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!"

Happy Monday, everyone! Today I'd like to discuss everyone's small market darling, the Sacramento Kings. You've probably heard the news by now -- a consortium of "lattechino"-sipping Seattle socialites are trying to purchase the Kings from the oft-maligned Maloof brothers in an attempt to forcibly bring back the Seattle Supersonics. At best, this move is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Perhaps the Sonics were un-rightfully robbed from Seattle. Well, alright -- they definitely were. But what gives them the right to steal the Kings from Sacramento? The fact that the Seattle fanbase knows what it's like to lose a team should give them more perspective than the average observer, yet all I see from them is "sucks to suck, Sacramento". There are children in Sacramento who love nothing more than to watch Jimmer swish 3's, to see Isaiah Thomas put up 21 points in the 3rd quarter, or try to figure out why DeMarcus Cousins anything he ever does.

How do you explain this to them?

This move could result in anywhere between 600 to 1,000 jobs being lost in Sacramento, one of the hardest-hit recession cities: they're currently sporting a disturbingly high 11.7% unemployment rate. The city of Sacramento approved spending $255 million dollars of the taxpayers money to keep the Kings there. Doesn't matter! They still might be moved, thanks to the incompetence of the Maloofs! Remember those kids I made up earlier in an unabashed attempt to tug your heartstrings? Imagine them losing their favorite team while their single mother loses her job alongside them because she worked in ticket sales for the Kings. Welp.

Yes, Seattle fans, life is tough and terrible things happen. Does that really justify taking the Kings away from a city who loves them despite their extremely incompetent owners? The Sacramento Kings actually hold the record for the 4th longest sell-out streak in league history... even when they were sub 0.500 for 11 of those 12 straight years. Having something stolen from you doesn't give you the right to steal from others, no matter how unjustified the wrongdoing was. Kings fans need to pressure the Maloofs into selling to an ownership group who will take a better role in managing the team, then start a brand new record sell-out streak. Because if they don't, maybe the Supersonics really should be saved.

• • •

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

I generally spend this section telling you all about how the Grizzlies have been dominating everyone and the Lakers are floundering. Just as everyone expected, thanks to ESPN's countless "will these Grizzlies go 82-0?" features over the offseason! This week, though, I'd like to you look to the future instead. There are three teams who are going to be rocketing up the standings soon enough, and I want you guys to impress your many friends by hyping them up before their winning streaks (and before ESPN's "is Mo Williams the greatest point guard ever" coverage begins for the 17th time). These three teams have one thing in common - they've played a much larger portion of their games on the road than at home thus far and have insane home records in those scant games.

The Spurs have played 18 home games to 22 road games, having gone 16-2 at home. Similarly, the Nuggets have played 16 at home and 23 on the road, protecting their house with a strong 14-2 home record. Finally, the team everyone expected to be a top-4 seed this year, the Utah Jazz, have played just 15 games at home compared with 24 on the road, winning 11 of their 15 home games. When you compare all of these numbers to #1 seed OKC's 21 home and 16 road games or #2 seed LAC's 22 home and 15 road games, you see that the 3 teams I listed have the potential to take the position in the western standings we all knew they would. Especially if they trade for Jimmer.

He's the missing piece, OK?

• • •

Sammy's Sack Racing Presents: "The King Of The League!" Jimmer Fredette MVP Watch

Jimmer is still reeling from the shock of his wedding video being leaked last week, having gone 5-19 from the field since. We'll be sure to keep you updated on this developing situation, but in the meantime just forget about his struggles and spend a good half hour watching this .gif over and over and over and over:

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night

John Wall is back, ladies and gentlemen, and the prices of tickets for tonight's game in Washington DC have nearly doubled in price - they start at a whole 2 dollars instead of 1! Instead of paying those exorbitant prices, you can sit at home to watch. It's the first half of our game-of-the-night doubleheader! That's right, tonight we have a very special doubleheader. That's because the Cavaliers will be traveling to Sacramento in a fierce match-up between the "most lovely and perfect and beautiful point guard ever" Kyrie Irving and "not bad at all for the literal last pick" Isaiah Thomas.

There's one sub-plot that made this doubleheader necessary tonight -- I've heard some sordid rumblings in the small market underworld that Kings fans are fed up with all the drama surrounding the move from Sacaramento. [Ed. Note: More colloquially, the "small market underworld" is known as "Twitter."] and will throw rotten eggs at the Maloofs tonight.

Why would they throw rotten eggs at the Kings owners, you ask?

Because they're mal oeufs.

"I never forget a face, but in your case, I'll make an exception."

Let's try something. Let's try forgetting everything we ever knew about basketball. Let's... look, you saw The Matrix, right? But "the Matrix" is replaced with "your present conception of basketball". Free your mind. Ain't no such things as halfway crooks. Go all the way. Forget everything. Okay, take a deep breath. If you've done it right, it's all gone. Everything's forgotten about the game. "Basketball" now looks like a curious misspelling of "baseball".

That's how fully I've bought into this hypothetical.

The first thing we find in our quest to discover the meaning of "Basketball" is a bunch of random box scores sprawling across the Internet, and an unaccountable sense that these things form a self-consistent system to try to understand. We all individually forgot, but the Internet remembered! ... But not enough to tell us the rules of basketball. (This is already getting really convoluted. Bear with me, okay?) We're all alone in the universe, and nothing can change that. Except for this hypothetical we've decided to undertake, together. Come a little closer and we can discuss the implications of this hypothetical further. It's cold outside, after all. Put on the samovar, Natascha.

• • •

Anyway. We run some mad regressions on the box scores we find. Some happy ones too, but mostly the seething ones. We notice a lot of stuff going on, a lot of equations that are always satisfied. Ignorant of the structure of the game, we form a hypothesis from these box scores: basketball is a self-consistent system perfectly derivable from the box scores, and this self-consistent system explains why every team wins or loses and to what extent. Categorically. Whatever the case, Implication #1 of the "Perfectly Derivable From The Box Score Theory" is the idea that if you take away any one number from a box score, you ought to be able to derive it precisely from every other number on the sheet. If one player's point totals are missing from every game, filling those numbers in simply a matter of adding up the first three numbers in the three dashed columns (FG, 3P, FT). If a player's field goals are missing? We take their point total, and from their point total, we subtract their 3P and FT. These are equations that are exactly accounted for in nearly every box score. Exceptions in these equations (we correctly reason) are mistakes in recording, not of mistakes in the system itself. And we're cool with that. Every point is accounted for.

But points are pretty easy to account for given only the box score. What about the rest? Well, we form more sophisticated theories to explain the relation between the other 11 pieces of information associated with every player, and eventually, after a few years, we put it all together in something akin to Newton's Laws of Motion or the inverse square law of gravity. We design the Possession Model, humanity's best attempt to make sense of the alien laws of "basketball." Every shot is a resource expended, made or missed. Every turnover is a resource expended. Every rebound is a resource gained. Every steal is a resource gained. Every set of free throws not as a part of an and-one is a resource expended. In all cases, the resource is the same. It's called a possession, and -- other than blocks, assists, and fouls -- our box scores are almost completely devoted to encoding this type of resource: how many of these a team gets, how efficiently it uses them to score points, how it loses them.

Our only disagreements here aren't all that fundamental. Just as we basically agree that something thrown upwards must come downward in a parabolic arc, we agree on the Possession Model of Basketball. Our disagreements boil down to a few lingering questions. First, how much is each of the resources is "worth"? Second, how do we credit the resources to the individual players that accrue the statistics? After all, certain things like rebounds and missed shots seem pretty commonplace, while steals and turnovers are comparatively rare. Maybe we can figure something out with that, you know? Those probably don't work out to the same value in an actual game, right? Or maybe they do. I don't know. Neither do you. None of us has ever seen a game of basketball, because we're forgetting! That's the whole point of this exercise, darn it!

Different researchers come to different conclusions with each of these questions, but overall, the consensus we share is more powerful than the minor points of disagreement. We go to the moon with this model by the end of the first decade of forgetting basketball, to keep up with the Newton analogy. We explain so much of what goes on with this model that we feel that we understand the box scores on a deep level, even if only as a self-consistent system. So we're all pretty satisfied we would be all major league at basketball if we knew what the heck it was. But for all our hilariously misplaced hubris, we still have doubts. We're only human, after all. We still ask ourselves about the little questions, the unknowns about this system we've found. Why are the two final scores never exactly equal? Haven't these people heard of ties?

Also, there's the giant elephant in the room. What on Earth is an assist?

• • •

Assists appear to be the only facet of the box score that "doesn't fit the plan" of a perfectly self-consistent game. Blocks and fouls are important but somewhat rare, they mostly seem like a less meaningful version of a steal and a negative statistic associated with opponent free throws, respectively. Yet, all we have are correlations: sometimes assists seem more like the concentrated pulp of a dying tree's fruits than the sweet pulp of a flourishing system, not entirely negative but not a panacea either. So we're left with a question and it's not clear where to begin answering it. How do we explain assists?

Spoiler alert! We can't.

With mystical explanations we can scrap together a narrative, but when you're dealing with science you can't take that much on faith alone. So we gather what we know about the fabled statistic. They're pretty consistent between players, teams, and what assists do for a win. Even if we don't know quite what they denote. Assuming basketball is a perfectly self-consistent system described by the box score, we try all sorts of mathematical models on the box score, but we come up short. In want of more data, we come to a lot of intriguing alternative hypotheses to explain assists.

• Hypothesis #1: Assists are essentially random events in the economy of a basketball game that can favorably occur to each team that Make Everyone Better in a mystical sense. Rather like the weather and climate, we can project and explain how assists happen in a large-scale sense even if chance prohibits us from going much further. Some teams are great at having fortune smile upon them or, equivalently, at having fortune frown upon their opponents. We assume that point guards are rather akin to clerics or scientists or strategists, tipping the balance of fortune in their team's favor, because it's the only reason they seem to be in the game on their own merits. The best leaders and priests and scientists are inordinately valuable to their teams. Is this the role of the point guard? And this explanation certainly jibes with our intuition, even if it doesn't have any empirical strength. It's a cool idea and it catches on. Everyone is happy someone thought of Hypothesis #1, even if it does feel like sort of a holdover/straw man while someone figures out something better.

• Hypothesis #2: We go the pure mathematical route: There are approximately 20-24 players in each game and each of them can have a number of assists. This gives us a point in 24-dimensional phase space, called "assisted space". It is thought that basketball is very simple on the lonely whole and very complicated on the margins of assisted space. We believe that this point in assisted space explains the remaining difference between the computed score (from all other stats) and actual score. Unfortunately, inferring a function with 24-dimensional domain is essentially impossible and this line of inquiry leads nowhere except to some neat graphics. Of course, neat graphics form 80% of the economy of the Internet and Hypothesis #2 is named Time's Person of the Year in a gimmick. In a tidbit sidebar the "net worth" of this Hypothesis is estimated at $600 billion.

• Hypothesis #3: We presume basketball is a system of inordinate complexity. As the focus moves from the possession to the assist, we note in our box scores that assists aren't simply correlative magnets for efficiency, but almost certainly have something to do with field goals and turnovers. If the possession is a resource, then the assist appears to be a secondary resource. It's further noted that just as defensive rebounds have to do with the other team's shots, assists have to do with one's teammates' shots. As a self-consistent system, assists are seen as the cooperative counterpart to turnovers, which sacrifice resources to the other team. Assists sacrifice one's own shots attempts for those of the other players, likely because the synergy of those players is the most efficient use of possessions.

Hypothesis #3 eventually takes over the academic community. This is not because it fits the evidence best, no. Too easy. This is because, after a long protracted debate over the meaning of the assist, hockey goes into a lockout and some random dude that watches hockey is sitting at home and is asked by a scholar of the mythical game of "basketball" what an "assist" means, as though it's some cryptic, unfathomable divination. After twenty-five minutes of a discussion held with that particular ironic relish of the French-Canadian accent, our hockey friend tells us everything about the nature of an assist. We understand, now.

Yet, even though humanity long abandoned Hypotheses #1 and #2, we can't let go of the mystical assist-givers as the grandmasters or prophets of basketball, accounting for all the complexity. Everything eventually falls into place for our conception of basketball. But in the back of our minds, point guards are elevated to the paragons of the sport, and the possession model is seen not as fundamental construct but as a holdover to the glorious exaltation of the prodigious assist-givers. And the other stats, in their self-consistency, now don't seem important so much as relatively preordained and fixed, as a perfunctory stage in which the assist-givers can thrive in their personal versions of chaotic fluidity and complexity. We run fascinated regressions on each assist-giver attempting to valuate the good and the bad. We understand, now.

• • •

Come to think of it, the word means "assist." That seems pretty obvious in retrospect. But then again, we're the people that spent an entire afternoon pretending to forget a sport we love because some idiot on a blog told us to. But let's be real: it was all a fever-dream and you forgot nothing about anything. No one did. Not even me. We all decided to pretend to forget basketball just to be polite to my absurd fascinations, and I thank you for it, but the experiment was an utter failure and during everything I described you still envisioned it all in terms of the basketball you've known and will continue to know. I asked the impossible of you and I'm frankly disappointed that you couldn't deliver. My faith in all of us is shook.

Look, I'm sorry.

But it kind of made you think, didn't it? Those assists, oh man, we went crazy with those assists. And you could probably buy all of that, right? If we didn't know what assists were, we'd have to account for them somehow, and they're the only things that aren't almost perfectly accounted for in the box score, at least in stats that actually "seem" to matter. And they do matter: we know assists matter a lot, and anyone that watches basketball or does any kind of regression knows that assists matter a great deal. Still, we shouldn't fetishize them like the people in that example. There's nothing mystical about a drive-and-kick. There's nothing mystical about good basketball, on the whole (even if there is something awesome about a great point guard that evokes a mystic). No, nothing fancy: work-a-day assists are just one part of the Big Picture Fundamentals, and that's all there is to it. We understand, now.

On the other hand, for all our sophistication in box score stats, most of them boil down to: "possession model" + "assists are generally positive" = "good players care about possessions, using them correctly, and racking up assists". And that's something worth noting. Because I'd argue that not many people actually approach the game that way, and while it's a neat "self-consistency + context" construct, it's also not intuitive and arguably not rational, either. I calculate the number of possessions and the players' individual points per possession when I look at the box score, to be honest, just because I'm a math guy and it's very easy for me to add field goal attempts and turnovers and half of free throws attempted and subtract offensive rebounds. Then I take the secondary/tertiary stats as "context". But I never really buy that as a good description. It just doesn't work for me. I know on some level that this approach is flawed, that it's priming me the wrong way, and that it gives a false linear narrative to something holistic and multifaceted. "Oh, he was inefficient at shooting, but he got a lot of steals and blocks and assists" is often a valid thing to say, but when the second part of your sentence can completely deconstruct the first part of your sentence? That's fundamentally flawed.

"Oh, Chris Paul got 20 points on 20 shots, that's kinda trash. Also he got 18 assists and 7 rebounds and 6 steals. I guess he's not such a trashy offensive player after all." I shouldn't prime myself that way, and I shouldn't have to engage in complicated mental arithmetic or random, non-intuitive single-number stats just to have a basic idea of what statistically a player is contributing. There's no baseline, there are a few stats columns jutting out arbitrarily, and overall, there's not a solid picture of what's going on. Just because assists don't fit the Possession Model doesn't mean they have anything mystical or tacked-on to them, or anything particular that separates them out from any other statistic. They just fit a self-consistent model less easily. There's nothing wrong with that. It just makes it hard for human beings to contextualize them correctly. There's nothing special about at-rim shots or threes, other than that teams generating these shots more often than their opponents will tend to win more games. Basketball is not unfathomably complex as a game, but sometimes it seems that way between the hodgepodge of different sites with analytics on the one hand and the fluidity and gospel truth of what one sees on the other. So let's get back to basics somehow.

So maybe that's the first alternative reality that is actually worth noting here. It's worth trying to blend analytics and what we see in a much more fluid way. The visual candor of the game can fool, but it's a powerful tool when you apply the proper rigor. We're people that are convinced by the eyes and the numbers, but the truth lies not in disjoint fragments but in a simultaneous picture containing both.

And instead of going all-out in the other direction from the Possession Model (which is very powerful, intuitive, and explanatory on a team level), perhaps we could build a set of assist-and-shot-location-heavy stats into the default box score that would accommodate the Quarterback Model for understanding basketball as an alternative. The Quarterback Model, akin to Hypothesis #3, could sit as a sort of brother theory to the Possession Model, with equal standing but with slightly different perspective. To explain what I mean: If the key axiom underlying the Possession Model is to maximize the value of possessions while minimizing the value of opponent possessions, the key axiom of the Quarterback Model is that the key skill for players is to generate efficient shot attempts for themselves and their teammates (and stop the generation of those efficient shot attempts for their opponents).

There are some fundamental problems with recording assists: For example, there aren't any non-examples, it's not a stat you can just not rack up, or rack up negative examples by feeding teammates in the wrong spots and making them miss with bad passes. To have weak assist stats right now doesn't mean to fail an efficiency test, it means quite literally to have fewer assists, pace/teammate/schedule-adjustments notwithstanding. But getting location-specific data for the assists (and for players' own shots) could help us go beyond the nebulous cliches. It's worth noting that in fact, to a lot of folks, that is the default version of basketball, not because they're ignorant of the Possession Model but because they find it less satisfactory or aesthetic or explanatory.

• • •

This is a conclusion, because pieces are supposed to have conclusions. We went on a journey into an alternate reality, came back, talked about what we learned, and box scores should be better and reflect assists less as a stat-padding extra that kinda doesn't fit but we all know is good and more as a part of holistic model of how teams generate shot attempts efficiently. That's it. That's my thesis, in short, and, in the grand tradition of conclusions we're now supposed to go more general and end with a sort of open literary ending. You know, much like the end of a conversation with friends is filled with well-wishing and deliberately constructed loose ends to signal, above all else, that that was a good conversation, that it was meaningful, and that (some time in the future) we should continue some of these loose ends in future conversations and keep one another in our minds in the meantime. Because... people, man. That's what's important in life, not getting the statistics exactly right for a simple game.

A game whose name escapes me right now. A curious misspelling of baseball, right?

“Fool that I am, that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself.”

Yesterday afternoon, we were treated to some unexpected league-changing news. From the mouth of Adrian Wojnarowski himself, word filtered down that the Brothers Maloof had finalized a deal to sell the Sacramento Kings to a Seattle-led ownership group. Most response involved some manner of shock, jubilation, and confusion. After all, it was just earlier this week that the Maloofs' Virginia Beach flirtation ended -- nobody expected them to bite on a new deal so quickly after that fell through. Jubilation is obvious -- the sad tale of the wayward Sonics is one that just about every NBA fan has been fed ad nauseam over the past several years, and the prospect of a revitalized Sonics is neat. And confusion? Again: where did it come from? Where was the lead up?

There are a lot of different considerations that bear mention when news of this magnitude shocks us. How are divisions going to realign to fit the new Sonics? How done is done -- will the Maloofs really follow through on it, or is this going to be yet another in their string of failed business decisions? And what kind of a trade is it to give up a franchise with a promising young core for a franchise that desperately needs a housecleaning? These will be answered in time, along with questions we haven't even thought to ask yet. And they may renege, it's true -- we aren't exactly talking about George W. Bush, here. No deciders. The Maloofs are notorious for their waffling, and we're already starting to see signs that this may just be their latest cowardly attempt to siphon more money from Sacramento's ownership groups.

But there was a curious lack of focus on what was actually getting left behind. Lots of thought about the future, the villains, et cetera -- almost no talk of what was to be lost. Today, I'd like to go over that history a bit. Let's remember the Sacramento Kings, and why they mattered.

• • •

Here's a fact that most people either aren't aware of or don't seem to care about -- the Kings have been around longer than almost every franchise in the league. Really! When the BAA disbanded and the NBA was formed in 1950, there were 17 teams that stuck around or were established to make the league. The Kings were a late addition to the BAA, and by extension, one of those founding NBA teams. Not all of those 17 teams stuck around, either. (Sorry, Sheboygan Red Skins!)

Of the 17 founding NBA teams, here are the eight that remain:

• Atlanta Hawks (then the Tri-City Blackhawks)
• Boston Celtics
• Detroit Pistons (then the Fort Wayne Pistons)
• Golden State Warriors (then the Philadelphia Warriors)
• Los Angeles Lakers (then the Minneapolis Lakers)
• New York Knicks
• Philadelphia 76ers (then the Syracuse Nationals)
• ... and finally, the Sacramento Kings (then the Rochester Royals)

They've been around a while. The Royals, in fact, were a very good team at the NBA's inception -- they tied Mikan's Lakers for the best record in the league in the NBA's founding season, and they won the 2nd NBA title ever awarded in 1952 -- they won it in an amusingly stressful fashion, too, beating the Knicks 4-3 in a series they shot out to a 3-0 lead in. That's right, they let the Knicks win three straight. "NOTHING EASY, WE GOING TO GAME 7 BABY." Assuming the sale goes through, that was the last time the Kings would make the finals. In a bit of sick irony, this means the to-be-defunct Kings would forever hold a tie for the best winning percentage in franchise NBA finals appearances -- after all, they made one and won one, so that's 100%! That ties the Jordan Bulls (6-0) and the Duncan Spurs (4-0). Good work, Kings.

I'm not 100% convinced I'm going to be able to give you a fair lowdown, at least on the Kings' early years. They moved to Cincinnati in 1957. Given that I'm 22 years old, I... uh... wasn't really around for the Royals' days in Cincinnati. To put it lightly. Hell, my parents weren't really around for the Royals' days in Cincinnati! I'm not positive that Curtis Harris was either, but he has written a lot of wonderful work remembering the players and personalities that team starred. There was Jack Twyman, as influential for his work bringing better labor conditions to the NBA as he was for being one of the best scoring forwards in league history. There was Oscar Robertson's triple-double season, a feat almost as untouchable as Rasheed's 41 technical season. There was Maurice Stokes, the first black superstar. Lots of colorful figures, lots of notable history. All worth reading. Check out his archives at Hardwood Paroxysm for a bit of a history lesson. Might be surprised at the depth, here.

When people refer to the Kings' general lack of history, they tend to point out that the Kings of recent years have been startlingly devoid of notoriety. Which is true in a broad sense. They only made the playoffs five of their thirteen years in Kansas City, despite Nate Archibald and their other stars. Although it is worth mentioning that one of those five runs was a shocking run to the Western Conference Finals against a Moses Malone-led Rockets team. I'm 90% sure that ranked as the first and only time in NBA history that two teams with losing records played in a conference finals matchup. Fun facts abound! The playoff drought got worse after their conference finals appearance and extended their plight when they finally made their way from Kansas City to Sacramento in 1986, too -- the Kings made the playoffs their first year and proceeded to miss the boat nine years in a row, and if you're counting, the Kings didn't have a single playoff victory from 1982 to 1996.

That could have been the end, but it wasn't -- the Kings finally started to acquire some upwards momentum in the late 90s, and in 1999 under Rick Adelman they managed to post their first winning record in 16 years. This set off one of the most successful periods in the Kings' history, an eight year period where the Kings would win 63% of their games, make the playoffs every single year, and win five individual playoff series. They played a breakneck offensive game, with Adelman scheming around Chris Webber's transcendent brilliance, Peja Stojakovic's shooting wizardry, and Vlade Divac's... everything, really. The early-aughts Kings were one of the most interesting basketball teams to ever play the game, taking the court with a strangely refreshing streetball mentality. They'd taunt, challenge, and flash to their heart's content. They passed the ball beautifully, shot the ball brilliantly, and won the hearts of millions. Their ill-begotten loss to the Lakers in the 2002 season can only be forgiven by the essential fact that it also meant Mike Bibby didn't win a title. (Sorry. I can appreciate the Kings all I want, but I still hate Mike Bibby with the inexplicable fury of a thousand suns.)

Since then, the Kings have been bad. Really bad. Although it's worth noting that this isn't entirely unplanned. The Maloofs haven't put serious money or investment into making the Kings a quality team since the mid 2000s, and they've been trying to move the franchise for the past 3 or 4 years. It's insane that this needs to be given as a caveat, but it absolutely needs to -- the Kings have made abhorrent personnel moves over the past few years, and they've composed a team with absolutely no cohesion or ability to compete on a real NBA level. And it hasn't been for no reason. If you lose the fans on purpose and price them out of their seats, you can build a real narrative about Sacramento "abandoning" the team. It hasn't. The Maloofs have poisoned the water in an effort to build a story, and while many accept the story on its face, it's difficult to really blame Kings fans for getting frustrated and dismayed with an ownership group that's tried their hardest to undermine every iota of respect and love Sacramento gives their team. Impossible, for me.

• • •

One of the first "serious" books I ever read was The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic Dumas masterpiece on revenge and the toll it takes on a man's soul. I don't need to explicitly restate the story -- even if you haven't read it, it's an outline that everyone's familiar with. Man is unjustly imprisoned, man stews over his rage for years, man breaks free, man extracts a long revenge on those who wronged him, and finally... man loses sight of his humanity in his quest for vengeance and becomes, to the reader and his eldest kin, an unrecognizable phantasm of woe and misery. The whole point of the book, in a not-so-roundabout way, is to highlight the problems with revenge as a concept. It's all fun and games to think about revenge. Actually acting on it changes a man, and can fundamentally betray the soul of the person who was wronged in the first place.

Wrongs aren't forgiven simply because you suffered before you acted on them. They're still wrong.

And that's, I suppose, my big problem with the move. Or at least at some of the joy many people get from it. Seattle is a wonderful city. I'll be there twice this year for two beautiful weddings. I felt for Seattle when they lost their Sonics, and I understand the desire for a team trumps the desire for justice. But this post is, in some sense, the big problem with moving a franchise to Seattle -- if you bring back the Sonics, you're necessarily closing the book on another team's history. The Kings have been around in some form or another for over 60 years. That's an awfully long stretch of time to simply close the book. If the Kings were moving to Anaheim, or Virginia Beach, or Las Vegas... they'd still be the Kings, or some warped interpretation thereof. They wouldn't simply be erasing their soul to become an echo of a dearly departed Seattle franchise.

Why does it matter? After all, as some Sonics fans were apt to point out, "Kings fans don't care." But that's... really not correct, at all. For all the whinging about Sacramento's poor attendance numbers, it's been lost in the shuffle that the Sonics had virtually identical numbers in the season before the move -- while the Kings have been filling the Sleep Train Arena to 76% capacity this season, the Sonics filled Key Arena to 78% capacity before the shoe dropped and Bennett moved them out. For all the talk about Seattle's storied basketball history, it's been lost that the Kings are also a storied basketball franchise -- erasing the league footprint of one of the NBA's founding franchises should not come lightly, nor should it come without a healthy dollop of respect. I think Seattle is due a franchise as much as anyone, but short of moving the Thunder back, I'm not sure of any non-expansion way to get them one.

Moving franchises where the owners have poisoned the well and ruined their fan experience just to make their team more mobile is the Count of Monte Cristo approach to team-building. Much like the masterpiece, the problem isn't in Seattle regaining a franchise, or in the reestablishment of a proud mainstay of the NBA's culture. No more than the problem was the Count's revenge in the first place. It's the collateral damage. It's the wives and families of the men who wronged the Count, or the history we're obliterating to reestablish the Seattle mainstay. It's the Sacramento arena-workers who lose their jobs with no prospect of ever getting a professional sports franchise ever again. It's the fans who did absolutely nothing wrong and are suffering for the sins of their horrible wayward owners. Seattle may need a franchise. Does the city need one enough to extract its vengeance on a set of innocent fans? Does the city need one enough to commit the very sin they eviscerated Bennett for, in the name of big market exceptionalism? Do the fans need one enough to consider themselves more deserving than the luckless Kings fans?

Who knows, really?

For now, questions of Seattle's worth aren't nearly as important as appreciating what we have in the Kings, and appreciating what the franchise means before the Maloofs do their best to wash it away. Try to remember the Kings, and sift through records of their obscenely deep history. If the Maloofs have their way, one won't be able to appreciate it much longer.

One pet peeve I have when discussing basketball is when people don't treat the game like the game that it is. I don't mean people that take it too seriously. I mean people that completely ignore the role of competition and the act of competing in a game of opposing players and teams with both fitting and clashing intentions. After all, it's this continuous collection of games-within-the-game that compels nearly every rational decision made in the games. The fact that basketball is a highly symmetric game with two teams, a finite amount of time, and definite outcomes (win or loss) seems to me about the first or second fact implicit in any discussion. All too often, we lose that thread in the hodgepodge of personalities, mental feats, and the impressive physical execution. It's a game, though! You have to play the game to win the game. And that game isn't "Can I get my buckets?" or "Can I fit the template of your designated Right Way, focusing on grit and hustle?" It's a game, and the game is basketball.

Enter Kobe. Segue, Denver. That intro comes about because of this strange Laker season in which everyone has mentally diagnosed an unsolvable problem with the Lakers, solved another one, and caused several new problems with short-sighted solutions. The "hypotheticals" game-within-the-game is a whole lot of fun, but as designated practitioner of the Right Way, it's probably time for all the fun to end. No more narratives for me, folks. Simple living, easy thoughts. Kobe has such a unique footprint on any game he's a part of, one that has grown ever more stark and dichotomous through all the recent roster turnover (forced and unforced). And yet, we get bogged down in all the ephemera to try to figure out what the heck that footprint actually is, because Kobe has set us up to think in terms of "Are you, or are you not, a winner?" And there are so many questions, in this world of winners.

• Is Kobe actually having an MVP-caliber season?
• Is Steve Nash a pale ghost of his old self this season that can't guard paper with glue or is he just as brilliant as ever?
• Is Kobe actually a huge minus defender now?
• If he is... is it even possible to build a contender around him, no matter how good he might be on one end?
• _Is Dwight Howard ever going to be the top center in the league again?___

All of these are interesting questions, to a point. But I've reached it. Me, I simply can't find them interesting anymore.

• • •

We always hear about the teams that can't win a title because of some arbitrary reason, like those questions on the list. Lo and behold, one of those teams does. Every year! Remember when Dirk couldn't, until he could? Remember when LeBron couldn't, until he could? Remember when Kobe couldn't win without Shaq, until he could? Remember when Jordan couldn't, until he could? Games aren't won by the best team, they're won by the team that put itself in a position to win and got enough of the right breaks.

The better team simply tend to be on the lucky side of the coin, and teams that are comfortable being good have the most tricks available to keep themselves on that side of the ledger. It's not a categorical game. There's chance, and variables you can't know in advance. With the Lakers, all we have are their footprints on the games. Instead of looking at the shapes and figuring out what weight that contender has, what transcendence that offense is capable of, what depths that transition defense can sink to? We focus on Dwight's mentality and Kobe's chemistry. Nash's "age" and Pau's softness. Because we have an idea of what a contender looks like, we fall on well-trodden arithmetic and see if that arithmetic fits our archetype for a contender. "Is their Pythagorean age too old?" ... "Does a championship team have a player like Jodie Meeks or Jordan Hill at 6th on the depth chart?" ... "How will the Lakers shore up their bench?"

If we want to find answers to the Lakers' curious plight, we need to treat the game like the game it is. Not a scoring parlor (for the offensively-fixated) or a morality exhibition (for the defense-and-grit monger) -- it's a game! Basketball, like all games with an undetermined ending, is all about the process of determination. The process by which a team separates itself from its opponent over 48 minutes, and whether that separation was to the end of a victory or a defeat. From a gamer's standpoint, what does Kobe do when he scores, precisely? He shifts the odds. Kobe plays the game, and the net result of his scoring is that he creates some separation between his favored team and his opponent's, or he gives his team new life against a favored foe. What happens when his opponent scores because of his mistake? Just the opposite, obviously. The odds drift away from his team. Every miss, turnover, and assist changes the odds just a little bit in one direction or the other, depending on the game time and the strengths of the respective teams and players. Odds upon odds, adrift -- that's all that results from the individual actions. Tides shift, chances wane.

The game the Lakers need to play over the next two years to win might be one that we've never seen before. One with crushingly brilliant offense and comically poor defense. Maybe that's the strategy that maximizes the Lakers' odds. Maybe they end up playing 4 on 5 with Dwight stuck at the opposing foul line trying to stop transitions. Maybe Ron Artest plays center. Maybe Kobe plays point guard with Nash off the ball. I don't know! I'm throwing this stuff out facetiously, but not totally satirically. Bill Russell did it for stretches in Finals games if he thought his team needed it. We talked a good game about the Positional Revolution with the Heat, after all. Maybe it's time to rethink the way these guys are supposed to play instead of whinging about the myriad ways a team with no reasonable historical comparison differs from a traditional team.

• • •

My point in saying this is that we're in the midst of injury, yes, but we're also in the midst of a somewhat stifling convention. The Lakers are hurting right now, and there's no tangible lesson to be gleaned from these injuries. At least in consideration of what the Lakers could have done differently. They made some mistakes with minutes, yes, but not that many. Maybe we're witnessing the death in infancy of a legendary dynasty-that-wasn't. Or maybe we're witnessing the calibration from a team that could win 60 games in a conventional way in its sleep to a team with a harder edge -- a team always at 75% health but never lacking in fire. Or maybe we're witnessing the latest form of your mother's same-old sandbagging Lakers, continuing onwards indefinitely as an amorphous blob of a team that can never define itself except in their desire to win each game.

... Or maybe Jim Buss will just blow it all up. That too is an option.

Whatever the case, this roster (especially with the injuries that, combined with rest, just confuse the picture even further) is utterly new territory for everyone from Bill Russell to Hubie Brown to the 14-year-old Kobe fan who's seen 20 games and remembers 3. This team is new business, and they were before Dwight stepped in, before Mike Brown stepped out, and so on. This team has not exploded from conflict; it's imploded from medical reality, if anything. And we ought not to judge the identity of the implosion for awhile. Let's stop talking about what the Lakers are supposed to be. Let's take a step back and take them as they are. We've done enough judging, enough figuring.

Now that all our delusions are right cleared up about instant dynasties and obvious busts (even for skeptical observers, this is a worst case beyond all worst cases), we ought to watch and see where the ride takes us. There are sights to see aplenty, sights that stand with pride and never as spectacle. Come, watch the invulnerable Nash on his last legs. Watch Dwight Howard as an Icarus with wings mid-melt. Watch a Black Swan in Gasol as rare as revolution. And, of course? Watch Kobe. We call him Black Mamba, but in the wake of the implosion it's time to see if he can be a chameleon. Slither more fully into the versatility he has shown this season. And Kobe must be the center of this story, as he always has been. For all one may dismiss the mysticism that surrounds his impact on the game, there's something so unpredictable and fascinating about the way he shifts the odds pathologically towards his own victory and yet never quite enough to shift those odds in a way that leaves you satisfied.

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 feature. 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 two short pieces are as follows.

• MIA vs IND: Dwyane Wade and the Smoking Lung (by Aaron McGuire)
• PHX vs MIL: Defenceless, starring the Phoenix Suns (by Adam Koscielak)

• • •

MIA vs IND: Dwyane Wade and the Smoking Lung
Aaron McGuire

For about 3 months of college, I attempted to keep my schedule without a caffeine or sugary beverages -- no soda, no tea, no juice. I had homework and essays and problem sets to worry my head, as well as the slog of my writing on the side and my actual job. Lots of factors, lots of problems. Without caffeine, I quickly discovered the late nights were even harder than they were before, and the depth of stupidity inherent in my overburdened schedule became clear. One particularly dismal night, I was up at about 3:00 AM, working. A friend calls me up. We talk. I mention my exhaustion.

"Want a pack of smokes? They'll keep you up..."

I didn't take it, but I'll admit the whole thought was alluring. It's stuck in my mind since. Smoking and nicotine are oddly ever-present temptations for me. It's not that I love the idea of killing my lungs. It's the other stuff. The short-lived burst of energy, as my friend described it. The caffeinated feeling of the smoke in your lungs and the inadvertently wakeful effects of a terrible wheezing cough. Others take a tantalizing drag, a secondhand fable, and dole out the wheeze of a lung on the verge of collapse. And it beckons, if you can believe it! An open invitation to this inexplicable rush of energy and this stupid rebellion against the self that lies within each little cancer stick. I've never had a cigarette, but every time I walk through a crowd of smokers, every time I inhale the secondhand smoke, I wonder how I've avoided becoming a chain smoker. And the desire itself is a terrible sign -- a red-letter warning. If I give in, I'll get addicted. It's obvious. So, I take my substitutes. One particular substitute showed exactly why he's such last night.

Dwyane Wade's play is like a Jackson Pollock painting, at times. An aggressive splattering of paint and frenetic energy. That's how you'd describe the best possessions and the memorable moments. But when you look at his current state, and examine his game as a whole? Put away the paints -- Wade's a smoker. There's the burst, of course. You still get a few possessions of classic Wade offense, night in and night out. That alluring energy, the one that smokers describe with zest. Catching a whiff of secondhand smoke -- sickening though it may be -- is oddly satisfying. So too is watching Wade trick the greenest rookie to the seasoned vets into biting on his jumper-less pump fake and going to the line. I hate free throws, and I've never been a fan of tricks like that. But there's something oddly satisfying about Wade's smug assurance as he fools his latest victim. The dunks, the hero-ball, the devil-may-care drives. The lack of regard for his opponents. For someone who's never loved Wade, it's all very tantalizing. Cool and smooth. Just take a drag, man.

But then you look at the other side of the court -- you see him a step slow on defense, wheezing to catch up with his more nimble counterparts. Then you notice the empty possessions, those protracted coughs where Wade refuses to give up the ball as LeBron or Bosh languish, open as a man could be. And then the lead begins to collapse. The Heat were up 51-44 last night, with Wade having a monstrous night and a reminder of how good he can be. And then it all collapsed -- the Pacers finished the game on a 39-26 stretch, with Wade unable to get free and the Pacers defense swallowing the Heat whole. The Pacers kept driving at Wade and slipping him on screens -- they kept challenging him to catch outside of his comfort zone, and he just kept missing the boat. He looked tired. Wheezy. Old. All actions have an equal and opposite reactions -- all risers like Wade have an equal and opposite come-down.

And that's the problem, with a cigarette. It's all fun and games until the energy fades and you're left with a wheezing shell. Tantalizing, sure, but only to a point -- the burst of energy is never going to be worth the come-down. The wakefulness is never going to be worth the cough. Lungs are a valuable thing. They say you never quite know what you have until it's gone -- I feel that, with Wade, a lot of people (myself included) have missed the boat. He's always been great. Wonderful, even. One of the best. And now that he's begun to crack and chip, and show his age, there's an internal desire among this particular fan to see him stave off the inevitable as long as he possibly can. But a reminder, as well -- don't taunt death, don't taunt age, don't mock convention just to mock it.

And don't smoke, either. I don't need a cigarette.

After all, I've still got Dwyane Wade.

• • •

PHX vs MIL: Defenceless, starring Adam Koscielak and the Phoenix Suns
Adam Koscielak

On Monday, I found myself at my weekly university-mandated basketball “class.” In actuality, it's just an hour and a half pickup game. We play 4-on-4 on a small court, which means a lot of the game is a track meet. But there were slow possessions too, where defence would actually be required. When that happened, one of two things would occur. Everyone would rotate, do their job and get beaten by a miracle shot... or, alternatively, someone would end up completely wide open under the bucket. At the beginning, everyone tried. They tried hard. Put in a good fight. But as time went by the effort became more and more lacking, until it dissipated into lazily going through the motions. Nobody lost their man, but nobody tried to stop him from getting to the bucket either. Nobody missed a box out, but nobody hustled down loose balls either. Et cetera, et cetera.

On Tuesday, I had the 'pleasure' of watching a similar defensive effort. This time it was far more remote -- I was watching the Phoenix Suns, from my computer in Poland. They didn't do this for the first time, nor did they do it for the last time. As I planned to write this, I wrote out what was wrong with the defence. Slowly but surely, note by note, I came to my own realization: fundamentally, the system is in place, and the implementation of it was mostly correct. Traps were set, rotations were made. Somehow? The Milwuakee Bucks just kept scoring. That was the first quarter, back when the offence flowed and the Suns were leading. And then, just like in my pickup game, as time went on the effort just got worse. At first it was just the bench. That made sense. It was a squad that (outside of Jermaine O’Neal) never had any defensive potential either way. But as time passed, the problems infected the starters. Jared Dudley lost Mike Dunleavy on screens, Marcin Gortat and Luis Scola missed rotations, Goran Dragic let Brandon Jennings rain threes. They weren’t lost, and they were doing what they were told.

But that's the thing -- they were doing it in slow motion! It was as if they were making Matrix impressions while the other team ran on normal speed. Every contest was there, but it was always two seconds late. Every rotation was there, but the rotating player always ended up on the off arm of a player now established in the low-post. Normally, a team has one player with a horrible defensive effort. The Suns played 9 of them Tuesday night. I could try to analyze the game, or I could watch synergy for missed rotations and point out the real culprits, the traditionally "bad" defensive players. But as I watch this happen, game after game, night after night, I don't really know if there's any specific culprit. Any particular man at fault. I watch a team that can be good-to-average defensively, if they simply were a little faster. But every single player on the team seems to dig the broader unit into a hole. They just don't try after they get tired, once their shots stop falling. And just like me, in a pickup game, they end up going through the motions as shots swish through the net. And it would seem that in the end, my search for a recipe for the Suns woes yields a surprisingly simple resolution problems.

Sometimes, all you need to do is try harder.

Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less incredible 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 recently deemed one of the league's biggest surprises, although certainly not in a good way -- we're covering the sordid, unhappy tales of the 2013 Washington Wizards.

Not exactly the most grandiose of a start I could've hoped for, but you can't win them all. Today, to start this new series outlining the stories and evolutions of each team in the NBA, I'm starting with a team most people can't bear to watch: your 2013 Washington Wizards. A bit of backstory. In the preseason, I notched the Wizards for 35 wins -- short of the playoffs, but only 5 or 6 games back. I was a bit surprised to find the Wizards I had in my head -- a scrappy (though well below average) defensive unit with a roughly average offense -- apparently didn't exist anywhere outside my head. As they stand, the Wizards are among the slowest teams in the league, and currently hold the dubious distinction of sporting the 10th worst offense in the history of the NBA. Some of that's bound to improve when John Wall comes back. How much of it? Let's find out.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: WASHINGTON 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: From 11/27 to 12/10, the Wizards faced their toughest opposition of the season to date. They went 2-3 (almost 0.500!) against that moderately tough schedule, didn't completely embarrass themselves by the margins, and looked semi-competent. For a short time, of course.

• WORST STRETCH: From 12/11 to 12/24, the Wizards were -- on average -- blown out by over 12 points a night over 8 games, even though they won one of them. They scored 90 points per 100 possessions in the stretch. I watched 5 of those 8 games, and let me tell you -- it looked just as bad as it sounds. "Your search for entertainment returned an error: 404, not found."

Despite the fact that the Wizards are the 11th best defense in the league, in not one of these stretches have the Wizards shot better than the team they're defending. Little has changed, even with Nene back -- this is a team that loses big to bad teams and has a nasty habit of losing just about every close game they could possibly lose to the good ones. Last night's brilliant performance excepted.

• • •

WASHINGTON'S BIGGEST MYSTERY: "How do you defend?"

As a team profile, I'm trying to answer most of the questions I can about the Wizards. Give some insight into what they're doing, why they're doing it, what's the point of it all, et cetera. That's the goal, anyway. But I also want to be honest about the things that mystify me. And for the Wizards, there's one thing I really can't even pretend to understand.

How in God's name do they defend so well?

Really. Despite the fact that the Wizards enter today at 5-28 on the season, they're hardly a poor defensive unit. Just the opposite -- they're on the fringes of the league's top 10, allowing just 104 points per 100 possessions. That's good for the 11th best defense in the league, and my lord, it doesn't make sense. I watched a lot of tape on the Wizards to try and figure out what exactly they do well on defense, and I've come up with a single answer. One specific thing they do well that fuels their defense and keeps them above water, defensively. That thing? They're really good at missing shots.

Let me explain. There are two or three types of missed shots in the NBA. The first are the chippies -- the ones you miss directly under the rim under little duress, that give you an excellent chance for the offensive rebound. The second are the long, semi-random chucks. Those bounce to god-knows-where, often starting a fastbreak by bouncing to the three point line into the hands of the other team's fastest player. The third are the completely hopeless missed shots, the ones that bounce behind the rim and force the other team to inbound the ball behind the baseline. The thing with the Wizards is that despite having a shot distribution that's inordinately skewed towards long two-pointers and errant threes, they're simply really good at missing shots. They're more likely to have a shot miss spectacularly (over the rim, above the backboard, bouncing off to the corner) than they are a simple long bounce that feeds a transition break. That dramatically cuts down on the number of transition opportunities the Wizards allow their opponents -- they're a top-5 team in tamping down on their foe's fastbreak points, and that certainly isn't because they're full of defensive savants.

The odd rebounds their opponents get serve two purposes. First, it cuts down on fast breaks. Second, it slows the game down and forces their opponent into their halfcourt sets. That's essential for the Wizards. Without Wall (and sustaining the sort of insane injury maladies they've suffered this season), the Wizards can reasonably claim to be the least talented team in the NBA -- when you're worse than the opponent, mucking the game up and forcing a slow, high-effort contest is just about the only way to grind out a win. With the exception of their road win over the New Orleans Hornets (where they won 77-70 in a game where both teams got an above average number of possessions, somehow), each win the Wizards have put up this year have involved holding the opposing team below their ideal pace. By pushing teams out of their comfort zone, the Wizards can throw up a few threes and get lucky. When they can't do that, they get stomped. Simple as that.

(Also, it helps that Chris Singleton is getting minutes. He's a good defender.)

• • •

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

At writing, the Wizards are shooting an effective field goal percentage of 44% on the season. That's phenomenally bad. It's the 20th worst mark of the shot clock era, in fact. Some excruciating stuff. The problem I have with projecting anything dramatically better to close the season is that I'm simply not sure where the improvement is supposed to come from. John Wall is a solid player, but unless he comes back from injury exactly as good as he was before, with absolutely no warm-up period? I don't see him changing the equation in a whole-scale way. He'll add a better passing wrinkle, and he's fast enough that his speed disorients the defense into giving up a slightly more open shot. But it's not like the Wizards shoot that much better on open shots -- Wall's shooters can't shoot. This team may be built around his talents, but it's hard for any one man's talents to make up for a parade of errant shooting talents and an offense that simply can't move correctly. Especially when Wall is a poor shooter himself!

Still, you have to think the Wizards are going to stumble into a better offense eventually. Maybe. Just look at last year, when the Wizards ended the year on a solid 6-game win streak after an absolutely abhorrent season, with Jordan Crawford, Kevin Seraphin, and Nene leading them to semi-respectability. Crawford actually started the 2013 season out well -- his shot selection has been poor, as is his wont, but he's made a few more threes than usual and shown a particular proficiency for the pure above-the-break dead center three point shot. With Wall back healthy to end the season, I doubt they sniff 25 wins or end the season on the same sort of a 6-game winning streak, but I could see them putting up a decent fight for 15-20 victories if they experience a marginal offensive improvement and continue their mystifyingly solid defense. Their overall outlook is grim, but as long as they continue to put in effort on the defensive end and keep missing shots with the sort of sickening aplomb that fuels their defense, they'll never quite reach the levels reached by historically awful pushovers -- you know, like the 2012 Bobcats, the 2011 Cavaliers, or the 2010 Nets. A fringe top-10 defense is more than any of those teams ever had going for them, that's for sure.

As for next year? We clearly shouldn't have been entertaining the notion of a playoff team this year, and next year seems like a comparable stretch. As good as Nene may be, one good piece doesn't make a team a playoff squad. And the offensive problems run deep. Nobody on this team can shoot, nobody can consistently draw free throws, and Randy Wittman may be the least qualified offensive coach in the NBA. Really! He's the Jay Triano of offense. In Wittman's entire coaching history, his best offensive team was 23rd in the league, and it was Andre Miller's accomplishment to get them that far. His sets aren't creative. We can pooh-pooh the Wizards players all we want -- at the end of the day, when a team spends a coach's entire tenure looking like an uninspired offensive mess with no system or strategy of movement, it's hard to really blame the players. The Wizards have an irritating tendency to take their foot off the gas and play tight every time they shoot out to even an inconsequential lead, and Wittman has an irritating tendency to either not notice or not care. They don't play to win, they play to avoid the loss -- when your team is as offensively dismal as this group, reducing your offense to 10 second no-movement half-court sets is almost like guaranteeing the other team a gift-wrapped stop. If Wittman can dramatically improve his ability to coach offense and the Wizards don't blow another draft pick, they could be decent. If Wittman can't? He should be fired, no matter how little the franchise cares about winning. Do no harm, as they say.

• • •

Hope everyone enjoyed the reprieve from my 15,000 words a week. Let's hope this series can go half as well as the last. Current rough schedule is one team a week until the all-star break, when I kick this into a higher gear and go to 3 or 4 to have scouting and stories for each team by the playoffs. I'll be writing a column about an undisclosed subject in an undisclosed location with an undisclosed family on Thursday. Look out for that. Also, I told you 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 #2 has as many losses against their own division in the 2013 season as they had in 2012 and 2011 combined. Their pace has slowed to a tortoise crawl, and they've averaged just 88 possessions a night since December 10th. Their All-Star probably won't repeat, but they should safely have a new representative at the game.

Best of luck. See you next week.

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!"

Good morning, small marketeers! I hope you all enjoyed your New Year's celebrations. Today I come to you with a simple request for the year -- remember the legends of the game. Far too often we consider our generation's greatest to be the greatest ever when the small market way of life would be to simply respect the all-time greats. It's impossible to know who the greatest of all time truly is due to the ever-changing rules of the game, evolving training methods, and differing strategies. All of the greats hang up their jerseys knowing that they'll be forgotten by the annals of history, left out of everyone's favorite moments. And because of this, in an odd way, the decision for a player to retire from the NBA is somewhat like the decision to end a relationship.

You see, the worst part about a break-up is knowing you'll be forgotten soon enough, thanks to the sands of time or a replacement coming into that person's life. Perhaps that replacement isn't as objectively good as you once were, but to the person in love -- the person who used to be in love with you -- that new person is their everything. Hell, even if they know deep down that this new person isn't as good a fit for them, at least that person is actually there in the here and now. They're a tangible object as opposed to a distant memory. And who can trust memories anyways? They're always these wispy, fragile things floating around your head subject to change on every emotional whim. Sure, the best times and the worst times stand out for as long as they can be remembered. But that constant day-in, day-out support and love and just being there for the person is the first thing to be forgotten.

And so it goes for the greats of time immemorial. It's easy to remember the things like small market superstar David Robinson's 71 point game and his season-ending injury but forget that he averaged over 23 points, 10 rebounds, and 3 blocks per game for 7 straight seasons. Moses Malone's fo' fo' fo' declaration will live on forever in basketball history, but what about his nearly 25 points/18 rebounds per game averages in 1978-79 with Houston, a feat that hasn't come close to being replicated since? Kareem has the all-time scoring record, but how about his 34 point/16 rebound average with the Bucks in 1971-1972? Adrian Dantley put up nearly 31 points a night along with 6.4 rebounds and 4.8 assists for the Jazz in 1982-83... as a 6'5" power forward. They weren't just flashes in the pan to be defined by their highest moments. These stars made their bread the same way today's lunch-pail players make theirs -- they show up. They're just there.

My point here is that there's a lot of nuance which gets left behind in the debate to find the greatest ever. We have a habit of overrating the stars of our generation, the ones we came of age with like an unforgotten high school love a la Michael Jordan or the ones we get to see ply their craft on prime-time each and every night like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant. We'll never know who was truly the best and that's alright. There's been so many amazingly talented players. It's a certainty that someone better will come along, just as someone better will come along after that new GOAT has retired. Your children are going to proclaim their generation's superstar to be better than Michael Jordan and we're going to put up the counter-argument of it being a different era just as the elders who proclaim Bill Russell the greatest ever do today. So I propose this -- let's stop trying to figure this out. Let's remember all the greats for just how phenomenal they were on such a lengthy timeline instead of remembering them as "that guy who's only the 5th best power forward of all time". Let's stop being obsessed with rankings and arguments and focusing on just a few players at the top. Let's learn our history, respect everyone's game, and marvel at just how separately talented two players can be while playing the same sport.

And most of all, let's respect our elders.

• • •

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

Usually I'm on the side of the small markets as all of you beautiful, amazing readers know. But frankly? I'm getting quite fed up with the one thing they've consistently been doing wrong -- stealing from big market teams. I understand the Robin Hood aspect of it, but theft is theft. I mean, c'mon -- the Grizzlies traded Pau Gasol (have you SEEN him play lately?) to the Lakers for now-top-3 big man Marc Gasol, the Jazz traded the moody Deron Williams to the Nets for Derrick Favors and 2 primo first round picks, the Cavs received the pick from the Clippers which became Kyrie Irving for Mo Williams, and the Blazers received the pick which became presumptive rookie of the year Damian Lillard from those silly Nets again! Come on, guys! Stealing is wrong, even when it's completely hilarious!

And now the Kings are trying to get in on the fleecing action. The latest news has them trying to get rid of that cantankerous malcontent center DeMarcus Cousins and under-sized big man Chuck Hayes for the Celtics' trio of Avery Bradley, Courtney Lee, and Jason Terry. Excuse me, NBA champion Jason Terry. They'd be receiving a defensive superstar in the making in Bradley, a tricky guard who has been to the finals in Courtney Lee, and a bonafide NBA champion in Jason Terry. All for a guy who gets suspended for getting in verbal altercations with one of the best commentators in the league (and fellow small market maverick) Sean Elliot.

Nice try, Kings, but everyone has to play fair -- even when it comes to ripping those big market bullies off.

• • •

Sammy's Sack Racing Presents: "The King Of The League!" Jimmer Fredette MVP Watch

I'm not going to bore you with fancy-shmancy "statistics" today.

Instead, I implore you to watch this video of Jimmer's marriage and try to tell me that he shouldn't be MVP.

If you still have a shred of doubt about it, just stare at this .GIF for as long as it takes to convince you:

(Well-deserved hat-tip to the guys over at Sactown Royalty for linking me to this)

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night

Tonight the narratives of our two previous features come together in out game of the night -- the Memphis Grizzlies taking on the Sacramento Kings in Sacramento. You'll get to see what could perhaps be one of DeMarcus Cousins' last games before the Kings fleece a big market team in a trade for him, much like the Grizzlies did to the Lakers for Marc Gasol -- who should be guarding DMC for the majority of this game. You'll also get to see leading MVP candidate Jimmer Fredette unleash his arsenal of 3 pointers and hopefully (if there's any justice in the world) see him pull a similar move to the one above as a celebration. And, if you're really lucky? You'll get to see DeMarcus berate an announcer while Jimmer dougies on top of the announcer's table to add to the sting of DMC's words. And then they'll announce that they're going to live together Real World style and film a reality show of it.

Please, Small Market Allah, for the love of all that's holy make it happen.

• • •

NOTES FROM THE EDITOR: Hey, all. Aaron here. My weeklong break ends tomorrow -- I'll be starting a new Tuesday/Thursday column. For the most part I'll just be going over whatever comes to mind, with a few consistent features becoming apparent as time goes by. This Tuesday? The Wizards are on the discussion table, because we know how much everyone thirsts for Wizards coverage. Going to discuss their performance on the year with a general focus on how they're so hilariously bad on offense, so "good" on defense, and so utterly luckless overall. See you then.

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. And now, the end. Today we conclude this absurd, unnecessary, slog of a series with Matt Bonner. And me, too.

• • •

Follow Matt Bonner by listening to Arcade Fire and partying with them.

There are a lot of players in the NBA who I love despite their skills. One could make the argument reading my appraisals of NBA players now explicated in triplicate that I love just about everyone in the league, and one wouldn't be that far off. I'm a realist in my personal life and I tend to be a pragmatist in my approach to the world, but I can't lie to you: I'm a starry-eyed optimist when it comes to the humanity of those around me. I may often assume the government's an institution of lies and deceit, but I'm a big tragedy-of-the-commons guy. I can assume a team's horrible without hating the component players. I can assume a company's full of crap without indicting a single member of the company. I can make snide little jokes about how much I hate the Clippers without impugning individuals. And as such, I can recognize a player's limited talents without bearing any ill will to the player for those limits. Call me an optimist, call me foolish, call me wrong. I call it sports, and I'll like who I like.

One of those people, indeed, is Matt Bonner.

I've personally defended Bonner's ill-reputed defense a few times, mostly because I don't feel it's quite as bad as people initially think. Once or twice a Spurs game, when Bonner's on the court, opposing teams run plays specifically meant to attack Bonner's perceived defensive deficiencies. There's a problem with that. As bad as Bonner is at rotating and as immobile as he is on an overall level, he's not atrocious enough as an individual defender to make isolations-against-Bonner a reasonable offensive strategy. Isolation plays are what you go to when a play has failed. They certainly aren't something you should go to as a general rule, and in one of the biggest mysteries of the NBA, teams insist on going to them the minute Matt Bonner comes on the floor. And Bonner -- the cad -- has the audacity to stay on his feet, keep his hands up, and provide reasonable (if not incredible) defense against a stupid post-up or isolation with no outside options that never should've happened. When teams run plays like that, Bonner can hurt them simply by not being a folding lawn chair. He isn't, so he hurts them. But teams keep doing it, and the Spurs keep reaping the rewards. And good on them, I suppose.

The thing where people get tripped up is when they construe my statements about Bonner as a not-team-killing individual defender as some statement of support for the idea that Bonner's a lockdown defender. As good as his Synergy numbers have always been, he's not. He absolutely is not. He's a reasonably solid isolation defender who tries very hard despite not having any great skillset for it. And his offense, good as it may be in the regular season, is far from playoff caliber. Bonner's odd shot mechanics are incredibly fun to watch and impossibly amusing, but they're also mechanics that require about a restraining order's expanse of space between him and the defender for the shot to make it home. That's not space Bonner's ever going to have in a playoff situation, and without it, he's less than useless -- his offensive repertoire beyond "wide-open threes" is about as lengthy as the movie Airplane's pamphlet of Jewish superstar athletes. He's gotten less and less playoff burn as the years go on and Popovich loses his faith that any given year will finally be the year Bonner will quicken his release and adapt it to a playoff scenario. Because each year he tries, and each year he fails. It's like Lucy and the football. Spurs fans and coaches get optimistic, Bonner works on new methods, and every year it ends the same way -- the playoffs come, the kick goes up, and a player who can't really adapt to playoff situations gets badly exposed. An unfortunate fact of life.

All this isn't to say I don't like Bonner, though. Absolutely love the man. Understanding his weaknesses isn't akin to abandoning the guy entirely -- he's good for adding on a regular season win or two, without a doubt, and off the court there are few other guys in the league I'd rather root for. He's one of the few NBA players with legitimate connections in the hoops blogosphere, being somewhat friendly with the Basketball Jones crew. He's also friendly with the blogosphere because he has his own blog. Take that, world! Matt Bonner is one of us! It's a blog about sandwiches that appears on San Antonio's NBA.com site, called "Matt Bonner's Sandwich Hunter." It's stated mission is to follow Matt Bonner's quest for the Hoagie Grail, the sandwich-to-end-all-sandwiches. Someday, Matt Bonner will succeed in his mission. He'll also succeed in his mission to bring basketball fundamentals to children everywhere, with his 90s style vide--... oh, wait. That's not Matt Bonner. It's "Coach B." Very different beast. Still, quite worth watching. It's the greatest video any NBA player has ever produced. And the sequels, video 2 and video 3, are still amazing acid trips into the world of inspirational basketball videos. I feel like every marginal player in the NBA could eventually be a league MVP, if only they all watched these videos every night before they went to sleep. And this includes Matt Bonner! I don't know why he doesn't listen to Coach B more, frankly. They bear a striking resemblance to each other and he clearly was very helpful to Bonner's younger brother Luke. Come on, Matt. Coach B is all that's separating you from MVP-caliber ball. Listen to him. Let's get this done, MVP-in-waiting. Let's get it done.

• • •

_Follow Aaron McGuire on Twitter at __@docrostov.___

Who is Aaron McGuire? Who's the idiot who actually tried to do this project? I'll scout it out for you -- I have some sources on this guy. Aaron McGuire's about 6'4", 6'5" if he stands up straight. He's a scrawny man, a pickup tweener with a poor outside shot and a worse dribble. He's never played pickup against an NBA player, which is probably for the best, because he'd get dunked on with such obscene force that he'd turn to dust and blow into the wind. One would perhaps say he's a decent defender, but one would be wrong, because he's not. That's just what all white pickup players say when they aren't really good at anything else. "Don't worry, guys, I'm a defensive specialist! I'll lock guys down!" Yeah, no. Fat chance of that. His best quality is simply that he's tall relative to the average pickup player, and he can sometimes -- if he's lucky -- see a pick and roll developing and quash it with a nice twirl. And you know what? That's about it. Because that's about it, he always gets picked last, and it's a reasonable thing for people to do it. He's not very good at basketball, OK?

Off the court, he's a bit of a bore. The man works as a statistician in his day job -- a statistician! -- and devotes an untold number of hours outside of work to the pursuit of writing things about the NBA and contributions to unshared creative writing projects he'll probably never finish. He and one of his favorite professors from back in school have a paper up for publication in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, although he's been lazy about revisions, so it may never see the light of day. He's a family man without a family, a luckless romantic knave without the whole luckless part. Or the romantic part, I suppose. So he is more aptly described as a knave, simply. He likes to think he's funny every now and again, but is consistently dissuaded of those views when realizing how few people actually laugh at his openly horrible jokes. He likes helping people out, even at the detriment to his time and wallet, which can get him into trouble at times. Lots of times. But he tries pretty hard to be a decent person and by and large succeeds, even if it also makes him something of a boring slug that few in the world really want to know. He can't hold his liquor whatsoever, probably on account of the fact he's slightly underweight and has poor circulation for his height. He doesn't have very good NBA prospects. Let's just pretend this didn't happen and move on to someone else.

... wait. There's nobody else to move on to. Well, that's awkward.

• • •

THE END

All told, this whole thing has been an undertaking. I'm not going to make any promises about ever doing something like this again, mostly because I'd have to be completely off-my-rocker to promise that after this experience. I'm going to walk you through what my daily schedule has been over the last 5 months. This is partly for your entertainment, and partly for my reference -- when I'm ruminating on whether or not to do it again next year, I'll probably go back and read this post, and I'll probably see this. And I would really like my future self to think hard on whether he actually wants to do this again. So, for one's amusement, here it is. My daily schedule, my kingdom of dust.

• 6:00 AM: Wake up. Shower. Brush my teeth. Drive to the office. Sometimes earlier, but never later than 6:45.

• 6:45 AM: Nestle into my desk, spend about 2 hours writing capsules, then start in on the day's work.

• 9:30 AM: Publish the capsules. Usually. If they needed more editing I did it in off-moments from my job, or my lunch break.

• 6:00 PM: Begin to pack up my things, drive home. Often later, rarely earlier.

• 9:00 PM: After a few hours of games with my ex-girlfriend, dinner, and whatever the heck else I had to do, I'd open up my spreadsheet with all the players in the feature. I'd isolate the next 3 and start up Synergy.

• 12:15 AM: With an hour or three of scouting done, a game or two watched in the background (usually featuring a player or two from the next day's capsules), and some manner of notes made on the players for the next day, I would head to bed, ready to approach the next day's work.

• 1:30 AM: ... OK, yeah, I usually didn't go to sleep until well after the games were over. Sorry, doctor. (No, seriously. My doctor talked to me about it. Sorry about that.)

Have you ever wondered what sort of psychotic devotion to a project it takes to produce this kind of a steady stream of content over a 5 month span while working a stressful nine to five? There you have it. The project began on July 6th, 2012. The project concluded in full on December 31st, 2012. In that time I wrote 370 player capsules, which (when added up) summed to a ridiculous 373,955 words. Some people have asked me why I didn't edit these down, or try to make them shorter in an effort to ease the burden on myself. Confession: I did! For most of these players, I ended up scratching ideas and rewriting whole sections. But I treated each of these things like a several-draft essay, with each essay usually ending when I'd realize I was crunched for time and needed to slash out paragraphs. Had to get it down to a moderately short and reasonably snappy three-to-four paragraph explication rather than a long, meandering appreciation. Gross! I still meandered, as most would be wont remind me, but trust that there was more editing on my part put into this effort than it may have appeared. I really wanted to do this right.

That's the thing, though. Why did I really want to do it right, though? What made this my goal?

This is a question I've been asking myself. Why was I so intent on proving I could do this with any semblance of quality? It's not like these aren't time-sensitive. If you go back in about a year and read the capsules, I'm sure some of the observations will still be apt. But I'm just as sure others will be about as outdated as year-old milk. There's a certain temporal transience here that makes all basketball writing somewhat ephemeral, and it applies just as well to a series like this. Few people are going to go back and think "wow, I want to read the equivalent of a 1000 page novel about basketball just so I can get the views of a single capricious fan on every player in the league." I'm not trying to get a new job -- I like my current job, thanks. In terms of assessing the project's quality in-the-whole, there aren't ever going to be more than 30-40 people who can do that, and most of them aren't ever going to let me know what they thought of it. So, why? I'm not a person who tends to have a great deal of pride in my work. Ever, really. I certainly put a lot of effort into what I do, but I'm a perfectionist at heart. Never quite happy with things. Always errors, always problems. Some of my best writing has been stuff that I absolutely hated at the time and only grew to like months or years later. It's the nature of the beast. But when I look back on this ridiculously unnecessary project, I get a bit choked up.

Because, simply put? I didn't fail. Certain things are large and ambitious enough that you simply get excited when you reach the finish line. They're things you'll remember for a long time, and you know it when you feel it. For me, this is one of those things. In 5 or 6 years, I'm not going to remember the 10-15 capsules I wish I had back. I'm not going to remember the sleep lost, the struggles getting Synergy to work, the nights when I had to stay up late because I simply didn't have the joy. I'm not going to remember the sad feeling whenever I'd have to cancel a day because I simply had too much work to do. No, I'm simply going to remember this -- I was able to complete a 370-part series of 1000 word essays, and I was able to complete it in a way that made me proud. I'm going to remember how many people the project reached, and remember the fact that even if very few people read all of the capsules, just about everyone in the blogosphere at least read one. I'm going to remember those feelings of accomplishment as I incremented my calendar and watched my progress meter fill. And the satisfaction of putting that last word to the Bonner capsule and smiling to myself. No monetary compensation, no boss to cheer up. Just me. The project was for me, above anyone else. And I succeeded.

This series is full of stories. It's a tapestry of disconnected ideas, concepts, and experiments. Some were good, some were bad, some were flat-out wrong. But I was faithful to the project and I accomplished something I didn't know for sure if I could when I started. I weathered some bad personal moments during the duration of the series -- I got dumped by a girlfriend of two and a half years, I had several immensely stressful work projects, and I dealt with a lot of real life turmoil at times in the project. But I kept at it, I didn't give up, and right before the turn of the year, I finally finished my large and ambitious side-of-the-desk project. I did it in the timeframe I wanted with the detail I needed. I don't like gloating and I don't like pride. I detest arrogance. But I'm proud of myself, for once, and I think that pride is exactly why I put so much into this. I knew in the back of my mind if I finished something like this I'd have to finally admit to myself I did a good job at something. Take a moment to appreciate the work I did, the grind I lived, the time I spent.

Of course, there's one thing I didn't totally consider. Or rather, I did but I didn't want to admit it. That grind, that writer's yen? It goes on. It always does. I've had a small success, here. A moment of personal pride. I'll take a week, catch my breath, and find some new mountain to climb. Because when you feel pride in your work once, you want to feel it again. And that's what writing is, right? An addiction to the best ideas, a constant need for your foremost efforts, and a constant parched thirst for the best you'll ever be. That's what makes a good writer good. Not the words on the page but the yearning that stands behind it. And I'm no excellent writer -- not yet, anyway. But perhaps someday I'll turn the pages of something I wrote and think with pride and love of the individual hammer-strikes to the stone of inspiration that came behind it. The intractable surfeit of effort and toil it took to get a piece I could really love as my own, not in an isolated moment, but deep within my soul and heart.

Perhaps, someday. For a time, I'll stop and enjoy a project completed. Life's good.

And in a week? The work chugs happily onward. And I'll enjoy that, too.

Hope to see you then.

• • •

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the leaves turn frosty, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last full week. Not quite done yet, but close. Today we continue with Ed Davis, Darrell Arthur, Wilson Chandler.

• • •

Follow Ed Davis on Twitter at @eddavis32.

Aha, Ed Davis. Finally. The mainstay of promising young big men everywhere. Davis is as Davis does -- he's a relatively capable defender, a decent rebounder, and (as currently utilized) a poor offensive player. He's not a willing passer, he's not good at controlling the ball, and he's a rather atrocious scorer once you get outside of about 7 feet. That said, he has the tools to be at least somewhat useful on offense -- it's up to Dwane Casey to set him up correctly. He's a quality finisher at the rim (75% last year, which is simply insane) and holds the keys to an excellent 3-9 foot baby hook he tends to rely on from that range. In fact, last season he made his hook shot as far as 11 feet out from the basket. Quite impressive, I think. When it comes to a jump shot, that's certainly nothing to write home about, but he's got a decent short jump shot from about 6 feet in that's effective on the left side of the basket and toothless on the right -- something about the angles or personal comfort, I'm assuming, because even in college he never attacked the basket for jumpers from the right. Looking through the tape, I wasn't sure I saw him make a jump shot in the paint to the immediate right of the basket over his entire career -- sure enough, looking at his shot locations on Basketball Reference, he hasn't. Ed Davis hasn't made a shot from the close-right of the basket since his rookie year, when he made three shots relatively close to the basket to its right. Last year he made zero, and this year he hasn't even attempted any.

Quite the interesting tic, and probably reflective of one of his playing time issues -- if Davis is playing a big man who knows this and effectively forces him to the right of the basket, he fumbles around a bit and usually ends up turning the ball over. Not too hard to scout when you can only attack one side of the basket with any particular efficiency. To Davis' credit, he never seems to act outside his comfort zone badly -- he doesn't try to do too much, or overpass, or hog the ball without reason to. He doesn't play a ton of minutes, but he's active on defense (sometimes too active -- he really needs to learn to get the feel for those times that help defense is detrimental to the team's overall structure) and his athletic package is excellent. The key's really got to be putting it all together. He's young, so you have to like his chances, but you also have to be a bit skeptical after two seasons of being a relative nonentity that he's ever going to establish himself as a real young star in the league. But stranger things have happened. Perhaps adding some offensive moves to the basket's right could help. And I mean anything. Anything! Just some competent offensive move. Please? Bueller?

A friend of mine once told me that Ed Davis was really cool, and by far the coolest guy on the dismal Carolina team he left behind right before my senior year. I never had much of a reason to believe him, and the rivalry feelings are strong, so I didn't really pay him much heed. This came to mind while looking up today's off-the-court research for Ed Davis, and after reading a few interviews with him, I have to agree. He's accurately describing himself in the following excerpt from this particularly fun interview with Eric Koreen of the National Post:

What’s one thing about you that people don’t know that they should know?
I’m a boss. I’m a boss.

Go on.
I just do boss things, move like a boss, talk like a boss, act like a boss. That’s about it.

Made me smile, if nothing else. Keep bossin', Ed.

Oh, also! Fun fact -- Ed Davis went to high school in the same city I live in now! That's crazy to me. Virtually nobody in the NBA comes from this part of Virginia. Of course, it's not like people around here really remember him -- he went to a private school in Richmond. Still though. This is the sort of thing I go scrabbling for when I've reached players like Ed Davis, who are fundamentally hard to separate out of the rest of the NBA's promising young big men. Sorry, Davis.

• • •

Follow Darrell Arthur and his outsized impact on a great Grizzlies team.

Although the Grizzlies are going through a bit of a rough patch now, let it be stated for the absolute record that the Memphis Grizzlies DID improve this last offseason. People slept on it, didn't really think about it, and continually underrated it. But they did. They really did. Although the core is the same and the upgrades aren't sexy, the Grizzlies got Darrell Arthur back and shored up a bit of their three point shooting problems with a few solid acquisitions straight from the scrap heap. The Grizzlies having a good, semi-elite season was always in the cards, even if it may not have been the easiest thing to see from the outset. The team has been blessed with some rather incredible roster continuity ever since the Randolph acquisition, and they've seen improvement from most if not all of their pieces. Much as I liked to put down Chris Wallace's strategy no less than 3 years ago, time has seen him successful. They're mean, lean, and they aren't leaving for a year or two. And unlike last year's debacle, they now stand a pretty good chance of being better in the playoffs than they've been in the regular season. They aren't going anywhere. The Western top seeds should be quaking, a bit -- they're a challenge, a roadblock, and a grit-and-grind nightmare to any good offense that relies on their execution. Like the Clippers during their current streak, or the Thunder, or the Spurs. Wait. That's all three top seeds. Huh. Fancy that.

Although Darrell Arthur isn't a humongous world-changing part of that Memphis equation, he's certainly not useless. Arthur's an excellent defensive player, to start with -- not exactly Marc Gasol-type world changing, but very good. He does a good job defending the pick and roll, and that was one of his main values in 2011. The Grizzlies were one of the only teams in the NBA that could (at all junctures of the game) put a competent pick-and-roll big man defender on the floor. If you spammed pick and rolls against the 2011 Grizzlies, it didn't really matter how ornate they were or how well-designed they were -- they weren't going to be as effective as they were against virtually any other team in the league. Most teams have one or two good pick and roll defenders. Some teams have zero. The Grizzlies? They had 3 or 4 available in the frontcourt, depending on your view on Zach Randolph's pick and roll defense (I think it's fine, especially next to someone like Gasol or Arthur). When you have a team who can effectively take away the pick and roll and control the game's tempo, it doesn't really matter what adjustments the offensive team makes -- it's going to be impossible to consistently hit 100-110 points against that kind of a defensive unit. That's why this particular Grizzlies team feels so elite, and it's why the 2011 Grizzlies were such a nightmarish matchup for the 2011 Spurs.

Offensively, he's nothing to write home about but he's nothing to scoff at either. Arthur is a decent at-rim big guy, with a few decent moves and a good sense of space on his layup attempts. He's good at the rim, but not so overwhelmingly good that he won't mix it up a bit outside, and that's a good thing, because his best use on this Grizzlies team is to act as a floor-spacing stopgap and can a bunch of long two point baskets. Not bad. Combine the picture and you have exactly what you'd want from a backup big -- a few offensive talents that complement the team well, great defense, and a gritty devotion to the team. "But Aaron," you'd say, quizzically cocking an eyebrow, "That's hardly good enough to greatly improve a team. How does he make the Grizzlies better than last year?" Good question, Time's 2006 Person-of-the-Year! He helps the Grizzlies for exactly the reason San Antonio's regular season depth helps the Spurs. In last year's first round series against the Clippers, Marc Gasol was tired. He was visibly lagging, and dead in the second half of almost every game of the series. Randolph wasn't in great shape, and that was one of the main catalysts of their loss, but to assume it was all on Randolph misunderstands just how important Gasol is to this Grizzlies team.

If Gasol had been a bit less winded from a terribly long season that forced him into far more minutes than he'd ever played in his career, he provides enough defensive resistance to stave off LA's game deciding run in game one. He showed some vintage Gasol brilliance in the fourth quarter of game 6, when the Grizzlies were fighting for their lives -- He proceeded to fall apart in Game 7, an exhausted mess. Arthur's main and primary use for the Grizzlies is simple -- he just needs to help Hollins rest Gasol and Randolph. They don't need to rest much, they simply need to rest. Marc Gasol is not a 36-37 minute-per-game player -- he's a 32-34 minute guy, at least until the playoffs dawn. He simply doesn't have the fitness to play that much more in a single game without balking. Arthur's a better defender than last year's Speights experiment, and he's a better stopgap to fill those minutes without forcing the Grizzlies to change their playbook or give up regular season wins for Gasol's health. So that, in a nutshell, is why Darrell Arthur can help this Grizzlies team. If he can fully return to his 2011 form, he can help Hollins draw Gasol's minutes back as the season goes on, and keep him fresh for the playoffs. And facing down a Memphis team with a fresh Gasol in a playoff situation? That's terrifying. One of the greatest fears of ANY Western contender, for sure.

• • •

_Follow Wilson Chandler on Twitter at __@wilsonchandler.___

Wilson Chandler hasn't been very good lately. In fact, that's probably the nicest way to put it -- in the aftermath of his relatively inauspicious stay across the pond in Hangzhou with the Zhejiang Lions, Chandler has looked about as far from a real NBA talent as he possibly could. Last year he had his surgery-requiring strained hip to contend with. This year? Same problem. During his time battling this injury, how's his game failed him? Let's examine.

• First, his defense. Chandler was never an excellent defensive presence. He was one of those shot-blocking wings who would sacrifice position and rotation for the good block attempt or the semi-smart steal. But even if you couldn't get behind his exact style, you would never concede him to be a nonentity -- as of late, though? He's been just that. Guys blow by him like he's not even there. Opposing wings salivate, knowing he'll go for the block on nearly every attempt he stays in front of. So if they don't blow by him, it's no real problem -- they just jump into him, throw up a wild shot, and get the call. It's rough to watch.

• One of Wilson Chandler's primary skills on the court is a solid shooting stroke that had him canning around 35% of his threes in New York and Denver the year of the Carmelo Anthony trade. This is sort of problematic, given that his shot -- outside of that year -- has been relatively shaky. Decent at the long two, awful at the three. But his shot has been absolutely abhorrent ever since he got back from China. Really bad! Just 36.9% from the field, including 5-of-20 from the three point line. Rough times.

• Finally, the tertiaries -- one of the places Chandler really helped the Knicks in his time with New York was in his assistance on the boards for a team starting Amare Stoudemire and a bunch of scrap metal. He had a relatively low turnover rate his first few seasons and it helped supercharge the Knicks' offense. His rebounding has stayed solid, but his turnover rate has skyrocketed -- he turned it over on almost 20% of his plays last year, and while he settled down a bit in his limited burn this year, it was bad when he first got to Denver too.

"So what's the prognosis, Doc?"

First, James... I'm a statistician, not a doctor. (Even if I play one on Twitter.) Second, nobody really knows. He's been out since mid-November, sidelined with the same hip issue that caused him to get surgery last season. If you erase his anemic play over the past year due to his injury, you've got a mixed picture. He's had one valuable year and a whole lot of flashes outside of that year -- stretches where he looks like an unimpeachable at-rim monster and a lord of dunking artistry, stretches where he looks like a very solid defensive prospect, and stretches where he looks like a pure shooter. His shot-blocking IS very good for a wing, and he's got the sort of athleticism scouts drool over. And that one year he had a three point shot? Gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous combination of skills. But there's an issue. He's 25 years old and he's had one good year -- a year in which he played 33 minutes a night and still had a bit of trouble fitting in after the big trade.

All in all, I'm not 100% sure what everyone sees in him. It's not that he's bad, or that he utterly lacks potential. He certainly doesn't. It's just that he's at an age where he's going to need a relatively big jump and a full recovery from these hip problems to really make it as an impact player in the NBA. His shot looks bad, his defense looks worse, and I'm a bit worried about this sudden spate of turnovers. I'm also a bit worried about the impact his time in China had on his game. In a nice TrueHoop piece, J.A. Adande detailed how the Nuggets felt they were getting an "improved" version of Chandler -- he averaged almost 27 points a night in China, and professed that he learned to be a more vocal teammate. My issue? I'm not sure being a vocal teammate really helps when his overseas tenure seems to have done little more than make him prone to jack up shots with impunity. Indeed, Chandler was "The Guy" in China. He was the one who needed to take all those shots. But he isn't anything remotely close to that in the NBA. If his time in China gave him the idea that he needs to be that kind of a player, he really needs to reevaluate his lessons learned. Or risk a league leaving him behind as his contract grows musty. Off the court, seems like a very nice guy -- I point you directly to the Chandler anecdotes in this great New York Times piece on the NBA's China boondoggle. Taking his team out for kareoke, staying over his winter vacation to keep practicing, et cetera. Lots of great stuff. And I hope he improves such that he can do that all in the NBA too -- just need to see a bit more before I'm all that confident in it, I suppose.

• • •

At the end of each post, I've been scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right has gotten a shout out at the end of the next post. On last week's final Friday post, I gave four riddles, representing these three and the player from our next post. They were a bit easier than normal, and as such, more people got them right. This includes: Matt L, Billy Hoyle, wul.f, and Sir Thursday. Good work on the only 4/4 scores ever awarded in this riddle competition, where the prizes were made up and the rules didn't matter.

I'd like to say I've been keeping track of the riddle guesses and that I can now give lifetime scores to those of you who've stuck with me, but that's a level of nerd well beyond even my considerable capabilities. Nevertheless, I'd like to offer some overwhelming thanks to the people who've been guessing for the majority of this feature's duration. I do hope some of you will stick around and keep reading even at the cessation of the capsules, even if we don't have neat guess-worthy features anymore. I might try to implement some sort of ongoing riddle about what I'm writing about next for my next column project, but it'll never be quite the same now, will it?

In any event, thanks to everyone. I get every Gothic Ginobili comment straight to my phone's email inbox, and I can't tell you the number of times I was between meetings at work and started cracking up at a particularly well-humored, ingenious, or off-the-wall guess. Special thanks to a few comment-fiends of explicit notoriety (i.e., those that I can remember off the top of my head at 7:00 AM): Sir Thursday, wul.f, Chilai, Geezer, Matt L, Mike L, the other Matt L, the other Mike L (yes, I looked at the emails, we had 2 of each), Adam Johnson, Dr. No, Mike Munday, Luke, Ian, Atori, Chris, Corn, Brian, Krishnan, Zero20, Der_K, BaronZbimg (I PROMISE I WILL REPLY TO THAT EMAIL SOON), Steven S (I PROMISE I WILL REPLY TO YOURS TOO), and soconnor.

And, finally, inestimable thanks commenter J, whose riddle jokes were often my favorite emails of the day.

Thanks for sticking along with the ride, friends. Appreciate it more than you'll know.

Final capsule drops in about an hour.

• • •

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!"

Top of the morning to you, dearest reader! I know you must've missed me in my recent absence but I had to attend to some pressing familial issues, something for which I apologize to you. I would have loved to keep you updated on your beloved small markets during this time but I had to keep to our small market values, the most important of which are family values. Enough about me, though, and on to today's subject -- family values in the NBA!

There's been many NBA players related to one another - Brook and Robin Lopez are brothers, Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady are cousins, and Dell and Steph Curry are a sharpshooting father/son duo. Who could ever forget the Pau for Marc Gasol trade, the New York playground legends of cousins Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair, or the shared capriciousness of the Bynum brothers - Will and Andrew? There's Bill Walton's hilarious legend compared to his son Luke Walton's hilarious uselessness, the always entertaining commentating couplet of Jon and Brent Barry (seriously, he used the word scuttlebutt on NBATV recently), and the gritty toughness of the Evans twins, Tyreke and Reggie.

I listed all that fluff out not just to up my word count (to make notorious big-market apologist and big marketeer editor-in-chief Aaron McGuire happy) [Ed. Note: How many times must I reiterate -- I don't care about your word count!], but to make the point that the family who plays together stays together. And it's not just a basketball-specific phenomenon either -- sure, the family that watches basketball together will stay together, but so will the family that does pretty much anything together. Except domestic violence, probably. That... that wouldn't be very cool. I guess this was all just a really roundabout way to say "spend time with your family, you selfish buffoons". You truly never know if that last Bobcats game you watched with your dad will be the last one or if that argument you had with your brother about Durant vs. LeBron will never get settled or if just telling someone close to you that you love and appreciate them will give them something to keep living for. As someone who had to learn this lesson the hard way just over two weeks ago, I want you to go tell a loved one just how much they mean to you. Seriously, go do it right now. Your computer isn't going anywhere anytime soon and if it does, it's replaceable. They aren't. Go do it. Please.

I love you, Dad.

• • •

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

The Los Angeles Clippers are currently on a magnificent tear through the league, having just won their 17th game in a row Sunday night. "But, Alex," you think, "the Clippers are in Los Angeles, one of the biggest markets of all!" On the surface this does seem to be the case, guy in my imagination, but think about it: the Clippers have always been the ignored little brother to the bigger, badder Lakers. And if there's one thing I've learned over the course of my brief lifetime, it's that you can be big market on the surface yet small market at heart just like these Los Angeles Clippers. Uncoincidentally (I DON'T CARE IF THIS ISN'T A WORD, MCGUIRE) [Ed. Note: I DON'T CARE EITHER, WHY ARE WE TALKING IN ALL-CAPS] enough, the top 8 teams in the west at the moment are either small markets or small market at heart. It's not as applicable in the eastern conference, but you know what those ESPN talking heads always say - the western is the bestern and the eastern is the leastern!

• • •

Sammy's Sack Racing Presents: "The King Of The League!" Jimmer Fredette MVP Watch

The Jimmer is still rustling our jimmies. Still top-5 in the league for point guard PER, even as he lets troubled teammate DeMarcus Cousins get his first career triple-double in order to boost his trade value for a big market team to give valuable young assets for. He's the ultimate team player, the leader of our hearts, and the guider of our souls. In his last two games - two contests against the biggest of the big markets, the Knicks and Celtics - he went 56% from 3-point land, a rate which vanquished both of his foes. You see, Jimmer doesn't deserve to be just a Sacramento King. He deserves to be a Small Market Knight, demolishing all those big market dragons which lie in his path on his quest to reset the balance of today's NBA by throwing the One Championship Ring into the fiery hellscape of Memphis's Mount Doom. But remember, kids - one does not simply take ridiculously deep 3s into Mordor.

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night

There's not much tonight in the way of small market games, so the honor has to go to the Memphis Grizzlies visiting beautiful Indianapolis to take on the Pacers sans their star player, the Batman. If you ask me, he's faking the injury so that he can take on this evil Fiscal Cliff villain. It's becoming famous -- all of those people who actually care about "politics" (bleh) and the "economy" (meh) and "the future of this country at-large" (yawn) have been talking about it. But that's beside the point - we're here to talk about basketball and basketball is what you'll receive tonight. Look for the Pacers to hit the offensive glass hard (figuratively, not Amar'e-style literally) in classic small market fashion as the Grizzlies attempt to spread the ball around and make as many bank shots as possible before the bank closes for New Year's Day.

And on that wonderful joke, I'm out, dear readers - see you in 2013!