's oregano), they aren't fooled. The Suns revert back to their early season futility and brick right out against the Miami Heat in an easy sweep by LeBron and company, going down by about 40 points in each of the last three games. A DEA investigation later pins them as customers of many high profile Arizona dealers and locks them up in prison for 15 years. Suns fans remain completely unsurprised by what they've seen.

• • •

Timeline 4: Josh Smith to the Boston Celtics

Josh Smith is heading to Bean Town! The Celtics throw in draft picks with that trade, obviously. A LOT of draft picks. "EVERY DRAFT PICK'S POSSIBULLLLL!" The Celtics, reinforced with a new star PF alongside Kevin Garnett, inexplicably keep winning. They advance to the Eastern Conference Finals and fall to the Heat in 7. They enter next year as contenders, with Rajon Rondo is supposedly on the verge of a return to health. They repeat the same fun script... until Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce suddenly retire in the offseason. Right at the point where their draft picks begin to be sold. Over a painful five year period, the Celtics draft exactly TWO players -- yet another long and painful rebuild. Smith and Rondo leave as soon as their contracts are up, and the Celtics are bound for another era of sadness. Whoops.

• • •

Timeline 5: Josh Smith to the Brooklyn Nets

Mikhail Prokhorov kidnaps Danny Ferry's family, telling him to make a deal. He offers Wallace and Blatche as a throw in to keep up appearances. Prokhorov ALSO kidnaps the families of every single person involved in Hawks operations, noting that if they tell anyone anything after the trade, he'll do it again without the whole "returning them safe from harm" part. The Hawks are devastated by the trade and fall from playoff contention in record pace, unable to find chemistry with Gerald Wallace or Andray Blatche, who reverts to his former self after suffering withdrawal effects from Brooklyn club life. Meanwhile, the Nets somehow manage to click, with Josh Smith putting back all the bricks Joe Johnson and Deron Williams heave up nightly. The Nets continue a path of destruction all the way to a surprise NBA title, after it turns out that Brooklyn night-club life was the only thing Josh Smith needed to be able to defend LeBron James and Kevin Durant.

Next off-season, Dwight Howard forces a trade to Brooklyn. Nobody is surprised. The Nets go on to win six more titles, with ESPN proclaiming Josh Smith the new greatest of all time. Meanwhile, Mikhail Prokhorov finally beats a crusty old Vladimir Putin in the first competitive election in modern Russian history, partially riding his NBA takeover as a victory over the American imperialists. But a now-18 year old survivor of the kidnapping ordeal finally reports the story to Deadspin, who (after a full-on investigation) discover the truth behind the trade. The FBI jumps right on it, and the confirmation of Prokhorov's crimes comes just as the newly appointed Russian president is visiting the States. The Americans arrest him, diplomatic immunity be damned, on charges of kidnapping and destroying the sanctity of America's sports. This leads to Russia launching nuclear warheads. America and Russia are obliterated as wastelands, and China takes over the world.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announces that the Nets are stripped of all their titles.

• • •

Timeline 6: Josh Smith to the Philadelphia 76ers

Josh Smith is traded to the Sixers, while Evan Turner gets to grow with the Hawks. For team integration, the team decides to take Smith out bowling, where he injures his knee celebrating a strike that got him a perfect score. As time passes, Smith is day-to-day until the end of the season. He later has to retire due to the injury, stating he feels that he can't play on the level he'd want to anymore. Later it turns out that he spent his entire rehabilitation period playing games programmed by Andrew Bynum on a Kinect that Bynum also tweaked to have more "fun". Smith and Bynum keep re-injuring their knees, this way, and both eventually retired to become motion based video game designers.

• • •

Timeline 7: Josh Smith stays in Atlanta

Smith stays and resigns with Atlanta. He's joined by Dwight Howard, who chooses Atlanta in a 7 episode game show called "The Free Agency Dwight Howard Roulette Bonanza WITH CELEBRITY IMPERSONATIONS." Being old friends, Smith and Howard get along really well and pilot some of the more interesting NBA teams of recent memory. They develop a rabid national fanbase to offset the traditionally flagging attendance in Atlanta, but Smith's curse prevents them from achieving their ultimate goal. Eventually, due to their falling attendance and how little Atlanta cares about them, the Hawks make their way to London to become the NBA's first European team. This move powers Smith and Howard with the salve of night-life and prostitution, bringing the NBA's championship trophy to the United Kingdom. Mean mugging the camera as he's awarded his finals MVP, a beaming Josh Smith picks up the trophy and screams in excitement.

... only to wake up in a cold sweat a few days before the trade deadline, still waiting to see what happens.

THE END

• • •

EDITOR'S NOTE: Hey, all! We're finally back from our All-Star hangover. (No, none of us made it to the all-star game. This hangover is metaphorical, the answer is horrible, our morals are out of place and l--... I'll stop.) Tomorrow marks the return of the Outlet with a piece on last week's depressing-for-Jacob OKC/MIA rubber match and some other good stuff. Friday marks the start of a weeklong feature, an end-of-season viewing guide that handicaps the award races and sheds light on some trends and fun things to watch. Then I'll be making my way up to Boston to bring you guys some coverage of the Sloan conference. Get excited. -- Aaron

Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less absurd task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I was skeptical of entering the season, but whose collapse I really didn't see coming -- the 2013 Sixers, of course.

Fun story -- I actually didn't like Philadelphia that much as we entered the 2013 season. A few reasons for that: Bynum's injury was worrisome given his prior injury history, they replaced their best offensive player (Lou Williams) with Nick Young, and I wasn't a big fan of any of their non-Bynum moves. Still, the general consensus that they were a high upside team with potential outclassing the names on the roster -- after all, Doug Collins had guided a roster of relative no-names and young castaways to a game short of the Eastern Conference Finals a year prior, right? No way they'd disappoint. Except for the "no way" part, since that's exactly what happened. Let's examine how.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: PHILADELPHIA AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: This one's pretty obvious -- from late January to early February, the Sixers went on a pretty nice run. One of the few good ones this season. It wasn't exactly a murderer's row of opponents, but it was a good stretch. They lost to Milwaukee and Memphis in close games, coupling that with their best win of the season (a blowout of the Knicks) and a few blowouts over the East's cellar (the Bobcats and the Magic, obviously). Add in some comfortable wins against the Wizards and the Kings and you have their best stretch. It's really not much, but that's the kind of year they're having.
  

• WORST STRETCH: They were pretty atrocious in December as a whole -- they went 4-11 over the month. But in these particular two-week splits, the worst stretch has to be their 1-6 schneid around the middle of the month. They went 1-6 against generally weak competition, including an embarrassing home blowout loss to the Lakers and a 0-4 road record against the Pacers, Mavericks, Rockets, and Nets. Their only saving grace? A single blowout win against the Hawks. Not their finest hour.
  

Let's not beat around the bush -- the Sixers have been poor. Awful. Atrocious. They're still in the weeds of a tepid Eastern playoff race, but that's only on the assumption that Rondo's absence eventually leads to a Boston collapse -- it's unlikely they leapfrog Milwaukee, so Boston's theoretical collapse is their only real in-roads. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the two teams directly around them in the standings -- Toronto and Detroit -- are both a touch better than they are. At the 51-game mark, the Sixers rate out as one of the worst offensive teams in the league and a marginally above average defense. They're a defensive team, theoretically, but they're mostly just a bad one -- all things considered, Washington's shown a much higher defensive ceiling than Philadelphia has and they're a better offense as well, now that Wall's returned.

• • •

PHILADELPHIA'S PERFECT PACE: Doesn't exist!

Last season, around the conference finals, I performed an analysis of each conference finalist's "perfect" pace -- essentially, I split pace into four buckets (slow, mid-slow, mid-fast, fast) and assessed records and efficiency for each conference finalist in each bucket. I've decided to bring that type of analysis back to give a bit more context on the way teams are best suited to play. A reminder of what's going on here: I've split every game played this season into four buckets based on the number of possessions played -- one for slow, one mid-slow, one mid-fast, one fast. Quartiles. I've set up my program to update the quartiles as more games get played, so the designations may change slightly as time goes on. As for the statistics provided, they're similar to those you'll see above. There's the team's efficiency differential in that pace bucket, the average opponent differential of their opponents in that bucket on all games played, wins and losses, home and away totals, offensive ratings, defensive ratings, and a nice collection of the team's four factors stats. Good talk.

Here's how the Sixers have done by each bucket:

Some interesting stuff. A few observations on the overall distribution here.

• By design, Doug Collins likes his teams to focus on grind-it-out basketball. The man's happiest when his teams play turtle-slow basketball and grind the opponent into submission. That's... just about exactly what they've been doing, too! Almost 40% of Philadelphia's games were played at a snail's pace, at less than 88 possessions per contest. The Sixers have punched slightly above their weight at that pace -- they actually defend a bit worse than they do at faster paces, but their halfcourt offense does actually work a bit better when it's used less.

• One thing that may surprise you is how Philadelphia did in the 10 games they've played at over 95 possessions per contest. They really haven't been that bad. Their offense falls apart when they play fast, but their defense has shown to be a bit more stingy at high speeds, primarily because their rebounding improves and they force a lot of turnovers. This matches the eye test, as well -- when you watch some of the games Philadelphia has played at breakneck speeds, like this solid win against the Rockets, one of the first things you notice is just how comfortable Jrue Holiday and Thaddeus Young are when they're sprinting the floor and given free reign to challenge all quick passing lanes. They played a harder slate in those 10 "fast" games but still posted performances above their average. Good stuff.

• Overall, the Sixers have posted a winning record from exactly zero of these possession buckets -- there's no particularly notable pace of the game that strengthens them considerably. They play slow because Doug Collins likes to play slow. While it isn't exactly working out gangbusters for them, there aren't a whole lot of other options -- they play a bit better at breakneck speeds but transitioning to such a style falls squarely outside Collins' expertise. When nothing really helps, you do what you know.

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

I really can't restate it enough -- the Philadelphia 76ers are one of the biggest disappointments of the season. The higher profile struggles of the Lakers and the Celtics have obfuscated it, but this is an astonishingly poor season for a franchise that thought it was putting its hens in order. In the preseason, I thought they'd go 40-42. That's good for a 3 game drop from last season's standard, but hardly anything close to the currently projected 35-47 record that Basketball Reference forecasts them for. There were two main causes, so far as I see it, for their currently awful season.

• ANDREW BYNUM. I don't want to beat it into the ground, because it isn't really reasonable. But Bynum hasn't played a single game for them. He's the best player on a not-particularly-deep team -- that was going to hurt no matter what happened. All that said, I stop short of attributing all of their struggles to Bynum's absence. As good as Andrew Bynum is, we still have yet to see him acting as a team's first option on offense and we have yet to see how he recovers from his latest injury. Bynum's notorious for long recovery time and occasional flagging effort -- while it's possible he would've fixed everything for Philadelphia, it's hard to simply assume he would.

• A TERRIBLE SUMMER. Let's be straight, here -- the Sixers had an atrocious summer. The Bynum trade was decent in theory, if you consider just how tepid the trade market was for Andre Iguodala in the first place. But almost every single other move they made this summer went sour. Replacing Lou Williams with Nick Young has proven to be an unreasonably massive downgrade, and replacing Elton Brand with Kwame Brown has been arguably worse. Spencer Hawes has played so poorly he's had trouble living up to his contract, even though it's a massive bargain-bin deal. Dorrell Wright has been mediocre at best, Royal Ivey has been worse than Jodie Meeks (really? REALLY?!), and Jason Richardson is messing up their future cap situation (more on that in a second). Even if Bynum WAS playing, it's impossible to argue that Philadelphia made lateral moves this summer. Their wheeling and dealing dramatically harmed their team.

The second bullet is the more important one. They may yet sign Bynum to a max contract, and he may yet suit up and prove he deserves it. But Philadelphia got worse at virtually every position they touched this summer. That's phenomenally hard to do. It's also difficult to have a year as bad as the one Philadelphia's having in concert with your young stars having breakout years, but Philadelphia's aggressively poor offseason made sure of that. Seriously -- Jrue Holiday has taken a quantum leap forward and Thaddeus Young has looked phenomenal this season. If during the offseason you'd told me that either of those would happen, I would've predicted 48-54 wins. Even if Bynum was out! But alas. Sometimes your moves simply don't work out.

This season's an obvious casualty of a few moves that didn't work out, but it's worth mentioning that next season may be out too. Philadelphia currently has $44 million in the books for next season, and that's without resigning Bynum, Nick Young, or Dorrell Wright -- once they resign Bynum, they'll be over the salary cap and reduced to scrounging for the lower-priced scraps on the market. It's certainly possible that a three man core of Bynum/Holiday/Thaddeus can contend for a middling-tier playoff spot in a barren Eastern conference, but it's hard to see a championship endgame for a team like that without some excellent depth and some better wings. If Evan Turner didn't look atrocious, that might change matters -- but he's looked bad.

The Sixers are perilously close to losing all financial flexibility, partly because of their taking on Jason Richardson in the Andrew Bynum deal. Richardson's looked over the hill with a foot out the door for two seasons now, and he's still got $12 million left on his contract after this season. Richardson probably takes Philadelphia out of the picture in the incoming free agency bonanza during the 2014 offseason. Which all translates to a murky, hazy future. Philadelphia doesn't look like a title contender, or anything close -- if they resign Bynum, their upside appears to be a second round Hawks-type faux contender. What's the endgame? I really don't know. We'll see soon enough.

Here's hoping it goes a bit better than last year's endgame.

• For more Sixers scouting, check out the 2012 Philadelphia 76ers player capsules. •

• • •

Since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #5 plays relatively fast -- they don't always play at the fastest pace, but they almost never play slow. They've only played 8 games this season at under 88 possessions a contest, which is one of the lowest totals in the NBA. They've been consistently awful all year regardless of their pace, and their rotation is an absolute mess. Their coach infuriates me and they're having one of the worst 5-year stretches any franchise has ever gone through. At least they're 11-12 against the East. Wait, what.

Best of luck. See you next week.

Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. What more could we provide? Today's short pieces are as follows.

• PHX vs OKC: There Goes the Sun[s] (by Adam Koscielak)
• LAL vs PHX: The Collective Richard Jefferson of Suns/Lakers (by Alex Dewey)
• CLE vs SAS: Redemption in a Familiar Place (by Aaron McGuire)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

__PHX vs OKC: There Goes the Sun[s]
___Adam Koscielak_

Swish. Kevin Durant nails another one. There isn't anything any Suns player can do about it. After all, it's Kevin Durant, destroyer of worlds, killer of dreams, basket-bot 3000. Nobody's going to ever stop most of these shots. Lindsay Hunter, meanwhile, furiously calls a timeout, proceeding to eviscerate PJ Tucker, a journeyman who's basically an NBA rookie-via-Europe at this point. Hunter still expected perfection, Hunter, as an imperfect a head coach you could ever imagine, with his inconsistent rotations and his propensity to bench good players for streaky ones. And on the other end, there's Marcin Gortat. Last year's leading scorer, missing yet another bunny. Or maybe it wasn't a bunny, just something he'd make last year. Maybe it's the paralyzing fear of Serge Ibaka looming, or anger at the referees for missing another subtle nudge. These are not excuses, these are circumstances. They're circumstances he used to fight through, and circumstances that do not exonerate him from the crime of lazy basketball. Ditto for every other Suns player, every other disillusioned athlete that goes through the motion. And herein lies the problem.

I've been a Suns fan ever since I first heard of Steve Nash playing there. As I wrote before, this wasn't an easy quest in Poland, but I have embraced them. The arrival of Marcin Gortat cemented my fandom. Two years later, with a quick poof, Steve Nash left for the Lakers, and Gortat found himself as the 5th wheel on a team dominated by terrible ballhogs. Sunday night, even team captain Jared Dudley found himself benched for most of the game for no apparent reason. This is probably what drove me over the cliff. Yes, I'll admit it: I'm a crazy optimist. I expected the Suns to be fighting for a playoff spot right now, nowhere near a high lottery pick. Yes, it was irrational, but I believed that the same spirit that lead them to barely miss out on the playoffs the last two seasons was more than just Steve Nash. I thought it was fight. As it turned out, that it was all Nash's and Grant Hill's leadership. And so, disappointed by the rough fall that came as my expectations turned into high hopes, and high hopes turned into insane dreams, I write this little statement.

I will not watch another Suns game this season.

I will not make another comment about them outside of trade rumours, I will not write about Marcin Gortat's stat lines. I'm done. I have a choice between frustrating myself with awful basketball and embracing another team. I'll go elsewhere. And I chose the easy way out. Honestly? I feel liberated. Being a fan is hard, and believe me, I know all about bad teams. The Polish National Team in soccer hasn't had a major success in my lifetime, instead failing miserably whenever they seemed poised to make the next step. But that didn't happen. The Edmonton Oilers, outside of a single Stanley Cup Finals appearance, have been pretty bad in my lifetime. And yet I stuck with them. Why? Because I was bound to them. Rooting for someone else than Poland would be like you guys rooting for someone else than America. I'm not a big patriot, but when it comes to sport, I might just be a nationalist. The Oilers? The Oilers have always been the one thing I could talk about with my dad. They were his team, and so, they automatically became mine. The Suns? The Suns were a choice. An expression of appreciation for the beauty of the game they brought on. Now, they're jerseys filled by people who don't play beautiful basketball, far from it. Alvin Gentry, an offensive mastermind, and an architect of sorts, is now gone, dismissed for the sins of a terrible front office and replaced by Lindsay Hunter, who hadn't even been a coach before this happened.

The worst thing about Hunter is that while he did get the team under control, he made them play an even uglier brand of basketball, one totally opposite to the free flowing offence of Steve Nash. And so, when the Suns barely managed to score 69 points (with only Markieff Morris -- of all people -- in double figures), I gave up. I'd decided that enough was enough, and threw the Suns away to the laundry basket, waiting for the rebuilding machine to clean them up. Perhaps I can give them another chance, one day, when they'll be playing watchable basketball. In the meanwhile, however, I say goodbye to the Valley. It's been a fun ride while it lasted, but I refuse to torture myself any longer. And so, what's next? I'm going to watch a lot more Raptors, that's for sure. Canadian patriotism and all that, I feel like this is one team I can potentially root for. Aside from that, I will just look through the league, again and again, looking for teams and players that I can support.

I am now the liberated fan, one might say. And it's good for me.

• • •

__LAL vs PHX: The Collective Richard Jefferson of Suns/Lakers
___Alex Dewey
_

I'm a big-time advocate of the game of my muse -- that of stately, ambassadorial Warriors small forward Richard Jefferson, formerly of the Nets, Bucks, and Spurs. Some of my amusement at RJ is borne simply of Jefferson's absurdly well-developed self-awareness, his iconic appearance, and so on. But above all else, my amusement derives from his decision-making on the court. Despite major-league athletic ability and generally solid positioning (rarely will Jefferson make unwarranted gambles for steals and blocks), Jefferson is simply not an good decision-maker with the ball in his hands. RJ never looks comfortable passing from the corner to the wing or vice versa, or hitting players on backdoor cuts, at least in game-time offensive situations. On the rare event he does look comfortable, Jefferson seems almost too comfortable, making automatic passes even when he has an open shot, as though he's not really making the decision in the moment and he's not reading the situation effectively. Jefferson has the almost uncanny ability to disappear completely for long stretches of the game, and not because he's taking himself out of the game. Simply because he genuinely thinks the weakside corner is the best utilization of his talents. His cuts are random. Outside of the fast break (in which there are, to some extent, only automatic decisions), Jefferson with or near the ball is comedy. And I feel that Jefferson honestly has enough self-awareness to recognize the humor and enough self-deprecation to laugh about it.

And visually speaking, all of this absolutely cracks me up to watch. Bullet passes without reason, Jefferson posting up on the left block (and getting doubled) like he's Tim Duncan, insensibly solid defense at times, automatic responses with flat jumpers that have Mark Jackson and Gregg Popovich shaking their heads. For some reason I've always pictured Tim Duncan, suddenly becoming surly as though speaking to a pet, after a particularly poor decision: "Just look what you did, Richard. Just look what you did." I have so many all-time favorite Jefferson moments from his relatively short Spurs tenure, like the time he passed up a huge open wing 3 in crunch-time only to get the exact same shot three passes later and buried it. The time he absolutely flubbed an alley-oop from Tony Parker and let the ball go out of bounds. The time he missed a free throw everyone knew he would miss, and of the Spurs on the bench and line, only Popovich applauded him on the sideline encouragingly (he hit the second one). The time (and he'll do this sort of thing from time to time) that RJ blocked a Ty Lawson 3 and dribbled to the other end faster than Lawson could run to get a bucket. Impossible? Yeah, except it's not. It friggin' happened! That's the point: Richard Jefferson is like a low-key, articulate, self-aware, defensively solid, self-deprecating, 6'6'', not-all-that-athletic-anymore version of JaVale McGee, but in this blessedly singular way.

What is this building towards? Okay, so anyway, I actually did not watch Jefferson Tuesday night. So I guess (best Arlo Guthrie impression) "that's not what I came here to talk about." See, Jefferson was playing with the Warriors against Houston at the same time as the Lakers-Suns game. And that Lakers-Suns game, especially in the second half? It was exactly like the experience of watching a collective Richard Jefferson, except with Jefferson as every player's puppetmaster for most of the second half. The Suns looked like a 5-win team overperforming and the Lakers looked like a 20-win team performing to its level. And not like, "Wow, it's so sad that this is a team," but more like "I would go see these teams even if they were 5-win teams if I were nearby." It was a glorious comedy of errors: Players that did not know why they were throwing bullet passes, brilliant sequences of 50-50 balls, Metta World Peace making a brilliant steal and then not even trying to avoid getting called for the offensive foul against little Goran Dragic, Michael Beasley telegraphing his decision to shoot like he was Samuel Morse beating a horse-drawn carriage to the Patent Office, scrums that ended in unpredictable ways and led into scrums on scrums on scrums, Kobe refusing to shoot even when completely open, Earl Clark making cuts that I'm confident have never been made before, and a general sense that both teams were trying to outscore their opponents instead of trying to outplay their opponents.

The net result was that Aaron and I were just shaking our heads and completely cracking up watching the game. The Suns were winning the rebounding battle for reasons completely passing understanding. If the Suns had offered a guarantee of fun for this game (as they did earlier this season), they could have sold this a major network during prime time and gotten not one complaint. Yes, the Suns are often sad to watch and not altogether sadder than the Lakers. And all considering, seeing Luis Scola and Jermaine O'Neal trying to play out the string on their careers is kind of heart-breaking. Regardless! That game was entertainment, novelty, aesthetics, and humor all in one. I watched the Kings-Grizz game right before it, and while technically more competent and filled with brilliant scoring by Tyreke Evans and one of Tony Allen's God-mode games and a good performance by Tayshaun Prince...? Even with generally speaking, more eminent competence all throughout the game... I am going to forget a hundred Kings-Grizz games before I forget that comically awful Lakers-Suns game. It was by far the better game as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure those at Staples would agree.

Also, by this logic, Boris Diaw is far superior to Kevin Love. Just sayin'.

• • •

__CLE vs SAS: Redemption in a Familiar Place_
Aaron McGuire_

I actually watched this game on virtual tape delay, since I spent most of the night at a friend's place watching the Duke/UNC rivalry game. Before I say anything about the Spurs, allow me to spend a moment in muted awe. I generally hate college basketball, but this was something special -- the first half of last night's Duke/UNC game was quite possibly the worst game I've ever seen. No comebacks, no weasel words, no rejoinders. Just disgusting basketball. Both teams were throwing passes with no possible intended target. Both teams were taking hilariously poor shots, exemplified by one particular Amile Jefferson shot in the first half. Jefferson -- I kid you not -- dribbled, turned 270 degrees on his pivot foot, and made to shoot... before dribbling and turning 270 degrees back to exactly where he started, where his defender was still standing. The defender didn't move to cover his turnaround, he just stayed in the same place! So the net result was that Jefferson made a move that got himself free for a jumper before completely erasing the object of the move for absolutely no reason and throwing up a horribly contested shot. He missed badly. It was awful. It was a phenomenal trainwreck and offensive to the concept of execution.

So, given all that, I may have been a tad hypersensitive to good execution. So that said, let's not beat around the bush -- the Spurs played comparably lazy basketball last night over the vast majority of the game. The Cavaliers are playing reasonably well as of late, but in a game where Kyrie Irving scores just six points on 2-15 shooting, the Cavaliers should be down 20-30. That they weren't was a general indictment of San Antonio's effort and energy, and a reflection of how difficult it generally is to bring stars back from injury. It's not that Duncan, Parker, or Ginobili were bad -- they were all fine, in a vacuum. Duncan's defense was excellent all game (as is to be expected) and Manu's crisp two-man game with Blair remains one of the most fun little quirks of the current era of San Antonio basketball. But that didn't do much to combat the two big problems both players faced -- in Duncan's case, he tired almost exponentially quickly after the long layoff, playing quite well in his first 5-10 minutes but increasingly poorly as he lost his legs. The backups and riff-raff that had acquitted themselves so well in Duncan's absence were flagging in concert, as though Duncan's return had sequestered them back into the mindset of being a backup who didn't need to do anything. Danny Green did the same with Manu's return, and everyone over-deferred to Parker instead of seeking out their own generated offense. It was a sloppy, sloppy contest.

But you know what? All that ended up being essentially immaterial. In the final estimation, all that anyone's really going to remember about last night's game was the final eight seconds -- so sublime, so functional, so beautiful. I watched the video at least a dozen times, and I could watch it a dozen more. Duncan sets a high screen, Parker dives into the teeth of the defense with his disorienting, hypnotic dribble. He weaves his way to the rim, where he had an essentially wide-open layup to tie the game. Tim Duncan is right behind him with zero block-out coverage on the part of the Cavaliers, in perfect position to tip the ball in or receive a quick scoop pass for a flush. And there, in the corner? Wouldn't you know it, it's Kawhi Leonard, he of 48% three point shooting from that particular corner! There were three completely open shots that could've been generated in a split second. Being as they are a team that cares more about the win than the margin, the Spurs went for the pop-a-shot three. Leonard canned it. Parker then played brilliant stifling defense on Kyrie Irving to force an errant last shot, and the game was done. After a night of dismal basketball – for the Spurs, for Duke, for UNC – sometimes all you really need is a single stretch of beauty to redeem a terrible night of hoops. Big ups to the Spurs for rising from their slumber to provide us such a gem.

 

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

Nothing in sports is fair.

• • •

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

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

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

• • •

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

Isn't that an accomplishment worthy of praise?

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

Isn't that an accomplishment worthy of praise?

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

Long ago in a distant land, Alex Arnon was watching a Kings/Suns preseason game when he became so furiously enraged at a Tyreke Evans double-teamed isolation jumper with 19 seconds on the shot clock that he hit his head, fainted, and woke up a delusional new man. To my understanding, he's now wholly ensconced in a bizarro world where some guy named Xenu created the Earth, Segways changed the very core of how people get around, and small markets make up the vast majority of NBA coverage and traffic. So just remember the motto we've provided our cracked-skull columnist: "No superstars? No problem!"

The All-Star Game is back, baby!

Well, okay... All-Star weekend is back. After all, who cares about a bunch of overpaid ninnies refusing to play defense in a cash-grab by that devilish Stern? What really matters this weekend are the true main events: the dunk contest and the three-point shootout! In the dunk contest we've got Gerald Green, James White, and and Terrence Ross representing the East. You all know how I feel about Terrence Ross' Raptors but let's talk about James White for a moment. While he does play for the biggest of big market bullies, the New York Knicks, I believe a small-market heart beats within him. White started his career with our beloved Spurs back in 2006, but he didn't catch on there and had to play in Turkey, Italy, and Russia in order to make his way back to the NBA. He's demonstrated three very small market traits on his way back to the NBA: hard work, determination, and a devout hatred of communism. When he played for Saint Petersburg in 2009-10 he made absolutely sure that they didn't win a single accolade so that those dirty commies wouldn't be happy. It's surely no coincidence that Saint Petersburg won the Russian cup the year after he left!

The dunk contest ALSO has small-market saviors Jeremy Evans and Kenneth Faried participating, which is neat. But let's be real. Dunks are flashy, with pizzazz and artistry. Who has time for pizzazz and artistry in a small market? Not me, that's who. There's only one thing that REALLY matters during the all-star weekend: the good-old fashioned three point shootout. And what a doozy this year's event is going to be, friends! The West's main attraction is the peerless Matt Bonner, a man who once made, shot, and consumed 25 consecutive sandwiches from halfcourt. The Red-haired William Shatner lookalike will have Stephen Curry and Ryan Anderson alongside him in the West, but what I'm truly excited for is his competition in the East. Steve Novak, white-guy extraordinaire, will be a tough one to beat. Paul George is the object of affection for small marketeers everywhere and surpassed by only one man. The last man in this year's 3 point shooting contest and surely the one to will win at all, just as he's won our hearts? Kyrie Irving. Experts worldwide are expecting him to score a perfect 25/25 while showing everyone in the dunk contest by making his last attempt a dunk from the three-point line. Because if there's one man who can do it, it's Skyrie Irving.

One last note - I wasn't originally gonna talk about this, but the main page for the Skills Challenge has "Fundamentals" as the first word in its headline so I feel rather obligated to include it. There's a skills challenge! Several actual NBA players will compete to see whose definition of the word "skrillex" is closest to the actual definition, assuming they don't fall asleep during one of Kenny Smith's monologues. Can't wait! Here's hoping Coach B teaches his protege Tony Parker a bit about the fundamentals of the game (and a bit about skrillex) to help him repeat!

• • •

The State of The Small Market Union (Sponsored by The Memphis School of Modern Dance)

Timothy Theodore Duncan is still day-to-day. In related news, I'm still crying every day. The NBA's state of the small market union, therefore, remains on hiatus. But that doesn't mean we can't talk about the world's smallest market!

Today, live from Vatican City, we bring you...

• • •

The State of The Smallest City Union (Sponsored by Pope Vincent III's Vintage Vestments)

Hellooo, nurse! Today we've got some big news out of the world's smallest market of all. That's right -- Vatican City! And before you naysayers point out that Vatican City can't be a true small market, I defy you to look up how many square miles the entire city encompasses. It's OK, I'll wait. ... [Editor's Note: Alex, our readers have absolutely no way to interact with you while you're writing a post. It's been 6 hours. Stop waiting.] ... Oh, that's right! Thanks Aaron. Can you look it up for me? ... [Editor's Note: Wait, what? You didn't look it up?] ... Yeah, alright, look. Buddy, Google is hard. ... [Editor's Note: It's 0.44 square miles with a population of 793.] ... Yeah! Thanks! So, anyway, Vatican City isn't even half a square mile, and its entire population numbers fewer than the number of children sired by Wilt Chamberlain. It's basically the definition of a small market! If you look up small market in the dictionary, you'd get a picture of Pope Benedict's tossed salads and scrambled eggs, as served by Kelsey Grammar in the hit television sh--

Alright, look, I'm not having a good morning. Ahem.

Point is, we've got some big news out of Vatican City this morning. Pope Benedict, the worldly equivalent of an unreasonably powerful small market mayor, has resigned the office of pope. His stated reason is old age, which makes a lot of sense -- according to Wikipedia, Pope Benedict first took office in 575, which was 1,438 years ago. Pretty sure Dick Bavetta is the only person we know who was around to see him take office. (We love you, Dick!) In appreciation of Pope Benedict's long and storied service, let's take a look at some of the greatest moments of Benedict's 1,438 year papacy. Due to constraints on time, we were unable to make a short film. Please imagine the following played on a gigantic screen in a dark room with a needlessly dramatic background track while coked out movie stars clap their hands off.

• 630: Our Tang-drinking homie Du Ruhui died. I'M POURING ONE OUT FOR MY BROTHER.
• 737: Bardock perished on his homeworld in Frieza's attack. [Source: Wikipedia]
• 1235: The Lancaster Royal Grammar School was founded.
• 1649: Oliver Cromwell's brief rule of England began!
• 1653: Oliver Cromwell's brief rule of England concluded!
• 1974: Much beloved President Gerald Ford was inaugurated as President of these United States of America.
• 2012: Michael Culpepper was named acting City Manager of Troy, MI after the recall of Mayor Janice Daniels.

Oh, the memories.

In honor of our dear Pope, this week is dedicated to his favorite team, the Notre Dame Fightin' Irish. Go Lady Vols!

• • •

Sperry's Space Stuff presents: "Rocketing To The Top!" Chandler Parsons MVP Watch

I have to apologize to Mr. Parsons for taking so long to include him in our MVP watch. Even the best stretches of The Jimmer With The Zimmer and Michael "Clownface" Dunleavy Jr. couldn't hold a candle to Chandler's February thus far -- the good man's posting up 18.3 points on 56% shooting with 4.5 rebounds and 4.3 assists! And he's posting that up without ever posting anyone up, too, which is harder than it looks. Not only that, but Chandler's letting his teammate James Harden average 17.2 shots per game during the stretch. What more could you want from this guy? He knows he can stuff his own stat sheet, but he'd rather let a banished 6th man enjoy his time in the sun and shoot as many shots as he wants. Not only that, but Chandler doesn't lead his team in a single statistical category! Where else could you find a guy this talented and this unselfish? It's crazy! In fact, he's so well-liked within the league that word around town is that he's helping Mr. Ross with his dunk contest entry because Ross and Chandler are just such great friends.

[Editor's Note: YOU'RE FIRED I'M FIRED WE'RE ALL FIRED SHUT IT ALL DOWN.]

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night

This is it. This is the night. Our game of the night might as well be the game of the year! The two most amazing, most perfectest, most beautifulest point guards in the entire league go head to head tonight -- Ricky Rubio and Kyrie Irving lock irons in a deathmatch for the ages. Tricky Ricky will surely try some never-before-seen behind the head twistaroos, only to be countered by Kyrie's stout man-to-zone-plus-one defensive prowess. This is surely going to be a match-up full of flash and panache. Although, let's be honest. If it comes down to a grit and grind type contest, I'm afraid that Pretty Ricky has the advantage. He's incredibly experienced in grinding through games. See you next week, friends and family! (Mostly family!)

Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. What more could we provide? Today's short pieces are as follows.

• PHX vs MEM: Inspector Gadget's Game (by Aaron McGuire)
• MIL vs DEN: Basketbality, in Purest Form (by Alex Dewey)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

__PHX vs MEM: The Dirge of Inspector Gadget_
Aaron McGuire_

In the wake of Rudy Gay's departure from the Memphis Grizzlies, there's been a lot of talk about addition by subtraction. The idea that the team is going to get better -- perhaps a lot better -- from the formerly inefficient Rudy Gay's departure alone. Call it semantics if you'd like, but I'm not sure that's quite right. Addition by subtraction is reserved for situations where a player vanishes into the ether entirely -- whether through injury, a salary dump, or a suspension. When a player is replaced by a different agent with an entirely different skillset (as the Grizzlies did by picking up Tayshaun Prince to fill-in for Rudy's production), the trade becomes more a case of addition by tinker. Or more accurately, change by tinker, as it doesn't need to be prescriptively bad or good. It's a team taking a stab at absorbing a new set of skills brought to the table -- quite a different matter than addition by subtraction alone. Properly assessing the moving parts of a complex trade is surprisingly difficult.

Last night provided a good teaching example, when Grizzlies fans and NBA scribes got to watch a tantalizing glimpse of Prince's potential to help this Memphis team. Make no mistake -- Prince was active, impactful, and one of the scant few reasons the Grizzlies were in last night's game at all. His go-go-gadget arms were disrupting passing lanes all night long, and his fit into the offensive flow was surprisingly smooth. While he missed a few at-rim chippies he'd usually hit that made his overall game seem a bit inefficient, he took open shots and forced the Suns to run around like madmen to keep him from popping open for more. He served as the primary ballhandler for a few stretches of the game to a lot of success, something Rudy Gay was never great shakes at, and his command of the boards and passing lanes gave Memphis a lot more than they'd perhaps have the right to expect. Was it the same as Gay's contributions? Certainly not -- it was entirely and completely different. But it was useful, and it gave them a wrinkle they never quite had before.

Of course, despite that, the Grizzlies still lost. And that's where the minutiae and the complexity starts to rear its head. Prince showed versatility and comfort beyond all reasonable expectations, and Zach Randolph showed excellent form in a 21-13 return to his uncontested first-option status. Even Jerryd Bayless had a good game, combining everything he's given Memphis this year with a necessary infusion of three point shooting. (He was lit up on defense, but he was scoring so well it didn't completely matter.) Everyone else, though? A horror story. Marc Gasol's passing was slow and poorly timed, and his offense was completely off (partially because of a few horrible calls that sapped his aggression). Mike Conley has always played better with Gay on the court than with Gay off, and last night continued the trend -- his shots were hasty and poorly considered while his passing was weak and predictable. Darrell Arthur played like a nervous man worried for his minutes, Ed Davis was a complete nonfactor, and Tony Allen's defense was surprisingly tame. It was a lame and lethargic night for the Grizzlies as a whole, in spite of the unexpectedly exceptional performance from Randolph and Prince.

So, what was the end result? Prince played well, Randolph adapted, and everyone else appeared to fold. For one example of a night, the trade was completely inscrutable – it was essentially impossible for a layman to tell if the game was one the Grizzlies would win with Gay in their corner. Conversely, it’s difficult to state for certain that the game was one the Grizzlies would lose – without Prince’s contributions there’s no way to mentally assess how Gay would’ve filled in Tayshaun’s role. It’s hard to figure if Rudy Gay would’ve made the team more or less engaged. There’s no certainty when you assess a trade in-the-moment. A come-to-Jesus moment of realization, a understanding of exactly how good or bad the trade ended up being for your team? That’s rare. Elusive. A questing beast for a new age.

Basketball is a binary sport. You win, you lose -- the game ends, and you move on. The trades and sub-games of basketball are distinctly different. They aren't binary at all -- you don't simply win a trade or lose a trade. You make the trade, then you batten down the hatches and wait through the ebb and flow of the trade’s impact. All the while you watch the signals and the numbers, sift through statistics and figures, and furrow your brow in an effort to find a stark understanding that never comes. There are indications, sure. They’re just buried in mountains of noise, what-if’s, and conditionals. That's a large part of what makes trades so fun, for fans and analysts -- they're a lingering wisp of unparalleled nuance in a sport of stark truths and analysis.

• • •

__MIL vs DEN: Basketbality, in Purest Form
___Alex Dewey
_

"What is jazz?"
"If you gotta ask, you'll never know."

-Louis Armstrong, apocryphal.

Certain performers, composers, and listeners bring something to the table when they perform, compose, and listen to music. That something is called musicality. Musicality connotes acuity for melody, harmony, rhythm... but in its broadest sense, musicality really just means the ability to locate and produce sound in time and space. As a musically-oriented person I can hardly listen to music without much musicality. This isn't elitist; some people can latch on to great lyrics or the generally-well-conveyed emotion of a song much more easily than I can. And it's to their credit. But for me? Musicality is the First Law of my personal musical programming.

To that end, I've been thinking about what makes a basketball game "good." Considering a few games burned to my memory:

The Bobcats-Heat game was quite sloppy at times. It's unfair to paint it as "the Bobcats brought toughness and the Heat brought talent" because that's the obvious narrative when MKG is out and the Heat-Bobcats game is close. No. The Bobcats brought consistent execution, a bunch of above-average slashing/shooting guards (Ben Gordon, Ramon Sessions, Kemba Walker) that had good feel for the game, and the Heat brought LeBron James and Chris Bosh both having exceptional nights (James shot 13-14 from the floor) along with_ nobody else_. The Heat's defense looked a bit porous and the team as a whole looked a step slow. But they were competing and finally got some separation at the end. The Bobcats were staying in the game, bringing a bunch of runs to the table, often scoring at will, kicking it out well despite questionable shooters on the perimeter, and playing good basketball. They lost, but it was respectable.

The Lakers-Nets game was horrifyingly bad in the first half and I didn't want to watch anymore. I have blocked that half out of my memory forever. Some notes from a disoriented amnesia: Reggie Evans kept checking in (okay maybe this only happened twice) and it didn't feel like he was making the Nets any worse on offense. Like, Reggie Evans looked like a relatively average offensive option. Read those sentences again. That should never happen, ever, unless Reggie Evans woke up one day replaced by Kawhi Leonard or David Lee. I mean, Reggie Evans is comically bad and it is deeply comical that someone as physically large as Evans is so offensively limited that he gets about half his contested shots blocked and the other half completely uncontested. And in this game, he looked like an average option. Maybe even above-average. After all, while he may be bad, at least he's not sitting on the perimeter expecting to make shots like Gerald Wallace, Deron Williams, and Joe Johnson. The Nets offense was awful. I love where Brook Lopez is at, and Lopez has exceptional touch and instincts with the ball that are a joy to watch, but oftentimes Brook Lopez is carrying the Nets like he's friggin' Dirk Nowitzki. And it's a dismal watch.

On the other hand? The Bucks-Nuggets game last night was excellent, one of the better games I've seen this season. Part of it was probably the wine and friends I watched it with, but the flow of the game was simply excellent. Yes, part was built on Samuel Dalembert having the game of his life with 17-21 shooting on a brilliant sequence of open looks, offensive rebounds, and just plain "it's my night" kind of shots. But, you know... the Bucks lost. Simple Milwaukee answer: Monta Ellis and Brandon Jennings (combined 11-36, 24 points, 16 assists, 9 turnovers) were impossibly poor, except for a short stretch when Milwaukee was rolling. Also, so many of Milwaukee's deadly turnovers happened right when they were up 7 in the 4th with a chance to end the game. Simple Denver answer: No one on the Nuggets looked exceptional, but all of them weathered the Bucks' early dominance. They made a 19-4 run to end the game built on characteristic Nuggets' steal-to-fast-break machine.

We can explain the game that way, in terms of "what happened, why, when". But I think the real thing that made the game good was just the "basketbality" of the game and constituent players. Analogous to musicality, basketbality (a clumsy term waiting for replacement) is the situational awareness and ability to respond that made the Heat-Bobcats and Bucks-Nuggets so excellent and the Lakers-Nets so poor last night. That is to say, the Bucks and Nuggets were able to locate and produce the right plays in time and space, and the Nuggets just did it a bit more often.

Pressed for time, you'd be much better off listing the players that didn't have great basketbality: Brandon Jennings looked great for a brief stretch filled with dribble-drives, but it was mercurial greatness and Jennings strayed from good plays for bad shots far too often. JaVale McGee had his... own particular feel for the game. And that's about it. Most of the players on both teams were pretty aware, engaged, and active. Larry Sanders was blocking left and right and getting dunks on the other end. The Bucks weren't overfeeding Samuel Dalembert; that was the most impressive part. He started 16-18 and the Bucks weren't going to kill the golden goose by feeding Dalembert for a bunch of inefficient isos. Milwaukee coach Jim Boylan actually had him sit when he had 7-7 or 8-8 in the first half, because it was Sanders' time to return and that was the gameplan.

I think basketbality -- so far as it's defined -- is one of the key things I enjoy about basketball. A combination of kinesthetic intelligence, situational awareness, vision, and feel. Feel for the game, for time and space, and for what just one can contribute with one's resources. Also, all the dunks and blocks at the rim were pretty cool. Kenneth Faried, folks. Larry Sanders. JaVale McGee. They can jump out of the building and still have enough kinetic energy in them to power an arena's backup generator. That was neat too, fancy or not.

Long ago in a distant land, Alex Arnon was watching a Kings/Suns preseason game when he became so furiously enraged at a Tyreke Evans double-teamed isolation jumper with 19 seconds on the shot clock that he hit his head, fainted, and woke up a delusional new man. To my understanding, he's now wholly ensconced in a bizarro world where some guy named Xenu created the Earth, Segways changed the very core of how people get around, and small markets make up the vast majority of NBA coverage and traffic. So just remember the motto we've provided our cracked-skull columnist: "No superstars? No problem!"

Friends, I still can't get over the week's most wonderful of news! Rudy Gay has finally left behind our beloved Grizzlies, and we replaced him with Tayshaun Prince! You may be wondering why I'm so happy that the Grizzlies lost their "best" scorer, and there's quite a simple reason why. Rudy Gay is a Big Market Bully, someone who eschews teamwork for his own personal gain; Tayshaun Prince is a Small Market Sacrificer, someone who would do anything for his team.

It makes sense then that Rudy Gay is on his way to Toronto (a place in Canada) to play his me-me-me game in a fancy pancy wannabe-European big market. Honestly, who espouses arrogance and self-centeredness more than the French? When you remember that Toronto is the capital of Ontario which is a state in the province of Quebec_ [Ed. Note: Ontario is not in Quebec, Alex] which for a reason unbeknownst to me tries to be _French and not American even though we're right next to each other... then yeah, folks! It makes perfect sense that Rudy "16 shots per game" Gay now plays for their home team. He never really fit in with the Grizzlies' true American grit and hard work "grind", instead relying on isolation mid-rangers and stand-alone reverse pivot jump-o's instead of running the tried and true pick-n-roll or hop-n-pop. [Ed. Note: Why do you write for a basketball blog, again?]

It also makes sense that Tayshaun Prince will now play in the heartland of the good ol' USA for America's team. In Detroit he's done nothing but sacrifice: he shot less so Brandon Knight could develop, he passed more to Greg Monroe so he could do cool big-guy stuff, and he kept his facial bones intact so that Rip Hamilton could be the only guy on the team with a sweet mask. Surely he's going to be a consummate teammate as always, offering to teach Marc Gasol better English (and hopefully Tony Allen along the way), going out and decidedly not beating anyone up with Zach Randolph, and also doing whatever cool trickaroonies he does on a basketball court.

Also apparently this deal was really good for Memphis' "cap space" but Tayshaun's and Rudy's heads look kinda the same size to me so I dunno what all that hullabaloo is about. Whatever, though, that's just another way the Grizz win this trade (besides not being located in the country of Canadia, of course). [Ed. Note: IT'S SPELLED CANADA.]

• • •

The State of The Small Market Union (Sponsored by The Memphis School of Modern Dance)

Timothy Theodore Duncan went down in a game against the Wizards Saturday night. The one man who encapsulates everything which we as small markets stand for was struck by what could've been a season-ending freak injury to his knee. Thankfully, and I mean thankfully, our savior only has a sprained knee and sprained ankle, two injuries which have left him listed as "day-to-day". As such, this section will be put on day-to-day until the messiah makes his return, just as Jesus' Gestapoles did for Jesus when he was murdered by Lazarus but then raised himself from under that boulder they put on top of his grave.

I guess what I'm trying to say is pray for Timmy D. Or else.

• • •

Sperry's Space Stuff presents: "Rocketing To The Top!" Chandler Parsons MVP Watch

Just as Mike Dunleavy was wrecked by the news of his father possibly being hired to coach the Lakers, The Jimmer was wrecked by the news that his beloved franchise might be moving from Sacramento. As such, his play suffered and he's been replaced by Houston heartthrob Chandler Parsons. Because this is his first time on MVP watch, I've made you a nice little list to get acquainted with him:

• Chandler is the frontman of his own "98 Degrees" cover band, "37 Degrees (Celsius)."

• Chandler Parsons and Tyson Chandler once hugged and didn't let go for dozens of minutes in an attempt to fuse into Tyson Chandler Parsons.

• Chandler's parents best friends had a child named Ross so they named him Chandler in an attempt to make sure he always had a friend.

• Chandler ditched the aforementioned Ross after meeting the object of his newest bromance, Jeremy Lin.

• Chandler played for the Silverhawks in high school. His new goal is to become a Silver Fox as a senior citizen.

• Chandler was drafted 38th overall in 2011 but that's like being a lottery pick for a white guy who doesn't play center so he's reportedly "super chill" about it.

• Chandler has a habit of adding parsley to every meal because it kinda sounds like his last name and makes him giggle.

• Chandler has promised to never make any male offspring play golf because they'd just be par sons.

Congratulations, Chandler! Make our feature proud.

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night

Great news, compadres and compatriots! Tonight is a night for the ages as far as great quality basketball goes. As such, tonight we have a choose-your-own-game! Here are your two options. If you watch any other game, you're excommunicated! Forever!

Chicago @ Indiana - The highest profile game tonight and quite possibly the highest profile game ever. Derrick Rose is injured for the Bulls and Danny Granger is injured for the Pacers, but that makes this game even more watchable! Do you have any idea how many amazing rebounds will be collected without those guys to "create offense"? Can you fathom the strategy behind the 18 seconds it'll take to get the ball to a power forward in the post for an old-timey hook shot? How about trying to imagine one of these teams scoring over 80 points!? This will be basketball at its purest, ladies and gents, full of everything the game is about - rebounds, offensive rebounds, and boards! Ha-ha!

Portland @ Minnesota - Minnesota took on Portland's infamous injury curse by stealing Brandon Roy away in an effort to rejuvenate his career. What ended up happening was Roy got re-injured and made me super duper sad all over again and then Minnesota's players started dropping like flies right after him. This is what happens when you tamper with the moving Indian burial ground known as the Portland Trailblazers. Look for Ricky Rubio to attempt some sort of fancy behind the back pass of Roy's injury curse to Damian Lillard. If there's one person in this league who can pass something that serious on, it's Marco Rubio, Senator from the sinful state of Florida who somehow finds time to moonlight as the starting point guard for the Minnesota Timberpups.

Keep on keepin' on, Marco.

Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less absurd task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I was a bit higher on than a lot of people -- the 2013 Hawks.

Throughout the capsules, I expressed a general thought that the 2013 Hawks weren't going to be as bad as most people expected. Many saw them as a fringe playoff team -- I thought it was reasonable to go a step further and call them a team with a puncher's chance at first round home court. After all. Though most people vastly underrated what Joe Johnson brought that Atlanta team, so too did most people vastly underrate what Lou Williams had the potential to bring them. Combine that with a bit of help off the bench through Devin Harris and a full season of their best player, Al Horford? The Hawks always had a good shot at being the same exact 4-5 seed type team they've been since 2009, despite Ferry's apt blow-it-up style asset trading. Checking in today, the Hawks have banked 45 of their 82 games. They sit at 6th in the East and 2nd in their division, 4.5 games behind Miami and 12 games ahead of Orlando. They've gotten a lot of benefit out of an easy schedule, but they are once again neither atrocious nor excellent. As they say: they are who we thought they were. Let's talk Hawks.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: ATLANTA AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: There's often some degree of uncertainty when sifting out a team's best stretch. No such uncertainty here -- the Hawks were at their best in period #2, in late November. For a nice 6 game stretch, the Hawks went 5-1. The opposition was stronger than it looks in SRS -- although they played a few teams close, they also had their best win of the season, an 11 point home upset of the Los Angeles Clippers, who'd start a 17 game win streak less than a week later.

• WORST STRETCH: Once again, no uncertainty necessary. They've finally gotten back above water over the last week or so, but my lord, they started the year poorly. From January 8th to the 21st, the Hawks played absolutely abysmal basketball. Slow-pace grindfests, ones where neither team shot or defended particularly well but games where the opposing team got to shoot free throws in scads. This included, obviously, the absolute worst game of Atlanta's season -- their embarrassing 39-point defeat to the Chicago Bulls. It also included blowout losses to the Cavaliers and the Wizards. Rough times.

On an overall level, after 45 games, the Hawks have finally entered the fringes of the top 10 (9th overall) in Defensive Rating. They're marginally below average on offense, rating out as the 16th best team. If you adjust for strength of schedule, their defense remains 9th-ranked, although cardinally less impressive. In a related story, their adjusted offense rating drops them to 19th overall. (They aren't a particularly fun team to watch, that's all I'm saying.) Additionally, they've played 17 of their 30 cross-conference contests -- they're one of just four eastern teams to post a winning record against the West, at a strong 9-8. Not bad for a team with no shot at the playoffs.

• • •

ATLANTA'S PERFECT PACE: Keep it steady, and FAR AWAY from grinds

Last season, around the conference finals, I performed an analysis of each conference finalist's "perfect" pace -- essentially, I split pace into four buckets (slow, mid-slow, mid-fast, fast) and assessed records and efficiency for each conference finalist in each bucket. Given the Hawks are a good teaching example, I decided to bring that general type of analysis back in an effort to give you a bit more context on the way Atlanta's best suited to play. So, a reminder of what's going on here. I've split every game played this season into four buckets based on the number of possessions played -- one for slow, one mid-slow, one mid-fast, one fast. Quartiles. I've set up my program to update the quartiles as more games get played, so the designations may change slightly as time goes on.

As for the statistics provided, they're quite similar to that you'll see above. There's the team's efficiency differential in that pace bucket, the average opponent differential of their opponents in that bucket on all games played, wins and losses, home and away totals, offensive ratings, defensive ratings, and a nice collection of the team's four factors stats. Good talk. Here's how the Hawks have done by each bucket:

Some interesting stuff. A few observations on the overall distribution here.

• The Hawks haven't skewed particularly hard towards either the fast or slow end of the NBA spectrum, but they've had an ever-so-slight tendency to play slow -- 57% of their games are played at a below-average tempo. This isn't really a good thing. The Hawks have been utterly dismal in slow-it-down grinding games, with their generally substandard half-court defense failing them when the game slows to a screeching halt.

• On the other hand... the Hawks are hardly phenomenal at playing with breakneck speeds, either. They've posted a 7-4 record in "fast" games, but that's fools gold -- they posted that record against awful teams with a combined efficiency differential of -2.05, and did it while posting a markedly negative differential themselves. While the Hawks are a good transition team, they aren't great shakes at defending other good transition squads. Combine that with a general inability to lock down the boards or keep opponents off the line in a rubber match and you've got a flat-out disastrous mix.

• In general, the Hawks play above their heads when they keep the game to a league average pace and wilt when faced with a fast pace or a grindout game. The idea that they're better when they play to the average pace generally backs the eye test -- the Hawks don't have a phenomenally strong identity at this point of the season, other than being a team that barely ever shoots free throws. That's how things have trended, so far. If they play a team in the playoffs that forces them into either extreme, the Hawks may struggle mightily.

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

The Hawks aren't a great team this year. They really aren't. While Horford's been back and in relatively decent form, he's been a slight bit removed the all-star caliber play that made him such a steal for the Hawks from 2010 to 2012, especially on the defensive end. In that duration, Horford played like a legitimate star -- never one of the 10 best players in the league, but always a top tier big man and one of the better players in the Eastern conference. He was the steady hand to Josh Smith's unpredictable bursts of energy and supreme competence. This year, he's been good -- his per-minute averages are about where they always are, but he's been markedly better in wins than losses -- 55% shooting in wins, 50% in losses. His free throw rate plummets and his defensive intensity does the same. It's not really Horford's fault at all that the Hawks are relying on him to punch a bit too far above his weight, but he can't be excused for being relatively nonessential in their losses either.

The thing is? This season simply doesn't matter that much. This offseason, the Hawks are -- theoretically -- set to clean house. Their books are going to be clean as a whistle for the first time since the mid-aughts, and their assets are going to be stronger than just about any other team in free agency. If Dwight Howard chooses to leave Los Angeles, Atlanta's his best choice for him. Same goes for any major free agent, really. Their books are clean, their management is sound, and their supporting cast is going to be far and away better than any other big free agent draw on the market in the 2013 offseason. Think about their supporting cast for a moment:

• As previously noted, the Hawks have Al Horford. Tad disappointing this year or not, the man's a two-time all-star at the age of 26 who's been one of the best bigs in his conference for the last 3 years. And he's locked up on an impressively cheap deal until 2016.

• Additionally, the Hawks have Lou Williams locked up for peanuts until the 2015 season. Williams is a frustrating player at times, but he's a legitimate starting two or a bench zeitgeist on a great team going forward. The man can drain threes, draw freebies, and control the ball with the best of them. For $5 million a year? Steals galore.

• Standout rookie John Jenkins is locked up on team-friendly options until 2016, and possible NBA-caliber talent Mike Scott has a comfortable sub-million dollar deal the Hawks can extend to give him a bit of burn. DeShawn Stevenson has a small contract, but it's small enough that Ferry can probably waive it and swallow the hit, if he really needed to.

Who else? Nobody. Absolutely nobody! But of those five players, three of them are obvious assets (strong players on cap-friendly deals), one is a question mark but a possible asset (Mike Scott), and one has Lincoln tattooed to his adam's apple. No other team can sport out a roster with an all-star, a volume scoring wing, and a nice high-upside rookie to surround their new acquisitions. The Hawks are set to have twenty to thirty million dollars of free space to fill with an affordable Ferry-stamped supporting cast around a max level star in a hilariously weak conference. If Ferry plays his cards right, the Hawks could end up as one of the best teams in the East for years to come. A new-age Howard-era Orlando Magic without Otis Smith to muck things up.

Sure, Atlanta isn't anyone's most ostentatious free agent play. They won't win on flash, pizzazz, or glitz. But just on the court, in the team that Ferry has the opportunity to build? The Hawks have made a formidable case for themselves, and one that Danny Ferry is preparing to give to whatever big stars don't go on a good postseason run. The Hawks may bow out peacefully in the first round this year. I'd expect that. But puttering around the 4 or 5 seed in a rebuilding year -- a year where they'll actually have a legitimate shot at taking a huge leap -- is a fantastic position for a franchise whose city is tepid enough that they can't tank in a horrifying manner. He probably won't win it, but he deserves it -- Ferry's work as Hawks GM has been great regardless of how this all turns out, and the man deserves more recognition for his successes. Don't trust this year's Hawks, no. But trust Ferry's management. The man knows what he's doing, for better or for worse.

• For more Hawks scouting, check out the 2012 Atlanta Hawks player capsules. •

• • •

I told you all I'd try to come up with a riddle. But since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #4's record could be a lot worse -- their Pythagorean record and their true-to-life record are a bit disparate, and they've won about two more games than they "should" have. Still, they look like they'll probably be better in the second half of the season. If they succeed, it'll be the complete and opposite inverse of how they played last season. The problem? Their strength of schedule is going to get A LOT tougher, and if they don't get better quickly, things are going to snowball well out of hand. They play better slow and better fast, but when the game trends toward the average pace, the team collapses.

Best of luck. See you next week.