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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Kosta Koufos, Luol Deng, and Nick Young.

• • •

Follow _Kosta Koufos on Twitter at @kostakoufos.
_

It's a bit funny. The Denver Nuggets have a vast surfeit of depth, or so we're led to believe. They've got more wing talent than you can shake a stick at, several decent point guards, and a veritable army of big men. All of them are above replacement level, all of them have their individual strengths, and (in theory) a bench unit comprised of such players should be blowing every team off the court. But there's a problem with simply assessing players as above or below replacement level without properly contextualizing their stats, and the Nuggets (to me) seem to embody this gap. First, replacement level on defense is extremely situational and hard to assess without seeing players on the court together. Simple as that. A good rotating pick and roll defender is still going to look pretty bad if he's surrounded by players who can't defend worth a damn, while an individually solid post defender who's asked to protect the rim is rarely going to get a chance to show off his talents. A shutdown wing who has to roam instead of key in to a superstar may look worse than they'd look if they were acting as a shutdown wing. And so on and so forth. The role you play on defense is a lot more valuable than we tend to give heed, and can completely change how you look on defense in a scheme poorly suited for your defensive talents. Or, conversely, can make you look a lot better than you are.

The problem with Denver's roster right now isn't that they lack of good players. They have a great many solid offensive players, and by the end of the year, I'd be shocked if their offense wasn't floating around top 10 (although I still think spacing will be an issue without acquiring another three point shooter). The issue is their defense, which is currently completely rudderless -- and if I'm honest, I don't see that changing for a while. And I think the fact that Kosta Koufos represents their biggest hope on that end is a good indicator why. While the Nuggets have a ton of big men who are above-replacement-level and solid offensive players, only one of the Nuggets' big men is currently a plus defender -- Koufos. The other Denver big men can stumble into good defensive plays, from time to time (see: McGee's block average, Faried's occasional possessions of post brilliance) but none have been able to solidly capture that defensive intensity in a manner that screams "build the defense around me." And frankly, neither has Koufos. He's a decent pick and roll defender that appears to fall apart when matched by someone larger than he is. He doesn't do one-on-one coverage very well, but he can help defend plays. Unfortunately, given the other defensive frontcourt talent on the Nuggets, he doesn't JUST need to defend plays -- he also needs to do man-to-man post defense, and he needs to try and protect the rim, and he needs to do so many things to make this team hum defensively that his actual defensive skills get buried in the miasma.

It's not all bad for Denver. Iguodala's defense will come back, and that will help. But you cannot build a positive defensive team around a single positive defender that isn't defending the paint -- not against an NBA where 30-40% of each team's shots come around the rim, not against an NBA where slashing and paint scoring is the path of least resistance to putting a lot of points on the board. And so Koufos sits. He's a decent offensive player, I suppose, in a limited role -- he converts well at the rim and has a nice little baby hook he employs with some success from short range. He has absolutely no offensive game outside of 10 feet, and thankfully for Denver, he doesn't pretend he does -- ceasing to pretend you have a midrange game when you don't is one of those steps that good players take that indicates both the merits of self-restraint and a better self-awareness than most. He's an excellent rebounder, although it is worth noting that last season's excellent rebounding numbers come with the caveat that he played scant minutes and has rarely had to rebound against starting-caliber bigs. Still. Koufos is a good player, if a bit of a situational roleplayer. The fact that Karl looked at his big man rotation and assessed Koufos the starter isn't necessarily a knock on Koufos, but more a knock on the Nuggets' frontcourt as a defensive unit -- at their best, the Nuggets will hum offensively as few other teams in the league do. But the defensive troubles that allowed Miami to post an offensive rating of 126 points per 100 possessions against the poor team aren't going away as soon as Iguodala comes back to full form.

• • •

Follow _Luol Deng on Twitter at __@LuolDeng9.___

You can ask friends of mine, if you want. They'd all tell you the same thing -- I may not be a fan of the Bulls, but I am a completely unabashed Luol Deng fan. I think Deng is one of the best small forwards in the league, and believe him to be a target of too much unjust criticism for things he can't really control. He finds himself dogged on both ends -- criticism of his lower-than-expectations offense override the context in which he gets his numbers, while his defense is considered "nice" but a step below that of Iguodala or LeBron. His contract is constantly referenced as a gigantic, frustrating overpay and an albatross. He's constantly mentioned as trade bait. He plays injured and plays often, pooh-poohing injury in an effort to help his team out -- but because his statistics take a dive while injured, he tends to suffer the ill effects of his injury twice, both in the disappointment of having the injury and disappointment in his statistics. It's not fun. But let's discuss each of his trouble points one-by-one.

• Poor offensive player. Not really. His percentages aren't great, but Deng does have some skills. The biggest issue Deng faces isn't really his skillset causing problems but the Bulls' relatively flawed offensive scheme to begin with. Thibodeau's understanding of offense tends to lead him towards a halfcourt, grind-it-out offense that relieson wings popping for long twos and bigs flashing to accept short passes (which, incidentally, raises his assist rate -- he's a bit above average in that department). It's fundamentally similar to the Boston offense around Paul Pierce. The problem? Deng isn't Paul Pierce -- he's no midrange wizard. When Deng's healthy, he's a good three point shooter (36% last season!), and he's quite good at slashing to the rim. But instead, Thibodeau's general offensive schema has essentially forced Deng to take an absurd excess of midrange shots in his time as a Bull, which has laid to waste his efficiency numbers given how absolutely awful he is at them. Now that he's injured, his shot has a very bad wrist-related hitch, and his aggression in getting to the rim is harmed by his difficulty dribbling. So now the critics can point and go "Hey! Look! Deng sucks at offense!" Problem is he doesn't, and the falloff is essentially all related to his injury. But keep saying that, sure.

• Not super-elite defensively. I have to question this. Do the people that say this watch Deng play defense? The man's a beast, and although he's not quite the shutdown wizard Iguodala is, I'd argue that he's about as valuable as LeBron James in the regular season. What really differentiates Deng (and Tony Allen, to be fair) from Iguodala and James and the rest of the NBA's best large perimeter defenders is that Deng's motor never, EVER stops. The man has never taken a defensive possession off in his life, for better or worse -- he hustles up the court every possession, whether it's a fast break or a halfcourt grind-out. He's ubiquitous, surveying the court with an eagle eye for any defensive breakdown he needs to assist. He doesn't quit, and for as good as Thibodeau is at putting together defensive schemes, without Deng his defense would be far less potent. He's the best one-on-one defender in the Bulls' starting five and makes the whole defensive system move correctly when he's on the court. He's far more important to the Bulls' defense than most give him credit for.

• Overpaid relative to his production. Honestly? I just think this is wrong. Plain and simple. Yes, he's a bit under the league's best wings -- he's no Kobe, he's no Harden, he's no LeBron. But which of the sub-elite wings is he that much worse than? I'd assess him to be clearly superior to Rudy Gay or Danny Granger, two players with marginally better offensive games but significantly worse defensive games (although they're still positive defenders). Pierce is better (for now) but also gets paid $3 million more per season. Luol Deng signed a $71 million dollar contract, but it was pre-lockout and it lasts for 6 years. That's a touch over $12 million a year. Big money, but for Deng's defensive and offensive production and the NBA average contract size, it's not THAT egregious, nor is it so out-of-sorts as to seriously merit griping. Not to mention the elephant in the room -- Deng is consistently among the top 5-10 players in the game in terms of the minutes he's on the court, plays through injury, and simply gets way more burn than many of the players with contracts commensurate to his. The fact that the Bulls don't really need to price in a serious backup for Deng (not with the minutes he plays) has to be a relative value-add to the contract as well, even if I (and many others) feel he needs to stop playing all those minutes.

So, that's that. This isn't to say that Deng is absent of problems, obviously. He should've gotten surgery on his torn wrist ligament during the offseason, and while I realize he wants to play tough and help his team, without Rose this Bulls team is relatively shiftless. It'd be far more valuable to his franchise and his life as a whole if he just got the surgery, recovered, and came back without the injury-forced hitch in his shooting stroke. I realize he wanted to play for his country, and quite frankly, I'm glad he did. But immediately after his Olympic play ended he should've gotten the surgery. Yes, he'd be out a month or two. No, I don't think anyone knowledgeable on the face of the earth would begrudge him for it. And as I mentioned -- he plays more minutes than just about anyone, which is both a value-add and a curse. It's a value-add because you don't need to worry about getting a particularly competent backup -- when your backup only has rotational room to play 5-10 minutes a night (considering smallball/largeball lineups), the franchise can fill it with minimum guys and experience little-to-no dropoff. It's a curse because Deng's offensive statistics (and occasional defensive possessions) may be significantly more inefficient than he'd produce if he played the 33-35 MPG nights of is peers.

While I love Deng's game, I love his off-court endeavors and past quite a bit more. He's one of the most likeable talents to ever attend Duke University (in a group with Kyrie Irving and Grant Hill), and he's lived through more than you or I could ever dream. Deng was born in a nine child family in the war-torn nation of Sudan, moving to Egypt at a young age to escape the ongoing civil war. After he got out and got his NBA contract, it would've been pretty easy for Deng to simply throw money at it and look past it. He doesn't. He's been personally extremely involved in Sudanese charities, with a special emphasis on the Lost Boys of Sudan. The "Lost Boys" part refers to one of the tens of thousands of boys of the Nuer or Dinka ethnic groups displaced or orphaned during Sudan's grisly civil war. I don't know if any of you have ever read Dave Egger's book, "What is the What" -- it's not commonly assigned reading. But if you haven't, I strongly suggest you carve out some time for it. It's the story of one of Sudan's Lost Boys who escapes, makes his way to America, and is mugged and troubled. Among other things, of course, like his history and the road he traveled. It's a great work in more ways than one, and it's rather representative of the program Luol Deng has put his heart and soul into helping. And there's a good reason for that, as well -- Deng is of the Dinka tribe, so he himself is technically of the lost boy designation.

Deng escaped the brunt of the horrors his peers underwent, but they're widely considered the most traumatized large-scale group of children to ever survive a war. They often had to walk -- rarely with shoes -- for years, searching for safe refuge in a journey where their journeying peers fell to death around them to starvation, wild animals, and soldiers. Then there were the lost girls, taken as hostages and sexually assaulted by massive armies before being sold into slavery. The worst part about the plight of the Lost Girls (relative to the Lost Boys) is that as they were sold to different families, they "technically" aren't eligible for the same supported resettlement to America that the Lost Boys are (through the charity foundations Deng supports). Which is pretty awful, much like virtually everything related to that period of Sudanese history. It's an incredible gift that we get to watch Luol Deng perform at this level, and it's a gift that Deng has achieved the success he has. He's established his own charity foundation, one that works to build schools in Sudan. He and his family visit Sudan yearly, often helping with government work and the establishment of a new independent state in south Sudan.

He's a hero, plain and simple -- one of the best people in the NBA, for sure. And for all the whining and hand-wringing about him being "overpaid"... can we all step back for a second and admit that a man who builds schools by his own hand to help build back a war-torn nation probably "deserves" about as much money as the world can give him? Yes? We can be on the same page for a minute? Good. Now go ahead and return to calling him an overpaid fraud-star, if you'd like -- just know that you'll hear virtually this entire capsule restated in the course of a minute if you say that to me personally. Fair warning, you know.

• • •

Follow _Nick Young on Twitter at __@NickSwagyPYoung.___

The nice thing about having a few of these left for the NBA season is that, occasionally, I'll see a player do something that absolutely needs to be in their capsule. Must be there. A singular moment in a random game that just exemplifies that player's style or general approach to the game. Today, for Nick Young, we have one such video that was taken from last night's game between the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia 76ers, Young's new team. The place? Philadelphia. The time? First quarter, right around the end. The action? SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS.

But I repeat myself. Please watch this.

Look, I usually try to avoid putting too much into a single play, but this is the single most representative play I've ever seen in my life. I have to have watched it 10-20 times at this point. Look at Young's complete and utter clock awareness -- he turned away from the arena shot clocks with almost 15 seconds on the clock, then ran into the corner without ever coming close to setting his feet or checking the clock again. The Sixers deserve some blame for passing him the ball in the first place, but my assumption would be that nobody on Earth really would think that a pass to someone as closely-guarded as that would actually lead to a shot. Young turns, and before he can even see the basket, he jumps to shoot -- not straight up, as one would generally expect, but backwards heading towards the corner. It's a Dirk-style fadeaway, only from so far into the corner that he's essentially taking it from behind the basket. After the shot, he doesn't seem to make any emotional gestures or faces that would indicate any awareness of what he's done. Just a sort of a shrug, and a slow "I guess I'll get back on defense... even though we had the last shot with enough time to run an actual play."

That's Nick Young for you. The man has never met a shot he didn't like. Ever. I don't know whether he was born this way or whether Gilbert Arenas -- one of Young's best friends in Washington -- helped bring out his latent chucker. But that's what Nick Young does. He makes Monta Ellis look like a willing distributor, last year posting one of the lowest assist rates in the entire league. For all his love of shots, the only real assist Nick Young enjoys is one that has a chance to go into the basket and score a bucket for Swaggy P himself. He's a massive black hole, essentially. Repeat after me, NBA friends: don't pass Nick Young the ball. Because if you DO decide to pass Nick Young the ball, be prepared -- Nick Young has the paperwork signed and notarized to adopt the ball as a child and put it under protective custody. You are not seeing that ball again without supervised visits, bud. To Young's credit, he's a bit more efficient than most chucking guards -- he shoots around 38% on his career from three point territory and he's not that bad from the long midrange. The problem is, he has no sense of self-control or ability to self-regulate his shots to eliminate all the bad ones. He takes more contested midrange shots per-minute-on-the-court than almost anyone in the league, doesn't play defense (or, rather, doesn't play effective defense -- he puts no effort in staying on his man and ballhawks without the ability to actually convert on steals). He's a 6'6" guard that rebounds as poorly as Earl Boykins, and has a handle that's high enough that he has trouble controlling the ball in pressure situations unless he shoots it within 2 or 3 seconds of getting the ball. (Hint: he will do that.)

As for why the Philadelphia 76ers felt they needed to get rid of Lou Williams only to pay Nick Young a higher salary? I... I really don't know. I covered this in the Lou Williams capsule earlier this year, but Williams was somewhat of an underrated player. He was a good passer, a solid shooter, and (although he tended to isolate a bit much in crunch time) so good at handling the ball without stupid turnovers that you felt relatively safe with Lou Williams running crunch time offense, especially since Holiday wasn't quite ready to do it yet. Nick Young? I'd feel about as safe giving him the keys to my crunch time offense as I would giving him the scalpel to perform open-heart surgery on an ailing grandmother. ESPECIALLY when dealing with an offense where you really want Andrew Bynum taking your shots in crunch time -- does anyone seriously think Young is going to pass to Bynum when the game's on the line? Or, perhaps more aptly, does anyone seriously think Young is going to pass to him if he's open? Maybe he's not, in which case Young will pass to him in order to "prove" that Nick Young needs to be the one taking the shots. I don't know. But in any event, he's a Sixer now. So I suppose we'll have to see if the Philadelphia organization's faith in Young is worthy.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Bunch of 2/3 guesses yesterday, but nobody got Luol Deng. (Seriously, he's the best player on the Bulls. Why does nobody realize he exists? WHY DOES NOBODY TALK ABOUT HIM?!) Anyway. Good job to Chilai, BaronZbimg, and J for good guesses.

• For Player #259... NOTHING IS EASY WHATSOEVER.
• Player #260 had high hopes going into this season. Through 4 games, though, he's been pretty awful. His decent career per-minute rebounding numbers have balked, his scoring has been inefficient, and he's been abhorrent defensively. One hopes he'll get better soon, or else his team will go from cellar-dweller to "worst in the league" very quickly.
• Player #261 is injured. Again. Contract looks bad. Again. But he's pretty solid when he's healthy, and could be a big asset in a push for a better position in their conference if he comes back. They need him. Because this one looks like a very bad team without him.

Adios, amigos.

• • •

Fans' emotions are vacillating between unreasonable optimism and abject panic on a nightly basis, so you know what that means: The 2012-2013 NBA Season has officially begun! And with the return of the season, comes the return of The Outlet! You might even say we're back in the swing of things. Usually we preface these posts by reminding you not to call it a comeback, but go ahead. Call it a comeback. The Outlet is officially back, whenever we see fit to publish one, and recently that seems to be more often than ever! It's truly a bright new age of semi-regular Dadaistic sports interpretation. Get ready, fansketball.

• OKC vs ATL: A Brief Examination of the Perkins Play (by Jacob Harmon)
• LAL vs DET: Mike Brown Minutes and the Essence of Comedy (by Alex Dewey)

• • •

A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF THE PERKINS PLAY
Written by Jacob Harmon

Pre-game, Chesapeake Energy Arena.

Outside of those tense moments of crunch time, these were the moments Kevin Durant relished most. The little routines, the excitement of the fans, the anticipation of what’s to come, giving his mom a kiss on the cheek for good luck. The Thunder’s pre-game ritual, one chiefly designed years prior by he and Russell, was well known. They’d had to speed it up a little bit, what with the league’s new rules regarding game delays prior to tip-off, but they’d made it work. The handshakes, the bumps, the hand to God, they could fit it in. But there was one part of the pre-game ritual that was less publicized; an unspoken part. In fact, Kevin wondered whether anyone was aware of it besides him. And though he smiled and regarded it with his usual friendly demeanor, the truth was that it was this part of the ritual that was most uncomfortable for Kevin.

This was the part where he had to have “the talk” with Kendrick Perkins.

As he arced another perfect jumper through the bottom of the net and adjusted his warm-ups, Perkins approached. Just like he always did, he spoke. “Hey Kevin, I’ve got an idea for the first quarter,” Perk chirped cheerfully. Though he had a reputation as something of a tough guy, anyone who came to know Kendrick soon found he was a softy, cheerful and friendly, almost childlike in his obsequious demeanor towards those he considered friends. Kevin considered Perkins words, nodding thoughtfully,

“Oh yeah? What do you got my man?” This was his usual response. No matter how many times they had this discussion (and they had this discussion before the tip-off of nearly every game), it played out the same way. Kevin wondered whether Perkins was in on the routine, or whether it was only he who noticed. No one else had ever asked him about it, and he wasn’t the type to talk behind his friends’ back. Perkins idly clanked a jumpshot, then turned back to his friend.

“I was thinking, you know, the offense doesn’t really use me much. It’s mostly you, Russell, and now we got K-Mart right?” Perkins paused, expectantly. Durant nodded.

“Yeah, yeah. So what’re you thinking?” He already knew what Kendrick was thinking, but such was the dance.

Perkins continued. “So like, we’re playing Horford this game, and you know that guy’s soft. I figure we set up a post-up, you feed me the ball down low, I’ll go to work on that dude. Show him the old-school moves. What do you think?” Kevin let Perkins’ words hang in the air for a moment as he looked into space, affecting a thoughtful expression, as though considering something new and intriguing. He stroked his goatee several times, for effect.

This was the routine, the ritual. Perk would always approach him, so friendly and expectant and eager to please, armed with his exciting new offensive strategy for whatever the team of the night might be. It had never mattered the opposing center, not once. There was always a reasoning, and it was always unique. And it never worked. Of the times KD had fed Perkins the ball in the low post, he could remember offhand maybe once or twice that it had actually ended with a basket rather than the defender pulling the chair, or a clanked hook shot. Assuming, of course, that Kendrick even successfully caught the ball. Kevin had never seen someone quite so poor at catching a ball from a stationary position, then so dismal at holding onto it. Many of the passes were simply bobbled out of bounds. Kevin estimated that his assist to turnover ratio, the one major statistical hole in his game (or so the pencil pushers told him), could primarily be traced to his devotion to this ritual. Finding himself lost in actual thought, he suddenly realized Perkins was still awaiting a response.

“Alright my man, that sounds good. We’ll give it a try, might catch em off guard.” Kevin smiled as he spoke, patting his buddy on the shoulder. Perk’s mouth spread into a broad grin at the scoring champ’s faith in his abilities, and he bounded off towards the locker room. Kevin smiled, and shook his head ruefully. The ratios would have to stand, because no matter how much he refined his passing game, he could be certain of one thing. He would feed the ball into the post to begin yet another game. After all, who could say no? You score points, grab boards, collect assists, win games, and fight for titles, but at the end of the day, wasn’t the real gold in the friends you make along the way? As he swished another jumper, he looked up to see his mom smiling warmly at him from the first row.

He knew that it was worth it.

Final Score: ATL 104, OKC 95. Kevin Durant put up 22 PTS/12 RB/8 AST/3 STL/6 TO.

• • •

MIKE BROWN MINUTES AND THE ESSENCE OF COMEDY
Written by Alex Dewey

First of all, let's briefly cover the game. Andre Drummond looked alright at times but mostly like an incredibly unpolished rookie, and Greg Monroe actually played some decent defense on Dwight Howard. [Ed. Note: Dwight Howard made 12 of 14 shots. --Aaron] Monroe has seemed to have made some strides defensively, which is nice, because defense is the only thing between Greg Monroe and that vaunted "franchise" label. Kyle Singler and Jonas Jerebko had some weird chemistry and occasionally the Pistons even passed the ball very quickly. And then we all collectively closed our eyes, shook our heads from side to side for a couple of seconds, and opened our eyes. They were now bloodshot and glaring, for we had remembered that the Lakers have somehow put together Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, and Dwight Howard. And... yeah, that was pretty much game. Complete laugher, only saved from lasting notoriety by the sheer fact that the Pistons apparently have 10 NBA players and the Lakers only have 5.

Anyway, let's get to my favorite story of the night: Mike Brown's substitution patterns. Get this -- the Lakers were up 21 after one quarter, up 28 at the half, up 31 when the fourth quarter started, and up 29 when the game ended. Read that sentence a few times. Now remember how minutes work: There are 48 minutes in a basketball game, and 12 in each quarter. 24 in each half, and it takes 36 minutes to get to the end of the third quarter. Alright, we have all of this down? Good.

None of that was meant to be condescending. I wrote that arithmetic primer for myself... because I keep reading the above paragraph over and over, and glancing over at the box score on my other monitor, because there must be some sort of mistake... I mean, maybe there's an error with the box score, but... no, I saw it with my own eyes. So it must be an arithmetic error on my part. I must have had a minor stroke while watching this game or I must have some sort of weird tic that prevents me from comparing specific pairs of numbers correctly, because I don't think I have fundamental problems literally reading the box score and I'm not totally misremembering what I saw. And I'm pretty sure a regulation basketball game has 48 minutes, still, which -- ...

Okay, Alex. You're not insane. Calm down. Start over. Get back to the facts. The Lakers were up 21 after one quarter, up 28 at the half, up 31 when the fourth quarter started, and up 29 when the game ended. Now, there are 48 minutes in a basketball game, and 12 in each quarter. 24 in each half, and it takes 36 minutes to get to the end of the third quarter. Okay, I'm doing good. All facts so far. Now, Kobe Bryant literally played 32 minutes in this game. Pau Gasol literally played 33 minutes in this game. Dwight Howard literally played 33 minutes in this game. These are three of the most valuable people in the Los Angeles Lakers' organization, and (one supposes) the propensity for fluke injuries which would flip them from assets to liabilities in one second is more or less directly proportional to the number of minutes that these players play. Three quarters of the game is 36 minutes, and these players had already played an unreasonably large proportion of the game (at halftime their minutes were: Dwight 22, Kobe 19, and Pau at 17).

But in the fourth quarter, Coach Mike Brown actually put the starters back in and kept them in, finally taking them out at the last possible moment (about 4 minutes remaining) with no apparent principle other than the mathematical exhaustion of possible combinations and Kobe putting pressure on his coach to leave him in. Besides stunned confusion and doubting my own senses more than Descartes, ultimately I found myself laughing uncontrollably at the situation. I would look away and look back at the game, and suddenly Dwight Howard was back in the game, or (this has been the running gag of Brown's tenure) Pau Gasol was still in the game, for absolutely no reason. Or Kobe was refusing to come out of the game, and because of that, Mike Brown also left Dwight and Gasol in the game. Then he would take Kobe out, but leave Gasol out there, and... I just was cracking up. Mike Brown played his starters the entire first quarter, more or less (only the older two, actually; he subbed Dwight out with about 2 minutes left in the quarter and then played him the entire second quarter).

As a Spurs fan, this was beyond anything I could possibly imagine. There are tics in substitution that coaches have - Why isn't he playing Faried more?, Why is he literally playing Roger Mason Jr.? etc. - but rarely are those tics quite on the level of classical thought experiments and Uncle Vanya-_style character humor and _Airplane-level sight gags (e.g. every shot of Mike Brown standing or saying anything), all simultaneously. The only way this could be funnier if this turns out to be the team that literally wins an NBA championship in seven months. Somehow I suspect the Lakers only have a chance because the studio producing this high comedy demanded a happy ending, instead of the gritty satirical ending in which the aging geniuses of our sport are overworked or injured by the end of the season, and useless as more than fodder for a healthy team.

Whatever the case, Steve Nash should be back in a few weeks and we can see what a dangerous team the Lakers can be.

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 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, MySpace is the most popular website on the internet, 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!"

Come one, come all and welcome to Gothic Ginobili's first edition of Small Market Mondays! We know you must be sick of all the attention that small markets get from the lamestream media. That Ben Gordon trade saga seemed to last FOREVER, didn't it? But we know what side our bread is buttered on. At this point, we really don't have a choice -- we HAVE to jump on this bandwagon to get precious page views. Aaron McGuire's McMansion isn't going to pay for itself, you know?

To start this week's installment off, it's only right to begin with the biggest storyline of the week -- the DJ Augustin revenge game. Augustin famously did what many superstars of his caliber have been known to do and made the move from the record-breaking, title-holding Charlotte Bobcats to a smaller market in Indianapolis. When asked about if the Pacers thought the Bobcats were competition due to their record-breaking season last year, Pacers GM Kevin Pritchard had this to say: "Charlotte is defending nothing. That's in boxing, you give the belt back. They don't have this year's trophy."

Meanwhile, Bobcats VP of basketball operations Rod Higgins confirmed what we all thought: Augustin understandably took less money in Indiana while giving up his starting role in Charlotte in order to play in a media market with 60,000 less people. As you must know by now due to the positively nauseating amount of coverage, Augustin went 1 for 7 from the field. In this writer's opinion, that underrates his game. It was absolutely one of the most efficient 1 for 7s this writer has ever seen. Every single one of his misses gave his teammates a great chance to hit the offensive glass as he intelligently took five threes knowing they'd result in long rebounds for his teammates. One would have to be delusional to think he was actually trying to make those shots and not displaying classic small market classiness by trying to make his teammates look good.

• • •

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

In a development surprising absolutely no one, small markets are currently leading almost every division in the league. The Bucks are leading the Central, the Magic are crushing the Southeast, the Blazers are in complete control of the Northwest, and the Spurs have basically already booked a ticket to the Finals with their undefeated record topping the Southwest. In fact, noted ESPN analyst John Hollinger insisted that we should stop giving the big markets handouts by featuring them on national TV over the better, more deserving small markets. But the poor truth-telling Hollinger was met by a classic big market apologist:

While I do agree with Mr. Hollinger that the NBA should be a meritocracy, we must remember that the league is only as good as its weakest team. For this reason, we must also televise teams with losing records like the 1-3 Lakers and 1-2 Celtics in order to keep them financially solvent. After all, there's a reason that the NBA has begun slowly phasing in plans to begin revenue sharing -- no one wants to see a team be contracted, even if it's a helpless big market squad like the talent-starved Lakers and their .250 winning percentage. As always, the big market wins came from the golden-hearted generosity of blue-collar smaller markets with the Washington Wizards allowing the Celtics to boost their confidence with a close win and the Detroit Pistons easing up the breaks to let the Lakers starters feel like superstars for one fleeting night.

• • •

Bubba's Bait Shop Presents: "The Buck Stops Here!" Mike Dunleavy MVP Watch

Mike Dunleavy, heavy favorite in the 2012-2013 MVP race, is currently posting an astronomical PER of 27.12 on 70% shooting and leading his beloved Buckaroos to an undefeated record. While he took it easy on big-market Boston with a 7 point night there, he decided to ramp up his level of play in a fierce match-up against the dynasty-driven Cleveland Cavaliers wherein he dropped 27 points and added 12 boards. We'll be sure to update you on his performance later this week in what looks to be a marquee prime-time Wednesday-night match-up between Dunleavy's Bucks and the 2nd smallest market in the NBA, the Memphis Grizzlies.

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night

With so many great match-ups tonight, it's hard to choose just one to focus on: the Brooklyn Nets and the largest market look to pull off the unlikely upset on the Minnesota T-Wolves, playing without mega-ultra-superstar Kevin Love. Meanwhile, Indiana faces San Antonio in what is sure to be an excellent display of classiness, ball movement, and all around great teamwork. Great blue-collar hustle plays. However, the game of the night HAS to go to the Memphis Grizzlies hosting the Utah Jazz. This is sure to be a great battle between 2 of the smallest 6 markets in the league, and there's much on the line to play for here. Mo Williams will be leading the Jazz and he's on a mission to prove that his time in the big, morally destitute market of Los Angeles didn't corrupt his play too much. But, the Grizzlies' Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph are on a mission of their own -- to prove that there needs to be a rule declaring the first team to 20 offensive rebounds the winner. Because as every good analyst knows, the only points that really matter in basketball are hustle points.

• • •

This concludes your first Small Market Monday of the year, folks. Don't forget to vote tomorrow, even though it may seem like a lock. Gary Johnson needs every vote he can get, friends, so he too can win in a landslide like good ol' Jimmy Carter in 1980!

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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Mike Miller, Tony Parker, and Andrew Bynum.

• • •

Follow _Mike Miller on Twitter at @m33m.
_

Mike Miller, in recent memory, has not a very productive basketball player. In fact, Miller serves as evidence to an angle that rarely gets much media play. The Miami front office did a picture-perfect job putting their big three together. Obviously one of the greatest offseason coups of all time. But most people don't give much credit to the fact that just about every move they made immediately afterwards has turned out poorly for the franchise. Right after signing their triumverate, the Heat made moves to lock up Joel Anthony, Udonis Haslem, and Mike Miller. Their deals were each for 5 years, meaning that each would still be under contract when their big three reached their ETO decision in year 4. The deals take each player to a state well past their primes -- Anthony to 33, Haslem to 35, and Miller to 35. Haslem's is for $20 million, Anthony's $18 million, and Miller's $30 million. In theory, all are relatively small sums. But when you combine the three contracts, the picture's more grim -- the Heat have three contracts that effectively make up a 5-year $68,000,000 deal. That's almost $13.5 million dollars a year for a group of players that were arguably past their prime when the contracts were signed in the first place. The gravity of this mistake became exceedingly clear in last year's finals, where the $68 million dollar men combined to play just 127 minutes in five games -- or 25 minutes a game across the three of them. Anthony got only two minutes of burn in the entire series and Miller was the only one even remotely resembling a decent NBA player (in his game 5 outburst, of course -- prior to that, he'd played around 5 ineffective minutes a night and missed every single three he took).

What an outburst it was, though. Seven of eight threes, a steal, five rebounds? Insane shooting, by anyone's standards. It was far and away Miller's best game in a Heat jersey, and one of the best of his career even ignoring the added gravity of the Finals. It does need to come with a grain of salt, though -- hard to bury it with praise without noting the inconvenient truth that he was atrocious in the first 120 games of his Heat tenure, prone to over-passing and often actively refusing to shoot when open and passed to. His shooting outside the arc has still been pretty good, but it happens so infrequently it's hard to make much of it. His rebounding has been good, but he brings virtually nothing else to the table. He can't make his own shot particularly well -- 80% of his shots were assisted, and as you watch him, you wonder if that understates it. It's not really his fault that he's fallen so far, mind you. He's been prone to massive back problems in Miami and his game has fallen off considerably, even going back to his fractured thumb and torn ligament he suffered in practice before he first took the court in a Heat jersey at all. His laundry-list of injuries would cause even the most medically inclined to cringe, and watching him labor up and down the court is one of the saddest things in the entire league right now. His injuries have sapped everything. His creativity, his aggression, his overall abilities... everything.

He's still gritty and smart, but that has its limitations as well -- his defense, where his grittiness should help him, is let down by circumstance. He tries the good try at making his rotations, but his lack of speed makes it pretty easy for good offensive teams to exploit his lack of lateral movement. He can still stick to his man pretty well when the Heat face slow-pace halfcourt offense, but good luck defending with Miller when the pace speeds up and he's forced to make quicker decisions. Which is all fine and well, if he wasn't making around $6 million a year during the next three to ply his trade, and in a state where everything's downhill from here. There are three years left, for all of these three guys, with player options and no team-side method of termination. It's true -- the Heat had no way of knowing for sure that Miller and Haslem's injuries were worse than expected, nor did they necessarily have the capacity to predict that Joel Anthony would be rendered utterly obsolete by the Heat's dominant 2012 gameplan. But looking back, the whole thing is retrospectively sad, and something probably worthy of more note. If the Heat find themselves unable to keep either LeBron or Bosh due to either terminating their contract in search of a better situation, the extent to which these three contracts tied the Heat's hands could end up being the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. Kept them out of the running for most serious roster upgrades, took up three roster spots, forced each of their stars to play larger-than-necessary minutes in the regular season to compensate for the lacking talent, et cetera. We'll have to see, of course. But right now -- affable and kindly though he may be (and he is; Miller's a great guy) -- Miller is one representative of some of the worst-luck decisions the Heat franchise made in the last decade, and that's not a look that suits him well. Alas.

• • •

Follow _Tony Parker on Twitter at __@tp9network.___

For today's Tony Parker capsule, it took me a while to figure out how to say exactly what I was looking for. Full disclosure: I'm not Parker's biggest fan. I wouldn't exactly say I'm a card-carrying member of the "TRADE TONY PARKER!" brigade, but I will say that I definitely don't appreciate Parker as much as I do a player like Tim Duncan or Manu Ginobili. On a personal level, I don't think it's at all unusual to prefer both of them to Parker -- but on both an aesthetic and a productive level I prefer their play to his as well. Manu plays with this breakneck energy that Parker never has quite embodied, and Duncan's defense is (probably) my favorite thing to watch in the entire league. Parker is simply there, and although he certainly works his heart out against certain matchups, there's no sense with Parker that he's really laying bare the contents of his soul in order to win the game. And he's not THAT productive, statistically. But for the capsule I watched Parker more closely than I've ever watched him before, and watched a ton of backdated Spurs tapes in an effort to expand my frame of reference. And, as tends to happen with these larger capsules, I felt I gained a far greater appreciation for Parker's game than I had before I started. Perhaps that's all that Tony's critics need to do. Perhaps a lot of game tape and a more understanding eye is all a Parker-loving individual need prescribe for the hater in all our souls.

... or maybe he's just kind of a douchey French guy. I dunno, could be either.

Isn't it kind of funny that a point guard with such a conventional toolbox forms the basis of the Spurs' current offense? This isn't an insult -- just consider Tony Parker. No, he doesn't have a three point shot. Yet. But Parker is, at his core, a pick and roll point guard with a strong slashing ability, an excellent floater, and a decent midrange shot to keep defenders honest. Parker's archetype is hardly one without compare in the league's annals -- look at Andre Miller for a modern example. It's a well-worn, conventional toolbox. Parker puts it in a blender with his unique blend of speed and control, it's true, and Parker's finishing may be among the best in the history of the game from the guard position. Which is what makes the trade-bait stuff a bit too wild for my tastes. But nobody is going to argue that Parker plies his trade with a surfeit of insane athleticism or game-breaking shooting talent. We've come to expect this in this generation of point guards, and Parker subsists without.

For more on Tony Parker, visit his Player Capsule (Plus) at 48 Minutes of Hell.

• • •

Follow _Andrew Bynum on MySpace to discover that he was a hilariously normal high schooler._

One of the more interesting questions of the season -- and one that looks to be regrettably delayed -- is the simple question of whether Andrew Bynum is going to be better or worse in Philadelphia. It's not as easy to answer as one would think. There's a natural inclination to assume that Bynum, a highly efficient offensive center who played a tiny bit better with Kobe off the court, will be better in a starring role. Perhaps a bit more inefficient, as per the usage-efficiency tradeoff, but a more prolific scorer with his customarily dominant rebounding. Theoretically. But the Bynum question is more complex than that. Bynum was great with Kobe off the court in Los Angeles, but the majority of Bynum's non-Kobe minutes came with Gasol on the court. This helped grease along the ongoing development of their pet two-man passing game, one of the more enjoyable Laker hook-ups of recent memory. Of Bynum's 103 assists last season, 35% of them went to Pau Gasol buckets -- similarly, of Gasol's 279 assists, 25% of them went to Bynum buckets! They passed to each other beautifully, and Gasol's expert passing helped Bynum flash past pesky double-teams and convert a heck of a lot more wide open baskets than a man his size had any reason to get.

This isn't to say that he didn't face doubles -- for large stretches of Bynum's tenure as a Laker, Bynum faced more doubles than Kobe Bryant did. He was the Lakers' most efficient and most effective option, which led many of the smarter teams to double him viciously. Unfortunately for his new team, when Bynum was doubled in Los Angeles, it tended to work. Last season, Andrew Bynum was faced with 250 double teams in the post. He turned the ball over on 62 of them; 25% of the time. To contextualize how bad this is relative to Bynum's norm, realize that among all possessions where Bynum wasn't double teamed in the post, he turned the ball over only 10% of the time. Huuuge gap. Bynum was doubled quite a lot in Los Angeles, and it's a testament to his efficiency elsewhere on the court that he was still such an incredible offensive big man. The big problem lies in the fact that Bynum, despite his many skills, is one of the worst ballhandlers in the league. Whenever Bynum needs to take more than 2 or 3 dribbles in the post, awful things happen. He's lumbering, and he telegraphs his motions far too much -- with even the most cursory of scouting, it's relatively easy to tell what Bynum's going to do when he has to make a move in the post. Beckley Mason went over it aptly: a banging shuffle baseline, totally overlook the incoming double, spin to the middle, and... turn the ball over. A lot, as the tape indicates.

So, how is Andrew Bynum going to acquit himself in Philadelphia? I'm not entirely sure. His rebounding should be welcome addition to this Sixers team -- he's been among the best rebounders in the entire league over the last two seasons, and last year's Philadelphia team was already excellent on the boards. With Bynum improving their team rebounding, they could very well be best-in-class at rebounding other team's misses and keeping the opposing offense to a single possession. Which should in turn help their defense set. He draws a ton of free throws, which should help the Sixers generate more points from the line than they used to. But he's going to find himself doubled quite a bit more in Philadelphia than he did in Los Angeles, which is a pretty bad state of affairs for the efficiency of his offense -- he may still put up misleadingly high field goal percentages, but with a menu of more double teams, expect his turnover rate to skyrocket and provide harm the Sixers' league-best turnover rate from last season. And then there's the defense. One of the staples of Philadelphia's defensive attack last season was the infectious effort Collins got from all his players. Bynum isn't a bad defender, but his effort level on the defensive end is consistently pretty poor, and while he tends to be a decent defender despite that, it's an open question to wonder whether Bynum's laissez-faire paint protection isn't going to clash a bit with Collins' high intensity style.

Still, all of this is pretty theoretical. We don't know exactly how this is going to play out, and I for one can't want to see how it turns out -- Bynum is a relatively excellent player despite his myriad flaws, and while the pressure of starring for a team may exacerbate many of them, figuring out what of his skillset properly translates and what doesn't is going to be about as interesting an experiment as the Harden-to-Houston shocker. None of this is to say that I like Andrew Bynum. I don't. To me, Bynum is more defined by his bush-league hits (see: this, this, or this!) than his quality play. He doesn't seem to care about that, either -- he personally thought the Barea hit "wasn't a big deal." Compound that with his outward refusal to work on his game (and his general disinterest in the game of basketball in general), and you don't really have the blueprint for a player I like on a personal level. I do admit -- his off-court focus on tinkering and electronics is absolutely wonderful, and if you've never read about it, you need to click this right now. One of the coolest little sub-stories of any NBA star. If he was a bit less focused on murdering the opposing team's players I'd probably like him a lot more. Then again... the dude builds state-of-the art computers, gets paid tens of millions of dollars to play a game he doesn't care deeply about, and parties at playboy mansion. Sincerely doubt Bynum gives a crap about what you or I think of him. Just a hunch.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Props to Greg for being the first to figure out Miller to complete the trio, and props as well to Der_K, Jacob Harmon, Geezer, and Okman for hitching to the right bandwagon (albeit lesser props.)

• Player #256's team has one of the deepest big man rotations in the league, but he's the starter for now. Kind of funny, because most people could pick him up in the last round of fantasy -- essentially nobody wanted to draft him.
• Player #257 is the best player on his team right now. His team is much-discussed. I've seen -- quite literally -- ZERO articles about him at this point. Only best-player-on-his-team who never gets discussed? Perhaps.
• Player #258 has swag. Unfortunately, he has very little else. At least he can shoot threes. Honestly can't believe his team let his predecessor go only to pay this guy the same amount.

Hope you enjoyed today's capsules. This Wednesday, I'll be attempting to post up two sets of these things. Need to get ahead if I want to keep to my Christmas Eve schedule. Fingers crossed.

• • •

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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Alan Anderson, Metta World Peace, and Chris Singleton.

• • •

Follow Alan Anderson by traveling the world.

Last year, Alan Anderson made an intensely surprising comeback. An undrafted player out of Michigan State (who made the Final Four in his senior season, way back when in 2005), Anderson went undrafted and was picked up on a minimum deal by the Charlotte Bobcats during the 2006 season. They waived him one month into the 2007 season, and after a season of excellent play in the D-League (with a few more Bobcats call-ups tacked on at the end of the year), Anderson went abroad in an effort to get guaranteed money and legitimate playing time. He flipped, over the next 5 years, almost interchangeably between the D-League and Europe -- played for six different European clubs, and three different D-League teams. Finally, last season, he got the second chance he wanted -- the Raptors brought him up, he earned Coach Casey's trust, and was picked up for both the rest of the 2012 season and the 2013 season as well. By the end of last year, he was actually starting over James Johnson. It was pretty wild.

As for his upside? Minimal, but that's A-OK. Turned 30 years old a few weeks ago, actually -- what you see is essentially what you get. But he looked quite good in last year's 17 games. Definitely NBA-caliber, if nothing else; there's a reason they traded James Johnson. Anderson was quite effective from both beyond the arc and the free throw line, canning nearly 40% of his three point shots despite taking only about a third of his shots from the corner. His defense was also very effective -- he's a rugged, in-your-face defender that combines a veteran sensibility borne of his years abroad with NBA-level athleticism and Izzo-developed guile. Sticks to his man well, and while his age may lead to a quicker-than-expected decline on that end, you have to like a player who's as good at cutting off the offensive player's breathing room as Anderson is. He doesn't necessarily disrupt every passing lane, but he does make it virtually impossible for his man to get open enough to receive a pass, which generally leads teams to try and avoid whatever wing option he's guarding when he's on the floor. He certainly has his downsides -- last year he put up one of the highest turnover rates in the year and generally puts up poor rebounding and assist numbers -- but if his role is better-regulated to serve as a defensive asset who keeps to spot-up shots on offense rather than an offensive creator who happens to play defense, he'll be a perfectly fine member of the Toronto rotation.

Off the court, Anderson has some of the most interesting stories in the league. As a veteran of the European circuit, he has a litany of firsthand stories from some of the strangest leagues on Earth. And some of the most violent fans, too. Even though there are metal detectors to make sure European fans can't throw lighters at the players, the fans are resourceful -- according to Anderson, fans would regularly dismantle the arena toilets and throw the toilet's component pieces at the opposing team's players to heckle. Another funny story from that neat article: in China, Anderson felt completely unsafe eating anything but fast food. I also recently had a chance to read a great profile from Eric Koreen, for his "Get to know a Raptor" series. You can find it here. In case you don't get a chance to read it, though, here's my favorite part. Another player I love personally (although his game is significantly more lacking), Landry Fields, comes along in the middle of the interview and completely stops the proceedings to grab Anderson's arm.

(Landry Fields grabs Anderson’s arm when walking by)
AA: What is wrong with you? What are you doing? Who is this guy?
LF: Did you know it’s your birthday tomorrow?
AA: Ahhh. Is it?
LF: Shut up.
AA: Is it? It’s my birthday?
LF: Yeah.
AA [lying]: No it’s not. My birthday is next month.
LF: I have it marked on my calendar with a heart.

Me too, Landry. Gonna circle October 16th in a heart going forward. Aw yeah.

Also, speaking of... Alberto? 223 days left.

• • •

_Follow Metta World Peace on Twitter at __@MettaWorldPeace .___

NOTE: I have trouble referring to him as "Metta World Peace", so I think I'll just call him Ron Artest in this post. Sorry, Metta.

By the end of the 2011 season, Ron Artest was on top of the world. He'd posted -- by all accounts -- one of the best off-court years of his life. He'd won a title, which had quelled a great number of his haters and began to re-write the book on Artest's off-court extracurriculars. He'd raffled his championship ring to raise over half a million dollars for mental health awareness, becoming one of the NBA's most outspoken advocates for the mentally unstable. His rehabilitation was so thorough that he ended up winning the Walter J. Kennedy citizenship award -- the suggestion that he'd eventually win the NBA's prime citizenship award would've gotten you laughed out of a room in the years after the Brawl, and most would've never seen a year like that coming. Then, in 2012? Well... things got a bit weird. His on-court play declined dramatically, as he quickly became the Lakers' 3nd or 4th best option at the wing on a team that was anything but deep. His mental health advocacy became a bit more quiet -- or, perhaps more accurately, it wasn't in quite as press-friendly a presentation. His reputation began a slow crawl back to where it was before the title. And then? Well, then he nearly broke James Harden's neck. That essentially erased the whole slate, and suddenly, Artest was right back where he started. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

There are a few troubling tics that maintain in Artest's public reputation that bug me. Quite a bit. The first is the idea that Artest's mental illness was "cured" by the time he won his title, or that it had been altogether transmuted into some more palatable form. That's... not really how mental illness works, at least not usually. Take it from personal experience. Mental illness is less something you conquer and more something you tame. It doesn't vanish -- it lies in wait, and it enacts a constant struggle inside your subconscious in its attempts to break out from whatever cage you've put it in. The mass public understands that cancer goes into remission. Why don't they understand that mental illness is the same way? You don't just wake up one day without your depression or without your bipolar disorder. You tame your disease with medication, if you can. And you fight to make every day as absent a breakdown as you possibly can. But it never totally vanishes -- it's a disease in remission, not a disease cured. Most of the pop culture coverage of Artest in the aftermath of 2010 focused on Artest as a man forever changed, and a man who'd "conquered" his demons. That's not quite true -- he's a man who fought a courageous fight to get to where he was, but quite a bit more importantly, still fought it daily. There is no tapping out when you're battling a mental illness. And it doesn't stop fighting you, either.

While I suppose I should've expected it, the genuinely off-base positive coverage of Artest's mental disorders during the Lakers' high times led somewhat slowly into the far too negative coverage Artest got last year. People thought Artest had "cured" his disorders, which meant that when he did odd things, people either chalked it up to Artest being a big ol' weirdo or "not taking the team seriously." And then, near the end of the year, the other shoe dropped -- Artest purposefully threw an elbow that (given his strength) could've legitimately broken James Harden's neck. Suddenly, the slow drip of negative coverage turned into a flood. People called to ban him from the league. People wondered how such a threat to society could've possibly made the league in the first place. Et cetera, et cetera. And through it all, I just didn't really know what to say. Sure, Artest shouldn't have done it. It was an awful thing, and I thought he probably should've been suspended a few more games -- ESPECIALLY when he refused to apologize. But instead of screaming bloody murder about the sins of a man who's got a reasonable explanation, why not examine the context that made him such a villain in the first place? It isn't really his fault that the media chose to cover his title as though he'd recovered from all his past sins. It isn't really his fault that he will always battle mental lapses that none of us can fully understand.

Artest does not deserve to be excused of his faults because of his mental illness, at all -- during the rehabilitation stage, there was some element of that, and it wasn't deserved. But he hardly deserves to executed for them either -- he's not a threat to society purely by his own design. His virtues don't exist in the intensity of a black or a white -- he's a monochromatic gray, balancing between two poles but never quite reaching either side. Neither the media nor the general public deals well with shades of gray, but that's exactly how someone like Artest needs to be approached. He's no savior, but he's no criminal either. And treating him like either does a disservice to both Artest as a person and mental health as a broad subject.

As for his game, it's somewhat darkly befitting a player of his mental struggles. Much as with Delonte West, on the defensive end, Artest will have good games and Artest will have bad games. He'll put up fantastic nights of bltizkrieg stopping power that stack up to any defender in the league. He'll then follow that up with tepid, angry, and frustrated performances where he couldn't conceive of stopping a fly. His offense is a bit more consistent, but not in a good way -- he's a consistently abysmal offensive player, far too often taking completely unnecessary isolation possessions and trying to ballhandle when he has no good reason to do so. At this point in his career, Artest has barely got the lift to take a shot at the rim, let alone actually make one. He's not good in structured offense, because he rarely takes the time to really understand the structure he's been placed in... but he's even worse when given enough leeway to really hurt the team. So there's that. Artest should not be taking very many shots this season. He really shouldn't. And I stand by my general assertion from yesterday's riddles -- if by the end of the season Artest is continuing to take the number of nasty 5-10 second isolations that he has in the last two Laker games, that will be some sort of a sign that something will have gone terribly wrong with this Laker team. Terribly, terribly wrong. Just... let Nash handle the ball, Metta. Pretty please?

• • •

_Follow Chris Singleton on Twitter at __@C_SING31.___

The story is relatively simple for Singleton. For him to stick around in the league, he has to become a better offensive player. Simply has to. Last year's Wizards were not renown for offensive wizardry -- they were the 25th ranked offense in the league, and the reality was even uglier than it looked. No cohesion whatsoever, poor ball movement, poor sets. Most of the players on the team were inefficient in at least one sense. But very, very few were inefficient in as many ways as Chris Singleton. Singleton's field goal percentage was in the bottom 25% among all small forwards for every range of the court but three, where he barely passed the 50th percentile. To be explicit about it, I'll list them -- his rookie season, Chris Singleton shot 59% at the rim (average: 63%), 24% from 3-9 feet (34%), 26% from 10-15 feet (36%), and 31% from 16-23 feet (35%). He made up for some of that by shooting 34% from three, which was 5th on the Wizards. Still not GOOD, but he had some value that way. Make no mistake, though: Singleton was brutal on offense. Just about the only real skill he offered was the ability to make the corner three, but problematically, nobody on the Wizards roster seemed to be able to set him up from that range. He took just 40 corner threes to 87 above-the-break threes, despite shooting 38% from the corner but 33% outside of it. Net and net, though, Singleton's not a scorer nor is he expected to be. He's a defensive-minded guard with good fundamentals and a strong frame -- strong enough, in fact, that it has some wondering if he'd fit better in the frontcourt than the wings.

Count me as one who's not sure about that one, although there are some issues with him on the wing right now. Watching him, you can definitely see times when the offensive player got ahead of him at small forward. Too quick. He wasn't great at covering the quickest of the quick -- he struggled mightily trying to match the quickness and core strength of players like LeBron, Iguodala, and Carmelo. A lot of that can be chalked up to conditioning, though, especially in the context of the shortened lockout season and the subsequent lack of practice and training camp exposure to the NBA fitness grind. And while big men would be somewhat less quick, they'd be quite a bit stronger. The strength gap would be even worse. And Singleton was an actively poor rebounder as a wing, posting a well-below-average overall rebounding percentage for the position. He would need to work on that quite a lot to be anywhere close to an asset as a big man. Big men who can't rebound don't last long in this league. Questions of his true position notwithstanding, there were some fundamentally good signs for Mr. Singleton. By the numbers, the Wizards defended significantly better with Singleton on the court -- they gave up a lower field goal percentage, and allowed 6 points less per 100 possessions. He wasn't quite the stopper of an Iman Shumpert level, but he was more effective than he looked and was clearly not in the peak conditioning he'd show in the NBA. I'd like to see him defending after a summer filled with an NBA weight room -- I have a good feeling he's going to defend better this year, even if his offense continues to torpedo his playing time.

As for his off-court ventures? I liked Singleton at Florida State and I like Singleton now. A few fun facts about the promising defensive baller include the following: he's evidently quite a bit more honest about his performance with the media than many others, as when asked to self-grade his rookie season, Singleton didn't pull punches, grading himself a D for inconsistent play and promising he'd come back better. According to the awesome team at Truth About It, Singleton was engaging all year with the fans and seemed to legitimately enjoy it -- he signed autographs before almost every game, gave away game-worn shoes to Facebook fans, and never once turned down a picture request. He seems to get into his city, at least to some degree --when asked in the doldrums of the lockout about something that made him sad, he mentioned that the Cowboys had recently beaten the Redskins, and that he didn't like that because they "need more winning teams in D.C.", his Wizards included. Pretty dope line, especially given this answer from a personal Q&A session he did with his fans.

What is the reason behind wearing the number 31?
Both my grandfathers and my father (3) have passed away and I’m the only (1) left.

So, you try rooting against him. I sure as hell can't. Hope you feel better about this year's play, Chris.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Props to Geezer and @MillerNBA for yet another 3/3. Really need to up the difficulty, although I have a feeling today's are easier than I intended.

• Player #253 is dealing with back problems that I can barely even fathom. Kind of shocked he hasn't retired, although he's making so much money he probably couldn't rationalize it.
• Player #254 is average-or-below in just about everything but speed. In theory. In practice, though, he's maximized every iota of potential and become a full realization of all his highest hopes. Which is pretty phenomenal. #TeamDrake. Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).
• Player #255 is kind of capricious, sort of a jerk, and a bit socially awkward. But he loves building computers, and for that, I can't completely hate the foul-less wonder.

Long week. It's possible I actually don't get the Capsule (Plus) version of #254 out until next week, but we'll see. Hopefully I can power through my rough draft tonight before all of the night's action. Au revoir for now.

• • •

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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Amare Stoudemire, Eduardo Najera, and Ryan Gomes.

• • •

_Follow Amare Stoudemire on Twitter at __@Amareisreal.___

Pretty apt timing, I suppose. Oftentimes the vagaries of random distributions have me posting a capsule just before some brand-new story completely changes the game for that particular player. See: the fact that I posted a Capsule (Plus) on Harden not less than a week before he got traded. Timely! Today's the inverse, though -- Amare Stoudemire's final injury assessment dropped yesterday, and I'm in a unique position to discuss it in the frame of these capsules. Before I do, I'll start with an assessment of his game, where he was, and where he is. And I'll cop and say it now, to set the frame. In his prime, Amare was one of the best offensive big men in the history of the game. Not just "in the league", or "in his era" -- Prime Amare is among the very best offensive bigs in the history of the game. Just look at his 2008 season. Amare AVERAGED 25 points on just 15 shots a game. In just 34 minutes per game! Insanely good. Despite that heavy usage, Amare shot 59% from the field. That was good enough to slot him in as 5th in the entire league at field goal percentage. People might scoff, saying that his entire game was an at-rim cacophony of smashes and dunks.

Those people would be very, very wrong.

While most of his shots came at the rim (7/15), he took 8 shots per game outside the rim, and a significant percentage from each of the cardinal three distances (3-9 feet, 10-15 foot midrange, 15-23 foot long two). Amare Stoudemire -- that "rim-only" player -- made 48% from 3-9 feet, 51% from the true midrange, and 48% from 16-23 feet. Which would put him in the top 25% of ALL league players from every single one of those ranges, had he put those numbers up last year -- not just big men, although he'd probably be top 5% among all big men in each. Eldritch. While that was a moderately fluky season, in some ways, it was quite representative of Amare as a whole -- his offensive game didn't used to be completely one-sided (as it's now become), and he used to flourish as a pick-and-pop big man who was impossible to effectively guard. Give him the space to shoot? He'd fire, and kill you. Get too close? He'd drive past you and mutilate the rim. Play picture-perfect defense? He'd still have a 40-45% chance of making the dang shot. A barely sub-prime Steve Nash helped a lot, and the attention Shaq drew down low helped him keep his great start going as the season went on. Were the game played on offense alone, Amare would be a living legend.

Of course, it's not. And when the final book is written on Amare's career, any retelling that doesn't include fair mention of his defense is like a discussion of the history of the British empire written without mention of the empire's transgressions in conquest. It's the giant elephant in the room with Amare. And that's primarily because -- quite frankly -- it didn't have to be. One thing Knicks fans always complained to me about after the Amare signing was that I was being too harsh on Amare's defense. When he plays up to his potential, he's a great defender! Look at all these possessions! They'd point out individual moments of defensive brilliance, competency, and well-formed decisioning. And that's fine. But that's precisely the characteristic that makes Amare such a frustrating nut to crack on the defensive end. When Amare is focused, he's a relatively decent possession-by-possession defender. But his main issue isn't some constant drumbeat of awful defense -- Amare's main identifying factor on the defensive end is the "one possession on, two possessions off" concept. This describes the constant pattern where Amare will -- after every positive defensive possession, immediately follow the possession up with two absent absent possessions, getting lost and barely contesting even the most easily guarded of shots. It's so predictable, teams like the Spurs were able to leverage the mere expectation of Amare's poor possessions into a cohesive offensive strategy -- after Amare would have a good defensive possession, the Spurs would consistently make sure to dump the ball to Duncan and let him go to work on Amare. More often than not? Score the basket, with little delay.

Which leads to a rather interesting dichotomy. Amare had excellent defensive possessions, in his prime. Shot blocks out of nowhere that completely blew up a good opposing possession, excellent man defense, et cetera. But he'd always -- ALWAYS -- follow them up with so many awful ones that you never quite knew what the hell to think about his defense. It was like having a relief pitcher who was absolutely guaranteed to strike out the 1st man in the batting order, the 4th, and the 7th on a nightly basis... only to give up home runs to the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 8th and 9th. It didn't matter the quality of the hitters. He could be pitching to the best player in the entire league at the 4th spot, and he'd always strike them out. He could be pitching to a just-deceased 90-year-old with a whiffleball bat in the 9th spot. Homers! Homers! EVERYWHERE! How do you even scheme a player like that, defensively? D'Antoni had lots of trouble with Amare, but it wasn't really D'Antoni's fault -- there is absolutely no way to actually gameplan a competent defensive scheme around someone that contributes it in such a touch-and-go manner. You end up with a player whose offense is so phenomenally brilliant that he's be an all-time legend when it comes to scoring big men... but a player whose defense is so easy to break within-game, you can scarcely even imagine it.

Unfortunately, age and nagging injuries have by large margin sapped his game of that offense. The defensive incompetence is still there, with the exact same "on one, off two" construction that made him so easy to score on as a younger man. But the offensive bravado has waned, leaving him with but a bitter shell of the varied moves he used to have outside the basket. He can still finish -- kind of -- although his finishing has declined from "far and away best in class" to "semi-effective lumbering as though he's a broken-leg elephant" levels. He still finishes well, but he simply can't finish as often as he used to, and while his numbers are still very good (even last season, Amare was in the top 25% of all big men in at-rim percentage!) the share of his shot distribution these at-rim forays took up was less than ever before. He took 60% of his shots from outside the rim, and unfortunately, he looked completely awful doing it. Just an abysmal display of post moves, and his long jumper looks completely broken at this point. Massive hitch in his shot, massive problems getting the ball off quick enough to beat the defense, massive inefficiency. Rough news. Amare shot barely 33% from outside 10 feet, and to the neutral observer, that seemed positively charitable. Still, even as you combine this with his falling-off-a-cliff rebounding, I'm not sure Amare's absence really helps the Knicks in any forseeable way. Part of the point with the Knicks' elderly signings was that the team would have depth so long as the young pieces stayed on the court. We're now heading for a situation where Novak, Melo, Thomas, Sheed, and Camby have to play a combined 96 minutes a game in the frontcourt to cover for both Chandler and Amare. That's... not optimal, no.

Amare isn't great, anymore, and his offensive game's decline has made his defensive problems that much more prominent. But he's not the worst player in the world. He's still one of the better finishers at the rim, if you set him up in a good spot. He's still valuable if used in a situational role, and isn't allowed to dominate the ball. No, the Knicks shouldn't be running their offense through him. No, he's not a player you want to have a usage rate above 20 going forward. But if you used him situationally, much like you use Tyson Chandler's offense? You can still extract some value from Amare's game. And you can avoid playing a trio of 38+ big men over 25 minutes a night to cover for absences they don't have the capability to withstand. Yes, the Melo-at-PF experiment is a noble one -- and if it works out, it could save the Knicks season. But you can't really help but feel sorry for Amare at this point. The injuries are mounting and sapping his game far younger than anyone could've ever expected, and the entire situation screams "worst case scenario" -- there's no world where Knicks fans or the Knicks front office could've reasonably expected that Amare would look like this just two years into the contract. His game has been creeping to the point where he's now a more effective off-ball sixth man than an important starter on the team. And now he has to miss potentially two months of his season recovering from yet another surgery? Cripes. Amare is a classy, smart, and generally kind man. I wouldn't wish this kind of within-career hellstorm on anyone, and especially not anyone dealing with the New York media. So, while I've never been Amare's grandest fan... please get better, Amare. Hope you're back soon.

• • •

Follow _Eduardo Najera on Twitter at __@eduardo_najera.___

Yesterday I covered Jason Terry, a player I really dislike. Today, apparently, I need to write yet another one of these blasted things about a player I rather irrationally dislike. Thanks, random numbers! Today's player isn't a player I dislike for many emphatic reasons, though, like Terry -- with Terry, I can't stand him for all he is, and for how he composes and carries himself. All that stuff. I'm a hater in totality. "The hatingest hater who ever did was, I tell you what." Eduardo Najera, though? How could anyone hate Najera like that? I dislike him for a single, solitary moment. One instance, one fleeting second in the span of a long NBA career. Which is kind of funny, really -- off the court, I must confess, Najera seems like one of the good guys. Extremely smart player, one whose post-playing career looks to (potentially) make him a name to remember. He was recently hired as the head coach of the Texas Legends, the Mavericks' D-League affiliate. He'll also have part-ownership of the franchise and will consult closely with Del Harris -- as that article notes, that has the potential to be a very fortuitous relationship for Najera. Eleven of Del Harris' coaching assistants have made it as NBA coaches at some point in their coaching career. Najera's certainly smart enough for it, someday.

As the first player drafted out of Mexico in the history of the league, Najera acquitted himself reasonably well over his career. He was never a star by any means whatsoever, or even a particularly useful asset. But he had a few seasons of 6-and-6 type performance, and his defense was always semi-decent. A bit dirty, but semi-decent. Unfortunately for him, he suffered a barrage of injuries around the 2009 season that devastated his game. Unfortunately for the Nets, they'd just so happened to sign him to a 4-year $12 million dollar deal with no real way out directly before that happened. Which, by the way, was kind of funny -- he was coming off a 47% shooting season where he averaged just 10-7 per 36 minutes despite playing on an immensely fast-paced team. I realize 4/12 isn't THAT huge with the league as a frame of reference... but really? After that season? Four years. Boy, I don't know. Najera maintained in the league for four years after that, his contract a constant wheel-greasing piece in trade machinations all over the place. He bounced around, offering a milquetoast-style version of the game he used to happily peddle -- lots of semi-dirty screens, a lack of a real offensive skillset, and a decent locker room presence on generally losing teams. Solid, I suppose, though not quite what you're expecting on a 4 year $12 million dollar contract.

As for why I dislike him? This moment, from the 2010 playoffs, where Najera essentially tried to kill Manu Ginobili. ... OK, no, he didn't try to kill him. It was essentially a classic clothesline with a twist, though, and it was one of the dirtiest-looking hits I've seen in playoff basketball. The Mavs had already accidentally broken Manu's nose earlier in the series -- Najera decided to take it a step further by actively going for Manu's nose on the foul, but missing. He had to settle for grabbing Manu's neck as he dragged him out of the sky from a lightly-contested fastbreak layup attempt. It was nasty. Graydon Gordian once posited that the hard foul could be a thing of beauty. A singular moment of frustrated self-loathing, a gasping breath for air and a not-so-subtle way of admitting that a team simply can't hope to guard a player. Which is fine. And in that series, it was exactly what the foul represented -- Manu obliterated the Mavericks' defense for the entire game, and the foul represented the collective frustration of the Mavericks and their fans for styling on them to such a degree that only a broken nose and a hit to the neck would stop his onslaught.

... but my GOD man, did you really have to grab his neck____?

• • •

Follow _Ryan Gomes on Twitter at __@GotGomes.___

In the quietest amnesty waiver ever, the Clippers let go of Ryan Gomes this July. I say quietest because it's one of the first things I've come across in these capsules that I honestly do not remember happening. I watch NBA news voraciously, mind you, and I tend to think I'm pretty plugged in. Always on the Twitters, this one. But I somehow completely missed Gomes! Which is actually... kind of ironic, as my pal Jaryd would attest. In the first incarnation of these capsules, I tried to make sure I (at a bare minimum) covered the regular starting lineups of every team. Despite thinking I'd gotten them, I quickly realized that I had totally forgotten Gomes (the Clippers' regular starter in 2011), only remembering to write his capsule late in the game and adding 70 players to the original list primarily as cover for actually getting Gomes down. Also, fun fact -- although they don't look similar and their games are completely different, I constantly get Ryan Gomes and Randy Foye's names mixed up in my head. If I refer to him as Foye in this capsule (at the time I write this, I've had to correct the error 4 times already), now you know why. Anyway. The amnesty isn't altogether surprising, as Gomes was astonishingly bad last year. Let's put it in context -- in 2011, Gomes started 62 of the 76 games he played in. He averaged 28 minutes a game. His numbers declined a bit from his 2010 career highs, shooting 34% from three instead of 37% and drawing way fewer free throws. But he wasn't AWFUL, and he had a few uses. Decent rebounding from the wing, could occasionally put the ball into play, and virtually never turned the ball over. Replacement level.

Last season? Gomes played in just 32 of 66 games, and started two of them. He went from averaging 27.6 minutes a night to 13.3, almost out of nowhere. After making more than 70 three pointers a year over the last three years, Gomes made four in 2012. No, not per game. Four made threes. The entire season. On 29 attempts. That's... not good. He compounded that by shooting poorly from every other range as well, upping his turnovers, and lowering his foul rate even more. Gomes played extremely poorly last year, and given that, the amnesty isn't really surprising. Frankly, I'm more surprised that teams have been so reluctant to give him another shot. Gomes is dealing with chronic injuries that are sapping his game, and I totally understand not bringing him back on account of this. But the same could be said for Sasha Pavlovic, or Derek Fisher, or any number of crusty veteran reclamation projects that continue to get re-signed and given heavy burn. He turned 30 less than two months back, and most teams are A-OK giving a flyer on a wing in the 29-32 range so long as they aren't that far from their peak production. Gomes fits that bill, and while he's dealing with some injuries, he's not that far off from his peak. I can't say I think he'd be a great player if they brought him back, just somewhat surprising that nobody's taken a flyer yet. Perhaps teams are learning.

... Or, like me, they continually forget that Gomes exists at all. Doh!

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Props to J, Geezer, Sir Thursday, and @MillerNBA for their expert guessing.

• Player #250 shocked last year. Won't be quite as effective from three this year in (assuredly) more than 17 games, but my lord, this guy was better than anyone had any reason to expect.
• Last night was a good reminder. If multiple possessions a game end in a Player #251, his team is not doing it right.
• Player #252 was a decent defender, even as a rookie last season. But the offense REALLY needs some work.

Another day, another... something. If you happened to miss Dewey's excellent post on the problems with power rankings yesterday, I highly recommend checking that one out. Also, I did a short recap of the DAL/LAL nightcap for ESPN's Daily Dime, which you can see in the Around the Association column here. So check that out too, if you're in the mood.

• • •

You're reading your favorite basketball blog. Today (finally!) they've got some power rankings up. You scroll down the page with glee, and immediately searching for your favorite team. With horror, though -- 50 wins, ranked 10th? "No, this can't be!" you shout to the heavens. "Why?" The writer (that cad!) has a reasonable response: your best player is, in fact, injured for the opener. That will probably cost your team some games and slow down the development of your team's chemistry. Rough going. "Fair enough," you shrug and acknowledge. After all, this guy knows what he's doing. You move on with your day.

... but not before checking the rest of the list. Huge mistake. Because now you begin to notice that your favorite team's divisional rival is listed at 58 wins, even though their best player is also injured. What's the explanation? Well, this injury may be just as harmful, but at least it will force their uncreative coach into small ball lineups, which are eminently more effective with such a roster. You huff. You puff. And then you get mad. You state strongly to your computer screen a lot of uncomfortably valid objections:

• "But my coach is actually creative with lineups! Why should we expect a bad coach being forced into small ball be more effective than my coach who has been using small ball correctly since the days of Don Nelson in Dallas!"

• "Even if that's true, what happens when their short small ball lineup has to sub out for the 8th-12th spots in the rotation, because those are the only players left? Why is this kind of a forced situation, replete with borderline D-leaguers, remotely preferable to having 7-9 rotation-level players to choose from on any given night? Why is this kind of a forced situation better than my forced situation, considering mine doesn't substantially affect the minutes allocation for anyone beyond the 10th man?"

Most importantly:

• "Why does their team get the benefit of the broken-window fallacy while my team is presumed to take the full chemistry-and-efficiency loss right on the chin? What is up with this writer's pernicious, unstated double-standard?"

So your day went from a happy one to a sad one in about two minutes, and all the unfairness of life has come back to mystify you again. "Who's this human trashcan, and why does he like the __<EXPLETIVE DELETED> Los Angeles _Clippers so much?"_ you ask. You suppose sadly that there will be other articles that you'll read, someday, but never again will these articles be read by one so innocent as you before the reading. Weeks later, you remain an avid visitor to the site. Unfortunately, your visits are now tinged with pure spite and furious disdain instead of unbridled joy and the desire for knowledge and informed opinions. You leave vicious comments. You have officiallybecome a troll. This "Choose Your Own Adventure" story is complete.

How could this situation have been prevented?

• • •

Baroque Standards & the Rank Problems

One thing that surprised me a few years ago is that is that it's totally possible for me to improvise half-decent fugues and canons on my personal piano. Certainly nothing to write home about, in my case, but it was still surprising. I've been playing piano for quite a long time, but I'm no savant -- just a mediocre player. But I'd read and heard about all these elaborate fugues and thought "Wow, how could anyone be that brilliant, just to get started?". Well, it's not as hard as I thought. I sat down and tried it. Used some basic harmonic and rhythmic tricks to keep the piece driving, you know? Focus on the bass, focus on the themes, and put it together. Simple. The composers of the Baroque era had a few themes that they were able to get a handle on, a few short phrases, and then they'd set the metronome working and see what fit. They did it long enough and the structures grew at once more complex and more direct, over a few hundred years. It was a process.

• • •

The Door's Locked -- a New Way In

Power rankings are constructed to be easy to improvise and go down the list in a few sittings. You could design a half-credible flow chart as to how most people compose them. "Here's the top team in the league.", "Now who's worse?", "How much are they worse by?", "Did I miss a team?", etc. The point of power rankings and their structure is to quickly get something written about every team. It's a sports-writing gimmick, not that there's anything wrong with that. That problem with divisional rivals getting the baroque treatment? It's a totally valid concern. But it comes from the fact that no one can keep in their heads 30 teams and the subtle balances of power that something like an injury will affect. And it's a zero-sum season: You think the Spurs will win 55 games this season? Alright, but that also means there are 55 fewer wins up for grabs for the rest of the teams, 5 fewer available than for someone else predicting the Spurs win 50. No one has the entire schedule in their heads. No one knows the minor detail that the Warriors play the Suns first game of the season so an injury probably won't affect their win/loss record... or, if they do, no one can balance that detail with the schedules of the Spurs and Mavs and Lakers and Clippers, etc., and engineer the perfect mental model to explicate the subtle calculus of injuries and limited options and just plain unknowns that are so endemic to sports.

Power rankings offer a quick, elegant, reductive way out. Go team by team, and if you don't like it, change up some numbers. In a roundabout way, it's also the famous problem of stats vs. intuition. Not usually a strict "stats vs. eyes" debate as some would like to believe; instead, it's usually a debate between one person's pet set of statistics and interpretations versus another's pet set. You might be able to project that Eric Gordon is a better player than last season, yes. Valid qualitative observation. But how do you balance that with a lot of other shooting guards also getting better? How do you weigh the statistical effect of rule changes, like the rip-through-foul getting altered before last season? How do you take into account Gordon's changed role on a (vastly) changed team? How do you compare how his improvement affects his team to how other similar shooting guards will effect theirs? What about the risk of uncertainty - did you scout him last season? Did you document him last season? Even if you did -- how do you know it's not your eyes that changed? How do you know the stats he has put up so far mean the same thing they did last season?

This isn't necessarily to advocate for more statistics -- common interpretations of stats suffer similar problems. As soon as you pretend otherwise, as soon as you try to run without shoes in the winter, you start to stub your toes and feel the frostbite. SRS for Miami does not have the same meaning as SRS for Boston, even though the calculation is made the same way, even if you adjust for pace. They play a different way qualitatively, and SRS can't necessarily capture that, especially when you get down to the level of matchups. All SRS does is give you a good and immediate sense of a team's quality. So you make an internal decision. Is Miami better than their SRS? Is Boston better than theirs? Let's look at more stats! But then, infuriatingly, you're back where you started. And you're back to intuition, and looking at secondary and tertiary stats and trying to glean significance. "How bad will the Clippers (or Spurs) be at protecting the rim? Is this an epochal concern, or is it going to amount to 1 point per 100 possessions? Will teams plan to get to the rim more often, making it a much worse flaw than last year's stats suggest? Or are those stats already taking that into account?"

The point here is to recognize that when people (be they writers or fans or soulless statisticians [Ed. Note: Hey, I heard that.]) make these sorts of advanced projections about hundreds of unknown variables, these are the pitfalls. Baroque reasoning must become endemic to how we approach dealing with a lot of data. We need to realize that self-consistent stats tables on the one hand and (totally baroque) presentations like power rankings don't offer a way out. They offer a way in, for writers to check the thermostat while setting it until the room feels comfortable. We all know that setting the thermostat doesn't mean everyone else in the room will be comfortable. It's a complicated problem and instead of admitting that we are cosmically adrift trying to make sense of an unknowable problem, we still want to boldly insist that we know the standings of the West in five months, or that the only unknowns relevant to our prediction are simple, bite-sized factoids like whether Manu will be healthy in March.

You may be totally right about the Clippers being worse than those power rankings suggest. Or you simply may be right that self-consistency is missing from the rankings -- but try doing the power rankings yourself. You'll find them exceedingly easy to begin, and then, if you're already this kind of a daring soul, you'll end up where all of us end up in the land of power rankings: going absolutely nuts trying to get them right and perfectly balanced. Eventually you'll settle on some sort of mind-shattering movie set to Bach as you indifferently hit "Publish," sending the rankings for all the world to see, as though your mouse is the trigger of a gun. You know not how much fury you'll cause to your readers, and then you'll laugh yourself to a restless sleep. You wake up in a cold sweat, wishing to God you'd ranked the Clippers lower. I mean, after all. Your ranking is based on Lamar Odom being healthy and willing to play 20+ mpg, and Ryan Hollins being an asset, and 40 year old players providing serious contributions, and just this huge myriad of --

... I mean, seriously, it's just not happening. Sorry.

As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with James Johnson, Jason Terry, and John Lucas.

• • •

Follow James Johnson by becoming an undefeated kickboxer.

If you haven't drafted your fantasy basketball team yet, I have a super hot tip for you. Super hot, fresh off the presses. James Johnson is a solid player to have in fantasy. For real. He hurts your percentages a bit -- the shooting is poor, with bad three point conversion and a sub-par free throw percentage. And he doesn't tend to put up 30 minutes a game, for good reason. But he's extraordinarily effective at the tertiary stats -- Johnson proudly puts up best-in-class per-minute numbers for both steals and blocks, and features above average assist and rebounding rates for his position. He turns the ball over an incomprehensibly large amount, but not all leagues even pay attention to turnovers. And in most category leagues, a player that puts up tertiary statistics in the oft-forgotten categories like Johnson can end up being one of the most valuable fantasy players around. In leagues where people don't know a ton about fantasy sports, he can be extremely useful simply because he's incredibly nondescript and can be had in a relatively late round without anyone ever realizing he's a good get. Sneaky, folks. Very sneaky. Oh, don't you worry. I'll make sure to give more hot fantasy tips after all your drafts are done and gone next year, too. You're welcome.

I mention his fantasy chops primarily because, in my opinion, those are basically the most valuable of all chops present. I don't really love Johnson as a player outside of his fantasy value. Yet -- he has the potential to get better. Johnson tends to take a lot of extremely bad long-two-point shots that tank his percentages across the board, and diminish his offensive usefulness. He takes a lot of shots at the rim -- above the position average, in fact -- but last season converted on a below-average proportion of those at-rim shots and doesn't have any particular talent for finishing at the rim, except when he's matched on much smaller players. (In other words, when he's not playing out of position at the large forward.) He's decent at the dunk, but no artist like Demar DeRozan or power slammer like Chandler or Howard. Still, that wouldn't matter quite so much if his offensive game had any real polish outside of 3 feet -- merely average shooting outside that range combined with his usual 55-58% showings at the rim would average out to a well-above-par offensive player. Unfortunately, he isn't at par or anywhere close -- he was below the small forward average from every range outside of 9 feet, often by quite a lot. And, again, way too many long two pointers -- almost 30% of his shots last season came from 15-23 feet, which is absurd and quite unnecessary.

Defensively, he's no perimeter stopper (yet) but he's a useful fellow to have in your corner. Doesn't necessarily have the quickness to get around screens efficiently or the nimble footing needed to individually check quick wings. But he's got a lot of size, and he has the ability to absolutely overwhelm smaller players who attempt to post him up. He tends to focus more on getting the steal or the block than I'd like, and while he's a good weakside shot blocker, at his position I'd rather have a guy who goes one on one and gives strong contests than someone like Johnson who tends to cherry pick and go after the average statistical metrics. His defense didn't really impact the Toronto system much, a sign of both how oddly underutilized he is as a power forward and how effective Casey's system was at generating incredible defense even without his best defensive wing on the floor. Still, his defense is helpful to a team who's generally defenseless, so his presence should be much appreciated by the Kings -- there were very few positive defensive players on the Kings last year, and in Johnson, they finally have one with some positive skills. And the potential to get a lot better, if he works on his focus when defending individual players and develops a bit more quickness. He could be a shut-down defender someday if he could just focus his stat-grabbing powers into the things that really make defenders excel. He's got the body for it, and he could carve out a more effective career as a role player if he did it.

Off the court? Kickboxer from a family of martial artists. Went 20-0 professionally. Don't mess with James Johnson.

• • •

_Follow Jason Terry on Twitter at __@jasonterry31.___

At some point, people who dislike Jason Terry -- myself included -- need to step back and simply start appreciating his production. And let's get this straight now -- I am no fan of Terry's. I think he's bombastic, self-obsessed, and preening. He needs to realize, at some point, that he is not an airplane. That is not him. He is not such an object. He is a man, and men cannot fly -- for they lack the wings and aerodynamically functional curves required to do so. No, Terry is not a plane, nor an NBA superstar. He has an irrational amount of self-confidence, and a frankly somewhat incredible ability to spin anything said about his play or his team's chances as a terrible insult. He's one of those guys who you may like on your team -- perhaps -- but who you absolutely despise playing against. And that's all, to some extent, to his credit. Even if it makes me dislike him.

But you know what? He probably was underrated in #NBARank, and in a general sense, Terry is of inconceivably low repute to a vast majority of the NBA's fans. And it makes no sense to me. Last season, Terry was the 5th best shooting guard in the NBA. Really. There were the obvious betters -- Kobe, Wade, Harden, Manu -- and you could make a reasonable case that Joe Johnson was better. Beyond those five? Nobody. Not a one. If you count Iguodala a shooting guard, he's better too -- but that's about it. You have to imagine that anyone else with his statistical resume last season in Los Angeles or New York would have gotten quite a bit more hype for it.

• Jason Terry shot an above average percentage from every single range of the floor, despite being assisted on less than 50% of his shots. (The average NBA shooting guard was assisted on 60% of their shots last season -- Ray Allen was assisted on over 75% of his.) There were few real flaws to Terry's offensive game -- he didn't get to the rim as much as he used to, and he drew fewer free throws, but he improved his jumper's accuracy to compensate and had a good year passing.

• Speaking of the passing, Terry's passing has been chronically underrated throughout his career. He's a gunner, but he's not one who never passes -- for his career he's posted an assist percentage around 25%, meaning that while Terry is on the floor, he assists on 25% of all field goals made. That's... actually quite good for a shooting guard, and in his late career, he's kept to roughly similar numbers. Turns the ball over a bit more than one would perhaps hope, but given his above-average assist rate, it's nothing phenomenally concerning -- he often acts as a pseudo-point when he's playing without a point guard, and that does tend to inflate one's turnover rate.

• He did all of this at the age of 34, well past his prime. He played over 30 minutes a night and missed only three games across the entire season. John Hollinger aptly described Terry as "the Ageless Wonder", and I have to agree. Let me put it this way -- in 2010, after Terry's objectively terrible playoffs, I had a sneaking suspicion that he'd be out of the rotation in favor of Rodrigue Beaubois in a year's time. Two years later, he's still one of the 5 or 6 best players at his position in the entire league. Eldritch.

No surprise, then -- I think Boston's switch from Ray Allen to Jason Terry is actually a pretty massive win for them. I don't know how much longer Terry's going to be able to continue putting up numbers like this, but I'm through with assuming he's got one foot out the door. The Boston offense should improve a decent amount with a player like Terry putting up 30 minutes of self-contained, efficient scoring. Terry is hardly dependent on the pieces around him to pass him the ball in exactly the right situation -- Allen was. The movement will help. I'm of the view that fewer minutes for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in favor of Brandon Bass and Jeff Green (as well as Avery Bradley being out or hobbling for 2-3 months) is going to completely cancel out the Allen upgrade. But that's just it -- Allen to Terry isn't a lateral move, as most seem to imply. It's a legitimate upgrade. At least for this season. It's possible that Terry finally begins to show his age. He will, at some point in this Celtics contract. But this season alone? Rondo's passing and Doc's crisp rotations should keep him as fresh (and annoying) as ever.

• • •

_Follow John Lucas on Twitter at __@Luke1luk.___

It's a constant refrain, here in the capsules. Per-minute productivity doesn't mean the player's necessarily a lock to be a decent player, nor does it necessarily translate to larger minutes. There's a general reason why this is true, one that's relatively less understood than it should be in sporting circles. So, let's try to explain it. Say we have a player -- call him George. George plays around 10 minutes a night... usually. He's one of two backups to a team's treasured star -- call him Geraldo. Let's say Geraldo is injured, and will be out for 7 or 8 games. How will George's minutes increase? Well, it's actually extremely unpredictable -- because there are two options, while we know his minutes will increase, we don't really know the magnitude of the jump. And that's primarily because if George is playing and he's put in 15 or so crummy minutes, the coach isn't just going to leave George on the court -- he'll play the other backup primary burn and relegate George to spot minutes. So, even in the presence of high-value playing time, George isn't necessarily going to play all of it -- he's going to play when he's good and sit when he's bad. Conversely, if he has 15 high-value minutes, chances are high George will double or triple his usual playing time -- the time is available, in theory, but it will likely only be extended to him if he's having a good game.

What I just described is the primary reason a backup who's generally average can end up with shockingly good statistics. If a player plays 5-10 minutes a night, a few outlier high-burn nights can skew the averages considerably. And with these kinds of players, high-burn nights simply don't happen unless the player is having a good night in the first place. Whether they found a good matchup, woke up on the right side of the bed, ate their Wheaties, etc -- games where fringe-ish players end up with 20-30 minutes tend to be games where the player is going supernova. Let's use last season's performance by John Lucas as an example. In his five top performances in minutes played, he accrued 156 minutes -- that calculates out to about 20% of the minutes he played in the entire season. In just five games. Were his minutes evenly distributed, we'd expect a five game sample to comprise 10% of his minutes played. How does this disparity translate to points? Well, he scored 109 points in these five games. He only scored 369 points in the season overall, meaning that in just five games, Lucas provided almost 30% of the points he scored in 2012. Consider: Lucas played fewer than 9 minutes in more than a third of his games this season. When you're dealing with such a low baseline, you end up giving a huge relative weight to these (fundamentally) skewed values.

This can have a rather outsized impact on raw averages -- in the field of statistics, this is a situation where an analyst would generally want to see the overall distance between the median and the mean and start to build intuition about why, exactly, they're so different. Then, potentially, take a long hard look at using the median as the descriptive statistic of choice. Despite being an extremely small sample, these five nights make up 30% of his scoring output. And it's a biased sample, too! If Lucas was having a poor night, he would've been promptly yanked. Which goes back to my original point -- high-minute nights for bit players are fundamentally biased samples, but they have a fundamentally higher impact on a player's averages. Ever wondered why some guy who performs like a scrub in all but a few random games every year has stats befitting an average, decent player? This general idea is your explanation. They get to overweight their best games in a way rotation players that have to play 30-35 minutes a night, off night or no, don't get to do. To sum it up -- if John Lucas goes 0-3, he'll be out at the next timeout. If Chris Bosh goes 0-3, he'll play 40 and have the chance to go 1-18.

All that said? John Lucas wasn't bad backup at all. Nor was any of this meant to imply he was. It IS meant to imply that stats are a bit useless without context when it comes time to assess where John Lucas fits in the game. The median trumps the mean, oftentimes, when it comes to assessing the value of players with skewed minutes distributions. That's the general point, not one about Lucas in particular -- I personally really like John Lucas as a guard off the bench. He's a good three point shooter, an aggressive scorer, and a decent ballhandler. He's quite undersized for a shooting guard, despite that being his natural position; no real point guard skills of note, although his size forces him to be matched with them. He had decent results as a defender by the numbers (adjusted +/- and Synergy), but watching tape, you can start to tell that less of his value comes from self-made defense than the general Chicago defensive schema Thibodeau put him in. Asik, Noah, and Gibson help out a lot, and cover for his size in a way he never quite got in his early career. He wasn't bad, per se -- used his quickness well, made the most out of the size he has, showed good ability to stay with guys laterally -- but his excellent defensive stats weren't necessarily something he caused more than something he lucked into with the help of the overall defense. Lucas turns 30 in less than a month, and he doesn't really have a ton of upside. But as a possible first-off-the-bench backup for Lowry in the event of a Calderon swap, the Raptors could do a lot worse. And this doesn't even cover Lucas as a person -- he's by all accounts an extraordinarily nice guy, and who's the feature of many heartwarming articles you can read if you want confirmation.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Mike L. got yesterday's riddles with a 3/3. (Although, I admit, Patrick... Derek Fisher would've been a great answer for the 2nd riddle as well.)

• Player #247 is constantly injured and doesn't fit with his team. Really needs to get his hops back. And come off the bench, too.
• Player #248 in 2010, was responsible for a huge bush league hit on Manu Ginobili in the playoffs. It infuriates me when thinking about it. Ugh.
• Player #249 was one of the quietest amnesties ever. I somehow didn't realize he was amnestied until preseason. He hasn't made it to a team... despite being barely 30 and having started 62 relatively decent games in 2011. "What. Really? What."

The season quite literally starts tonight. Lordy. I actually just got to a milestone of my own, here -- we're now officially 66% of the way through the capsules. Two thirds! The milestones will start going by a lot faster at this juncture, with the season as a backdrop to make time even quicker. Current projections of my end-date have the series, fittingly, wrapped up and tied with a bow on Christmas Eve. A nice gift. For now, enjoy the season's tidings. We'll have a general feature on Power Rankings up later today, as well -- hope you all enjoy it.

• • •

As our summer mainstay, Aaron's writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. Intent is to get you talking, thinking, and appreciating the myriad of wonderful folks who play in our favorite sports league. Today we continue with Elliot Williams, Andris Biedrins, and Kenneth Faried.

• • •

_Follow Elliot Williams on Twitter at __@ewill901.___

Elliot Williams looked pretty good last season. He didn't play an incredible amount of minutes, mind you -- he only played 24 games, and in those 24 games, he played only 6.2 minutes a night. And given that the game was virtually always decided when he stepped on the court, the defensive intensity Williams found himself faced with was regularly atrocious. But even given all those caveats? The man shot at an above-position-average percentage for every range but three, and shot an extremely efficient distribution besides, with almost 50% of his field goal attempts coming at the rim. Given what I saw of him in college and his general skillset, I think there's a lot of promise in his game, even if you try to extrapolate beyond the garbage time. He's never going to be a great three point shooter, no. At the NBA level, that hurts. But Williams has serious NBA athleticism, and above-average height from the guard position -- 6'5" is a bit under what he seemed the handful of times I met him at Duke. (The only reason I say this is because I'm 6'4" -- relative to my height, he seemed more like two inches taller than one.) To be fair, though, we were both in shoes and it's not like I've ever had my height accurately measured by the draftnik doctors. So, whatever. Even then, 6'5" is a solid height for a guard -- especially one who's viciously athletic, with a solid at-rim game and a decent midrange shot. His free throw form is good enough that I'd assess 75-80% to be closer to his true free throw mean than the 33% performance he put up last season.

Unfortunately, Williams has suffered greatly from a wealth of freak injuries. Out of seemingly nowhere, he's battled a range of problems that could end his career before it really began. His knees basically exploded prior to the 2011 season in a contact practice with the Blazers, requiring surgery on both kneecaps before he could see the court again. After a long period of rehabilitation, he re-entered the game late last season, and Williams' low minutes total was mostly attributed (reasonably) to the Blazers wanting to let him get gradually back into the game. Then, in a rough late March practice, ill omens struck again and Williams found himself sidelined with a dislocated shoulder. Quite gross. He missed the rest of the season, rehabilitated over the summer, and finally looked ready to play in the NBA... only to completely rupture his Achilles tendon in a workout right before the start of training camp. I mean, Christ. Really? He got surgery, and most likely, he'll be out the entire season. The whole thing is incredibly sad. These season-ending injuries have somehow all occurred to different body parts, indicating a player who lacks the sorts of foundational problems that tend to indicate an injury-prone player. He's like someone who won the worst lottery in the world, 3 years in a row. My heart goes out to Elliot.

Not just because of his skills, either. As for personally, Williams has always had my utmost respect. While he was beloved at Duke to a level incoherently high relative to his play, he left that and the university behind his last two seasons in order to transfer to Memphis in order to be closer to his cancer-stricken mother. Which I thought was pretty great of him -- he sacrificed few spots in his draft status, most likely, and he risked (at the time) having to redshirt a season before the NCAA approved a special waiver of the redshirt restriction on account of his mother's condition. Which would be heartwarming if it wasn't absolutely ridiculous that players need to redshirt a season in the first place. Not only do college athletes have no control over any portion of the money they generate for the school, nor any licensing rights over their own brands... there are also arbitrary restrictions in how they can move from team to team. Love the NCAA. Heck of a sports league, Brownie. In any event, his mother's breast cancer is in remission, which is absolutely wonderful. Here's hoping the cancer stays away and that Elliot gets another chance in the league -- you have to think he'd be a better backup than most of the awful wings the Blazers have stockpiled behind Matthews and Batum, right?

• • •

Follow Andris Biedrins by -- ... you know what, actually, just don't.

Anyone remember how good Andris Biedrins was a few years back? Let me remind you.

• In 2008, Andris Biedrins led the league in field goal percentage. But that's just one year. Try three -- from 2007-2009, Biedrins had one of the top 3 field goal percentages in the league each year.

• In the 2009 season, Biedrins put up per-36 averages of 14-13 with 2 assists, 2 blocks, and 2 steals a night. You can't make this stuff up.

• Andris Biedrins posted a career high free throw percentage of 62% in the 2008 season -- not great, but would've been average for an NBA center last season.

Yeah. Well, good thing he put up those excellent stats to remember him by. Because that's all we're doing now. Remembering, that is. In the past few seasons, Biedrins has fallen off the cliff-to-end-all-cliffs, and done so fast enough that we're still left wondering what the hell happened. It all started in 2010, when Biedrins had one of the worst starts to a season he could've possibly had -- it literally took a month for Biedrins to make his first free throw of the year, and by the all-star break, he'd gone an inconceivable 3-23 from the free throw line. This didn't hurt his broader offense... at first. It mostly was a source of amusement, as Biedrins continued to score efficiently. As he was coming off of injuries and not in the best of sorts, he took fewer field goals a night and his rebounding fell off from being among the best in the league to being a relatively average. But he didn't look like a bad player by any means, and he still looked like one that was genuinely worth his contract.

Then, in 2011, things got markedly worse. He tried to take a more active role in the offense again, but quickly discovered the obvious. If you shoot 16% on free throws in a season, as he did in 2010, you are going to get fouled and you're going to have to make opposing defenses at least pretend to respect your free throw form. So as the season went on and he began to get fouled at a higher rate, he began to go to increasingly absurd lengths to simply not get fouled. I'm talking ballerina twists, contorting his frame in C-shapes to miss the defender, immediately passing out if he had a post-up opportunity (leading to a career high assist rate! YEAH!), et cetera. He posted the worst rebound rates he'd put up since his sophomore season, his field goal percentage was (by far) a career worst, and he genuinely looked awful. Then 2012 happened... and he was even worse. His rebounding fell off a cliff, with Biedrins posting his worst rate ever by a country mile. His defense was abominable. His usage percentage -- never particularly high -- fell to the comically absurd rate of 5%. His free throw shooting actually ended up WORSE than 2010, with Biedrins making only one free throw the entire season for a free throw percentage of 11%. His confidence was shot, he absolutely refused to take shots (and in his off-ball movement, Biedrins actively fled angles he could have snagged a pass from and worked hard to keep himself from ever getting open), and the contorting and terror at the concept of free throws was obvious to anyone who watched him. It was sad. Although he's entering his 9th NBA season, Biedrins is exactly 366 days younger than Gustavo Ayon. He SHOULD be entering the prime of his career. Instead, he's a waiver candidate who looks unlikely to have more than a year or two of burn left in the NBA. A really weird career arc, to date.

Free throws and ruined games aside, Biedrins was responsible for the odd photographs that were -- for my money -- the most hilarious NBA story of the summer. I speak of course of the risque, absolutely not safe for work photos that depict Andris Biedrins both receiving oral sex in a car and watching in a garage as one of his friends receives the same. Don't click those photos if you're at work. Please. This isn't to say that the photos are funny all by themselves -- on their own, they're basically just your garden variety "dear lord, this athlete's 'friends' are terrible at being friends" type photographs. But look further, dear reader. Remember all the talk about his lacking confidence and his too-rapidly exploded game? I do as well, given that I wrote it less than a paragraph ago. Now, in that context, look at those photos. They depict a player on top of the world, probably hopped on something, and completely devoted to the pursuit of happiness. Er, sexually. In public. With his friends. One of whom has a camera. The brazen disregard for logic and reason here in pursuit of a fleeting high is absurd, and when you put it in the context of his disappointing basketball career and his completely broken confidence, is ABSOLUTELY hilarious. Somehow, we have a player who's scared to take a single free throw but not scared to receive oral sex in public and smoke up right next to his friend as he watches the friend receive it. From what looks like the same person.

I... what? For real, what? How can you be confident enough that these photos won't be posted that you do all of this grinning like an idiot but can't find the confidence in your heart to take and make a freaking FREE THROW? Luckily for Golden State, this came up right before the year they'll be trying to really compete. Because now, they actually know what to do with Biedrins! Marc Jackson needs to find out what drugs were in Andris Biedrins' system when these photos were taken. Have a private investigator do it, have Biedrins tell him straight up, whatever. Once he knows, though, he needs to begin enforcing a strict rule where Biedrins cannot step onto the court for the Warriors if he does not takes those same drugs before every game. Sure, having a high-out-of-his-mind Biedrins on the court will probably lead to some miscommunication. He MIGHT start humping the ball, or grinning and smoking in the middle of the stadium, or get Adam Morrison confused with the unknown girl in the pictures and try to solicit him for sex on an off-ball defensive possession. You know what? I don't care, and neither should Jackson! If that's the only way to bring back his confidence, then it's the only way to bring back his confidence. Where there's a will, there's a way! Andris Biedrins: 2013 comeback player of the year? TASTE THE FEVER! (Because you know he did.)

• • •

_Follow Kenneth Faried on Twitter at __@KennethFaried35.___

Last season's League Pass darling, Kenneth Faried is an interesting player with a lot of talent. Faried made a big impact last season -- he didn't play quite enough minutes to make leaderboard criteria, but Faried's overall rebounding percentage around 20% would've been top-3 in the entire league. His field goal percentage of 58.6% does sort of hide his offensive limitations -- namely, he can't buy a shot outside of 9 feet and every team in the NBA knows it -- but he actively avoided taking shots outside his range, and in doing that, Faried showed a lot more self-awareness and general knowledge of what worked for his game than many players ever realize in their careers. He took almost 90% of his shots from within 9 feet, which is exactly what you should be doing early in your career when you're a high energy finisher like Faried -- you don't mess with adding a long shot or developing a mid-range jumper. That's for practice, at least in your first year or two. Not competitive games. Outside his rebounding and his scoring, Faried isn't a hugely productive player -- he had an above average block/steal rate that hid a lot of his defensive problems, and an above average turnover rate for his position. His high-energy offense helped take Denver's already potent potables to an even higher level -- the Nuggets scored almost 108 points per 100 possessions with Faried on the court, which is legitimately insane, and almost 3 points above their average with Faried off the court.

Unfortunately, there's a dark side to that -- while their offense was completely off-the-chain with Faried on the floor, their defense was utterly abysmal. The Nuggets may have scored 107.5 points per 100 possessions with Faried on the floor, but they were also making opposing offenses look like Gods -- with Faried on the floor, they also allowed 107.1 points per 100. Which amounts to a barely-above-0.500 differential and a nagging problem to those who'd love to see Faried get more minutes. I'm sure Karl would like the same -- Karl's a fan of high-energy sparkplug-type players, as evinced by Chris Andersen's long tenure in Denver. The problem is, so long as Faried's defense is that bad, it's hard to really carve out more than 25-30 minutes a night for him. And this isn't a fundamentally trivial problem, either -- the reasons Faried is poor defensively (lacking height, lacking core strength, poor instincts) aren't just going to go away with practice. He can work on his strength, and that will come around, but the height trouble and his actively wrong instincts defending the pick and roll simply aren't going to vanish into the vastness of space. And even if he works on his strength -- high energy players like Faried do tend to have high foul rates. When you go for the ball with reckless abandon and produce incidental contact solely through your playing style, you're probably going to get called on it. That may serve to artificially compress his minutes in the future, as well.

This isn't to say he's a bad player, at all. He's really talented, and while his defense is pretty abysmal, he has some talents as a weakside shot-blocker (although, again, he took too many chances and was about as bad at holding position as I'd be at holding these capsules to 500 words apiece). His phenomenal talent for gobbling up boards -- especially offensively -- is going to be useful on a Denver team who may experience trouble stopping opposing possessions. His offense is strong, if a bit limited, and while teams may be able to scout his offense and decrease the general efficacy (see: his 53% shooting against Los Angeles in the playoffs), as long as he remains this active, he'll be a huge asset on that end. You know who Faried reminds me of, in a somewhat odd way? DeJuan Blair. People scoff at the comparison given how good Faried seems right now, but it's a lot more apt than many would like to admit. To compare them on the same baseline... per 36 minutes, Faried averaged 16-12-1-1-2 on 59% shooting. Blair averaged 15-13-2-1-1 on 56% shooting his rookie year -- he was a slightly more effective rebounder, a slightly worse scorer, and just about as shiftless and difficult-to-play defensively as Faried. He had his dominant nights -- and still does -- but Blair's height and talents are fundamentally not well-suited to the defensive end, and until he figures out a way to operate within a real defensive scheme, his flaws on that end going to continue to chip away at his minutes and keep him off the court. Even with excellent per-minute productivity, as Blair has maintained throughout his career. While I think Faried's future should be better than Blair's present, I think it's worth noting that Blair represents a very possible future if Faried's defense doesn't get in order quickly. He has a shot to be something special. He also has a shot to be DeJuan Blair v2.0 -- an above average offensive player whose sieve-like defense and relatively constrained role keep him from playing up to his per-36 averages. We'll have to wait and see to figure out exactly which end of the spectrum he lands on.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. JKim got an excellent 3/3 last Friday, amidst a few good guesses. Good work, mate.

• Player #244 is one of those small-name players who is excellent for a fantasy basketball team. Really gets you value in almost every stat category. In terms of actual NBA player value? Significantly less value.
• Player #245 is probably the single most despised player in the NBA by fans of the San Antonio Spurs. I've grown to not care about him, but rest assured, I once completely hated his guts.
• Player #246 played rather well at the point for a good team last year, but his minutes were scant and his promise for future playing time slim. Still, could be a decent player someday.

Hope everyone had a good weekend. If you missed all our great Friday content, go back and check it out! We had a lot of stuff celebrating our 1st birthday. Here's hoping Sandy doesn't threaten any of your livelihoods -- please be safe. Batten down the hatches, secure everything you can, and get to higher ground. The season starts tomorrow, folks -- stay safe, so you can start it with us.

• • •

Gothic Ginobili turns one today. As part of our celebration of this somewhat unexpected milestone, our writers are producing a variety of content reflecting and appreciating the journey that got us here. Here, our first added member to our extended staff waxes about his history with the blog and succinctly explains what makes writing under the iron fists of jerks like McGuire and Dewey even remotely tolerable!

One year ago today, the world didn't know much about Gothic Ginobili. (This was not surprising, as it had existed for less than 24 hours.) I was the editor of Fansided's main Suns blog at the time, Sun-N-Gun. I was trying to finish my first month strong, with increasingly insane, strangely written posts about the lockout. I didn't think I'd be where I am today, at least at the time. In fact, a part of me believed that I wouldn't even get to watch basketball until right about this time, this year.

A month later, the lockout ended. Two months later, the Suns played their first game of a season that would end up being Steve Nash's last. It was right about the start of the regular season that I realized regular, recap-grinding writing was a far more pressing constraint than I anticipated. As it turned out, I was (and still am) a terrible recap writer. So, if you by any chance wanted to mail me about a beat writer job for a Polish team, don't do it. After a few failed stabs at coherency, I resorted to grading players and giving notes. Why? I didn't know at the time, and I'm still not sure. Maybe it's because I pay too much attention to Marcin Gortat and Steve Nash. Or maybe because I don't treat basketball as a series of events, but merely a framework for discovering the people playing it, a weird, competitive social experiment of sorts. Whatever the case, two months into the regular season, I felt I couldn't really express whatever I felt about basketball on Sun-N-Gun. And so, I posted a random question on twitter of the "Yo, I'm bored writing just about the Suns, any general NBA blog want me?" sort, and Aaron and Alex answered my call.

To be honest, I didn't really read much of Gothic Ginobili before this. Mostly just scattered pieces Aaron linked me directly when we discussed basketball in between long sessions of swooning over King Crimson's "Red." Once I started flipping through, though, I was elated. With Aaron's work ethic, Alex's (positive) craziness, and their combined transcendent writing skills, I felt I was in the right place to hone my skills. I may have not done much, but I've had the opportunity to tell the stories I wanted to tell. The story of my nocturnal, basketball watching life is one, the story of my private family daytime soap being the other big one. The personal stuff. For the first time, I was putting myself into the framework, ridding myself of the fake mask of an unbiased blogger, and taking my own experiences into a weird (albeit fitting) context. It has been cathartic, it has been wonderful, and I just wish I had more time during last season to do it.

(And yes, that is a promise that I will be writing more, as if you didn't have enough of me already.)

So... I guess I have to thank Aaron and Alex for tolerating my writing-related shortcomings, my incessant overuse of parentheses, and all that other stuff. You guys are amazing. I can honestly say that being able to vote on ESPN's NBARank and Summer Forecast was one of the greatest moments of my life, and I can't say that I would've done it without this site. Meanwhile, I'm caught in a cruel twist of fate -- nearly a year after the lockout, precisely on the 1st anniversary of the blog that gave me so much, due to various problems with my mom's business (most of which I can't disclose, I wish I could), I might end up in a really bad situation, once again, through no fault of my own or my mother's.

But, hey. Whatever happens in next year's extended installment of Gothic Ginobili's absurdist reign over the odd, the offbeat, the outright strange -- I know one thing. I'll be able to talk about my troubles and trials here, put it in an odd context, and (eventually) have a catharsis. And that's what makes this experience great, for better or for worse. And with this, I end my rant, once again promising to actually deliver some content on a regular basis.

Let's just hope I'll have some ideas this time.

EDIT: This post was written on Tuesday. The problems? They seem to be resolved positively. I couldn't really talk about them, but I'm sure y'all would've supported me if I could, so, hey, thanks. Cheers. – Adam.