_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 contin_ue with Chris Duhon, Kawhi Leonard, and Joakim Noah.__

• • •

_Follow Chris Duhon on Twitter at __@CDuhonStandTall.___

I've got a game for you. It's fun, although perhaps a bit cruel. Go on twitter. If you don't have an account, get one. You can stop using it afterwards. Go around twitter and find a bunch of Knicks fans. Jared Dubin, the Knickerblogger guys, Dan Devine, my pal Wes, et cetera. Find them. Engage them in conversation. Discuss the finer points of basketball. Get some frozen yogurt. The finer things in life, you know. Become fast friends, and learn about why they're Knicks fans. Learn of their struggles, their triumphs, their woe. Truly internalize all of this, and realize that in the end we're all just wayward sport-obsessed souls with a penchant for exaggeration trying to one-up the other on an ever-spinning carousel of misery and disappointment. Eventually they will say something you find ridiculous -- whether it be a paean to Carmelo you don't understand, a statement of confidence in their team you don't get, or a statement about New York's mettle that makes no sense to anyone who doesn't live there. At this moment you will step back, crack your knuckles, and type out the following words.

"The New York Knicks paid Chris Duhon almost $12 million dollars to play the game of basketball." ... Okay, yep, so that's where this game becomes cruel. Sorry, Knicks fans. In truth, the only reason I'm bringing this exercise in a few cheap laughs up is the simple fact that there's virtually nothing else to talk about with Duhon at this point. His single fleeting moment of relevance in the past two years has been rooted to this incredible GIF. That's it. On the court, to say Duhon's been busted the last few years is to underrate things. He hasn't really looked like an NBA player in years, and while he had a decent season behind the arc this last year, I have my doubts he'll really extend that to next year. And the good season behind the arc was scarcely enough to override Duhon's other huge problems -- for one thing, he shot under 50% at the rim, which is remarkably bad even for a guard. Compound that with his turnovers and you have a problem -- Duhon is absolutely a turnover machine, and last year posted the 12th highest turnover rate in the entire league. The worst part about that? He played significantly more minutes than any of the players above him! It'd be one thing if he was some lock-down Gary Payton type on defense, but he's really not. He's a decently physical defender who can't really stay with quicker point guards (read: everyone but Jason Kidd) for more than 2 or 3 minutes a night, but does have the lateral mobility to bother guards-off-the-bench when he has the chance.

I've heard several people say that Duhon is important to the Lakers' title quest this season, and I agree. He's very important. The problem is that Duhon being important _is a really big problem_. He's a disgustingly bad offensive player and his defense (while situationally valuable) is completely undermined by his poor command of team offense and his weakness under even the most cursory of ball pressure. Despite that, with Nash at the point where he can't at all be counted on for more than 30 a night (and 28 might even be pushing it), that leaves 18-20 minutes without a point guard. Of the Lakers' pu pu platter of busted-down backup point guards, Duhon may very well be the best option. And knowing Mike Brown, he's certainly the one you can most expect Brown to trust -- Brown doesn't like young players much, and he always likes to play a solid defender over a solid offensive player when the players are of similar repute. Can a team win when they dominate by 20 to 30 points for 30 minutes a night and immediately hemorrhage the margin with their star point guard off the floor? Good question. As a teaching example, I'd point towards the other end of the floor with the Boston Celtics of last year's playoffs. Not with Rondo, no -- with Kevin Garnett. With Garnett on the floor, the Celtics absolutely obliterated the competition, allowing only 92 points per 100 possessions. With Garnett off? The Celtics allowed (and I swear to god this is not a typo) 118 points per 100 possessions. KIND OF A BIG DIFFERENCE. I could see a similar effect taking hold with Nash and the Laker offense in the playoffs in this upcoming season, simply because the Lakers' alternate options are so incredibly bad at the game of basketball.

• • •

_Follow Kawhi Leonard on Twitter at __@TheBig_Island.___

Today, I take some time out of my day at 48 Minutes of Hell to discuss Kawhi Leonard, expectations, and the role he plays on a philosophically adaptive offense like the San Antonio Spurs. Fans weren't really expecting Leonard to be the player he's manifested as, in more ways than one. Which leads to an interesting dichotomy -- fans are both excited for all the new things he's displayed and expectant that some of his still latent collegian talents will eventually develop into strong assets for his pro game as well. I'm one such fan. The thing I didn't touch on, and the one thing I probably should, is that this isn't necessarily how things are going to go. There's so much promise and potential here, it's easy to conflate the yet-to-happen with the things we've seen. We haven't seen proof Kawhi Leonard is going to be an excellent NBA defender yet. We've seen inklings, to whet our curiosity, but we haven't seen it definitively. Until we do, there's no guarantee it ever happens. But I take a more hopeful view with Leonard, perhaps because I like his game, perhaps because he's still so young. As one might note -- when the Spurs were eliminated in that soul-crushing Game 6 loss, Leonard couldn't legally drink. Imagine what he'll be with Artest's pet Henny!

Most people know that Kawhi is a great three point shooter. At least, he was one in the NBA -- it's worth noting (once again) that he was absolutely atrocious from behind the arc in college, hence why nobody expected he'd suddenly be good at it on the NBA level. One of the notable things that most people don't realize, though, is that Leonard isn't your everyday corner-bomber. While he takes a lot of threes from the corner, he also takes (and makes) more from above the arc than most would expect. In particular, in the 2012 NBA playoffs, Leonard shot 13 of his 40 three pointers from above the break. He made 7 -- 54%, for those counting. Yes, he took more corner threes -- 27 of his 40 threes were corner shots, but he doesn't only shoot corner shots. In fact, during his first regular season, he took far more above-the-break threes than corner three pointers, and his lack of hesitance with the shot is one of the reasons the Spurs offense moves so fluidly. It's easier to camp on the corners when you know for a fact every shooter makes their home there. When you have a shooter or two who regularly moves out and shoots on a dime or a break, the defense becomes that much more disoriented. There's that much more space they need to cover if they want to muffle your team. And while the Spurs use a lot of corner three pointers, with Neal and Leonard and Manu in the fold, the Spurs offense relies almost as much on effective use of wide open above-the-break threes.

For more on Kawhi Leonard, read today's Player Capsule (Plus) at 48 Minutes of Hell.

• • •

_Follow Joakim Noah on Twitter at __@JoakimNoah.___

You know, sometimes I wonder what to think about Joakim Noah. It's not that he's a bad player -- he's very good. But the ways his stats indicate he's good generally don't match 100% to the visual aesthetics of his game. You watch Noah and you get the sense that he's a sea-changing defensive presence, his limber body control and wide reach allowing him to get his hands on seemingly every possession he sits through on the defensive end. You watch him play and you imagine him on just about any other team in the league -- the Spurs, the Thunder, the Heat, the Nets -- and you imagine how amazing he could be as the crux of their defensive attack. He visually looks like that kind of a defender, at least in his ability to scout the point of attack on any individual possession and focus his efforts in to what viscerally looks like the most threatening offensive play the opposing team could run. His wingspan, his focus, and his monstrous talent at cleaning the glass are amazing (tangent: underrated fact about Noah -- he's one of the best rebounders in the NBA, and I have a feeling that he'd absolutely DESTROY the glass on a team where he wasn't next to Carlos Freakin' Boozer). He just feels defensively dominant.

And yet... the numbers haven't really backed that up for years. In fact, they've implied the opposite. Noah's on-and-off court numbers have indicated the last few years that the Bulls play markedly better defense when he's off the floor, INCLUDING the time he doesn't share with Carlos Boozer. Part of this is obvious. Asik and Gibson are the best bench big men in the NBA, and both would start on 20-25 teams in the league. Slotting them in against bench big men is not only hilarious, it's straight-up unfair. It's like Manu Ginobili or James Harden versus a bench shooting guard -- I mean, really, talk about an absurd mismatch. Of COURSE Asik and Gibson are going to lead to better results defensively -- they're playing worse competition. Except... this trend also extends to Noah's minutes versus bench players. And just in a general sense. It's really weird. But you know what's weirder? Joakim Noah -- the owner of one of the weirdest set-shots in the NBA, the player who has an effective field goal percentage well below the position average despite taking way fewer shots than most at his position do (and having a below-average percentage at the rim, which usually kills centers like him), the player who's usually among the first pieces mentioned when people bemoan the lack of offensive talent around Derrick Rose -- has consistently and markedly improved the Bulls offense over the past two years. Seriously. The on/off court numbers are relatively impressive, and this effect actually gets more pronounced when Derrick Rose is on the bench.

So, you might wonder. Why in God's name would that ever happen? Good question. There are a lot of useful things Noah brings to the table offensively, some of which are common knowledge and some of which aren't. First one: his free throw percentage is downright excellent for a starting center in the NBA, hovering in the mid 70s despite his odd looking release. Many defenses rely on fouling the center as a last-resort type "well, we can't defend your team, so let's make the center shoot a bunch of free throws." With Noah on the court it's impossible to really do that. Secondly, Noah's passing is absolutely brilliant, and while Noah rarely ends up with gaudy assist totals I wouldn't be surprised at all if he led the league in secondary hockey assists, or more specifically brilliant passes where he sets Rose up with two or three good offensive options through an excellent hockey-feed. He's a magnificent high-post setup man, and in a league where centers rarely have the quickness to steal, this can be invaluable to a functioning offense. Finally, the simple truth -- Noah seems to know every single person on the team. Watching him and the Bulls is fun, partly because he simply has great chemistry with just about everyone wearing the red and black. He knows their tendencies, their skills, their limitations. He sets great screens on the offensive end, and he's invaluable for getting Chicago's cavalcade of shooters open. Frankly, he just knows what everyone SHOULD doing on the offensive end, and he makes it happen. Which in turn makes him a more valuable asset for Chicago on the offensive end than he is on the defensive end, even if he's a better defensive player personally than he is an offensive player.

Off the court, Noah is the NBA's chillest bro, a man who I've heard from multiple sources "loves 4/20" and "is definitely up for chill time." He should live in the international house. (Shout out to the <15 people who will understand that joke.) I've heard several stories of people meeting Noah outside of the arena, and just about every one of them has been awesome. I'll cop to not necessarily being a huge fan of his, at least ever since his random slam on Cleveland straight out of nowhere, but the stories of how fun Noah is in real life do tend to assuage any concerns I have about him as a jerk. He seems to be a good-natured guy with a generally fun-to-watch game, an excellent sense of perspective, and a penchant for not-taking-himself-too-seriously. Good dude. Chicago fans should feel lucky they've locked this guy up for the price they did and the duration they did. He's a treasure, and the Noah-Rose core should continue to be a potent pairing well into this decade. Not bad for a guy who would've been a Knick if Isiah wasn't so hung up on getting Eddy Curry.

• • •

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. Congrats to Luke, the only one to get 3/3 on yesterday's riddles.

• It's sort of remarkable how poorly Player #178 has acquainted himself with the NBA. I realize his size is troubling, but he was so good in college you'd think he could've risen past it. Not so, alas.
• If there's anyone that's going to improve at the behest of Steve Nash in Los Angeles, it would be Player #179. They should put him alongside Nash as much as possible.
• Player #180 is another example of a player who in recent seasons has matched the Troy Murphy "instant falloff" archetype. His new team is still taking a risk on him, that's for sure.

Have a good day.

_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 Lester Hudson, Jimmer Fredette, and Marco Belinelli.__

• • •

_Follow Lester Hudson on Twitter at __@Lester26Hudson.___

The issue with Lester Hudson's game is, in my view, a personally warped perception of what he's actually good at. Seriously. I don't think there's a single scoring guard in the league with a more ridiculous shooting chart than that of Hudson -- strange decisions all around. Consider his time in Cleveland, which is by far the high point to his NBA career thus far. In those 13 games, Hudson converted a patently absurd 72% of his shots at the rim. That was the sixth best mark in the league among 20+ MPG guards. What's about as good is his close-in post-up game, where he had a few crafty moves to convert from close-but-not-too-close -- Hudson was well above his position average from 3-9 feet, with a solid 39% FG% from that range. So, you'd think he'd try to leverage that by taking a few more shots there, right? Try and get closer in? Run offensive sets to get closer to the basket? ... Nope! What a ridiculous notion! Hudson chose instead to backload his shots, which is insanely absurd when you actually take some time to examine his conversion percentages from that range. He took 64% of his field goals from behind 10 feet, shooting a positively blistering 27% on those shots. That's not a typo. He barely made 1 of 4! Yeesh.

This isn't to say he was an awful player with the Cavs, in his much ballyhooed rise to semi-prominence. In fact, Hudson's decent play did a relatively good job covering up one of the most incredible collapses of a team's defense I've ever seen -- while the second-half-of-the-season Cavs were absolutely rudderless on defense, most people don't quite understand how bad they were. I entreat you to take a look at how the Cavs defense performed with Hudson on the bench in his 13-game stint (second table on the page). Not only did Hudson's play drastically improve the Cavaliers' offense in the absence of Kyrie Irving, with Hudson on the floor, Cavaliers players actually seemed to give half a damn on defense again (with the singular exception of Antawn Jamison, who was still... well... Antawn Jamison) . They made some rotations, and Hudson's general energy and hustle helped lead the team into the promised land of "only being a bottom-10-of-the-season" defense rather than a "bottom-10-of-the-century" defense. Truly a hard-fought victory for Hudson fans. He did do a good job from that respect, though, and while he's a bad individual defender he does seem to have a semi-inspirational impact on teammates. So that's something.

Then there's Hudsanity (Ed. Note: Nevermind, sources say it was technically #LESTERIA), where you start to get into the funny, the awkward, and the silly. The idea behind Hudsanity was simple enough, I think. Try and capture in a bottle the same sort of magic that New York had with Linsanity, as a way to help cope with the fact that the Cleveland Cavaliers went from a fringe playoff team to a busted mess as soon as they realized Varejao was out for the season and Kyrie would be out for a while too. Simple problem, though. Hudson wasn't nearly as good, and although the front office was happy to profit off of and utilize the localized meme to their advantage, they clearly didn't have the same investment in Hudson's success as most Cavs fans did. Leading to one of the most hilariously awkward moments I've ever seen for a fanbase -- Cleveland fans having to uncomfortably stop the adulation after the front office completely unexpectedly refused to re-up Hudson on an end-of-the-season contract. One day, Cavs fans were writing long scribes about Hudson's potential as a change-of-pace bench point guard and the Cavaliers' bench mob leader of the future. The next day, they were chuckling uncomfortably as the Grizzlies signed him and wondering why the hell the front office didn't let him finish the string with the Cavs. How do you even respond to that, as a fan? No, Hudson isn't phenomenal, but he has a unique set of skills and (with the right training on how to use those skills) I could definitely see him as an end-of-rotation guy on a decent team. The decision not to re-up him doesn't actually matter in the macro level, or the aggregate -- he's a 28 year old whose lifetime NBA earnings probably won't surpass $1,000,000, with a questionable NBA-level skillset and a genuinely poor utilization of that skillset. But it was still a memorably awkward situation for Cleveland fans, and I know I'm not likely to forget it any time soon.

• • •

_Follow Jimmer Fredette on Twitter at __@jimmerfredette.___

Had I written this a year ago, I imagine a lot of people would've balked at the thought. Now, not so much. But I'm pretty sure Jimmer Fredette was the single most overhyped player in the last draft class. Fredette was bandied about as a game-changing shooting talent, whose unconscious stroke would make him an incredibly valuable piece going forward for the Kings. Needed to work the defense a bit, but a genuinely talented shooter who would finally give Tyreke Evans the shooters he needed to return to his rookie form. The great white hope. In hindsight? That expectation wasn't really fair to Fredette in the slightest, who absolutely was not in NBA shape when he first entered the league. Part of Fredette's problem his freshman season was conditioning -- at no point his rookie year did he really look the part of an NBA-fit player, and if you couldn't always tell on offense, you could virtually never miss it on defense. His defense was never going to be great, but most people didn't expect him to be THAT bad -- he simply couldn't stay with a soul or solve a rotation to save his life. It was tough, especially combined with his anemic rebounding and poor gambles. Fredette became, to some degree, a player whose minutes your defense had to survive -- which is fundamentally different than a player who's simply bad at defense, as he was actively forcing others to help to cover up his incredibly flawed defensive presence. Rough stuff, even given the rookie caveat.

On offense, he had a serious case of the sticky fingers. Never on a functioning NBA team should a player shooting a TS% below 50% on a team with ANY better offensive options be averaging a usage percentage above 20%. That's absurd. I realize it's probably a holdover from his BYU days, where Fredette shot the ball once every two minutes. And he had some offensive skills -- he was above average behind the three point line (despite NBA defenders being far more up in his grill than college defenders), on the longest two, and right at the rim. (Although it's worth noting that due to his lacking athleticism, he was barely able to get to the rim once a night). At some point, though, you need to make peace with what you are on an NBA level, and specifically make peace with the idea that you aren't what you were on a college level. I didn't really get the sense that Fredette did that. He still obviously has a few years to get to that realization, but he really hasn't quite yet. His passing was also rather depressing -- while he had a few nice connections (he was good at setting up Jason Thompson and Marcus Thornton, for two), in the aggregate his passing never struck me as reflective of any potential as a true NBA point guard, and his turnovers seemed rooted more in his lacking physical talent than in a surfeit of creativity. He put up an assist percentage of 15%, slightly above that of Kevin Martin's last season and slightly below that of Derek Fisher. He had almost the exact same percentage as Gary Neal, who I consistently argue is nowhere close to a backup point guard in the NBA. Both can make the occasional nice pass, both have some solid connections they default to, but in the whole picture they don't really have strong passing instincts and are score-first shooting guards at their core.

Unfortunately for Fredette, barring a full-time move to the large wing for Tyreke Evans (and perhaps even if that happens), minutes are going to be tight in Sacramento. Given his stellar rookie year, you have to imagine Isaiah should be good for 30+ minutes a night from day one. Same with Marcus Thornton. Aaron Brooks, if he's back to form after a stellar year in the CBA, will be taking up anywhere from 25-30 minutes a contest, and Tyreke should be able to fill the gaps quite nicely when he's not taking time at the SF spot. Which leaves Fredette with... 5 minutes a night? 10 on a good day? Yikes. Before the Brooks signing, it looked like he was in a position where he'd get 20 or so minutes a contest and a chance to really show if a summer of athletic training and shooting-coach visits couldn't improve his perceived ceiling a tad. Now, it just looks like the Kings have painted themselves into something of a corner. Fredette will get minutes, but only if one of the Kings' other pieces gets badly injured. His fans will continue to assert that he'd be great if they just gave him the minutes, his detractors will continue to note that he doesn't have NBA-caliber athleticism (even if Fredette could potentially pull a J.J. Redick and work himself into prime NBA shape with a brutal workout regimen), and the fence-sitters like me will wonder aimlessly whether Fredette's current tepid play is a general indicator that draft evaluators still have a long way to go before they weed out the Fredette-ish flash-in-the-pan types from lottery consideration.

He still has a chance to be a decent player, certainly -- the kid is halfway to 24, not halfway to 28. But given his old-ish age for a rookie and the general habits he's picked up, molding Jimmer into an NBA-level player with a clear understanding of his role on a good team won't be easy. Best of luck to the Kings -- they're going to need it. As for the off-court stuff.. for what seems like the 100th time, take some time to read our contributing writer Alex Arnon's encounter with Jimmer's wife. It's always -- ALWAYS -- worth a re-read.

• • •

_Follow Marco Belinelli on Twitter at __@marcobelinelli.___

Reading John Hollinger's player profiles is often a treat, and one of my favorite things to read about is his assessment of marginal NBA players. You can kind of expect the LeBron profile is going to be incredibly positive, and you roughly know what you're getting with the prominent highlight players in the league. With the marginal players, though, you can learn a few things you didn't necessarily know about the little guys, or little statistical oddities you didn't quite realize were there. There's a catch, though. Now that I'm doing this capsule series, where I'm basically writing a 700-1000 word essay on each player in the league, I've done enough scouting to notice a lot of these things myself. Which can occasionally make me sad when I read a Hollinger profile and read something that was going to be the entire basic theme of an upcoming capsule. Gosh, John. Get out of my head!

No, but really. Hollinger's profile on Marco Belinelli called to light the same exact trend I was planning on covering in the guy's capsule -- that is, the idea that Marco has become one of the most predictable per-minute players in the entire league. You know virtually exactly what you're going to get, to the letter. Marco Belinelli will give you:

• An effective field goal percent within three percentage points of 50% -- erring above 50% with a good PG, below 50% without.
• Five or six three point heaves per 36 minutes played, with a little over two makes a night.
• A minuscule turnover rate to go with a bare minimum assist rate and some of the worst guard rebounding in the NBA.
• Complete and utter disinterest on the defensive end to the point of being actively harmful.
• An awful and patchy beard that sometimes includes a mustache but usually just looks like overgrown peach fuzz.

That's Marco for you. He's incredibly predictable at this point, and a fringe NBA player solely for the fact that he can make a few threes and he has a name most people recognize. Important, important stuff. And this is really one of Chicago's big free agency acquisitions? I hate to make every single Bulls capsule an indictment on the management, but I can't really help it -- what the hell is Reinsdorf doing? If he wants to take the plunge and field a bad team while Rose is out, and he wants to be cheap (as the refusal to take the Asik deal indicates), he might as well make connections with some D-League teams. Just let the Bulls run through 10-day D-League contracts on a season-long talent search for players who could actually make waves with Rose in the fold. Instead, they just seem to be signing a bunch of crusty vets. That gives this Bulls team the "upside" of having wasted money on poor veterans who hurt the Bulls' win total and get them slightly better draft position while simultaneously taking up roster space with refuse that have no chance of being better pieces when Rose gets back to form. Combined with the "downside" that the vets actually make the team slightly better and put the team in draft purgatory, with no chance at a high lottery pick but simultaneously no chance at making waves in the playoffs.

If you don't want to spend money, then, well, don't. Use D-League talent and actually roll the dice on players who have the outside potential of being solid supporting pieces when Rose returns to the fold. Find undrafted rookies, European guys, et cetera. I just don't understand the strategy here. Snagging low-variance veterans who have displayed little outside potential on semi-low value contracts makes a lot of sense if you're looking at a juggernaut of a 60 game winner that needs to shore up a few minor things for the Eastern Conference Finals versus the Heat. Not so much if you're looking at a middling-tier season with a recovering Derrick Rose. If you're thinking for the future, you'd have kept Asik to keep the defensive core intact. If you're thinking to tank, there are better ways to do it. I just don't get it, and honestly, I feel immensely for Bulls fans who have to deal with this sort of rudderless frittering. Chicago fans are immensely loyal even when their team is remarkably bad, evinced through their league-leading attendance figures through the Bulls' dark post-Jordan epoch. They deserve better than rearranging deck chairs on a doomed team with low-upside vets and no broader plan. Come on, Reinsdorf. Get it together.

• • •

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. I was pretty lax on the Friday riddles last week, as everybody got 3/3 on them. That includes: Free_Zero20, Jeffrey, J, Luke, Chilai, and Sam. Whew. Let's see if I can't make these harder next time.

• Player #175's single hilarious dance move in this year's playoffs was funny. Completely overshadowed his play, which is actually a good thing for him, because he's awful.
• An article featuring Player #176 received one of the highest-traffic links in this site's history. It was a Proboards forum. I still don't get it. Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).
• One of the better defensive centers out there, this guy. Which is good, because even though Player #177 can technically run the floor, beyond passing, you seriously don't want him doing too much on the offensive end.

Two short notices: first, I spent about an hour this week adding a stylesheet to the comments. If you refresh the page, you should see a more-stylized comments page than before. Given that we're getting 10-20 comments a post now, I figured it'd be worth my time to make them better from a standpoint of not reading floating white text with poorly produced list statements. Second, going forward, I'm going to try and link every player's name in his "Follow ____ on Twitter" blurb to their basketball-reference page, in case you'd like to look at their stats while you're reading the capsule. Hope that's helpful to some people.

Until next time, then.

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 Michael Beasley, Ian Mahinmi, and Steve Nash.

• • •

_Follow Michael Beasley on Twitter at __@MBEASLEY8.___

I was actually pretty shocked that Batum was so commonly mentioned as the answer to yesterday's first riddle (in case you forgot: just a statement that this player had the worst new contract signed in the west this offseason). It's not that I'm in love with Batum's game (ask Tim Varner, I'm absolutely not), nor that I think he was signed to a good contract (too many years / too much money for a player that still has to take a proverbial leap to be worth that much). It's that there are simply so many better choices. You can go for Jamal Crawford -- actually, to be totally honest, I'd forgotten the exact terms of that contract. That one's probably the worst. Or you could go with Eric Gordon, if you think his health problems are more concerning than I do and you have a less sparkling assessment of his game. Considering his injury trouble and the fact that he's been legitimately maxed out, you might have a case. Or you can go with the player I was actually talking about, who somehow managed to wrangle $18,000,000 in guaranteed dollars from a dismal team that's going nowhere. A player who has not once displayed an above-average NBA capacity at any broad scale on a basketball court. A player who Kevin Love was explicitly happy to get rid of. I refer, of course, to samurai legend Michael Paul Beasley.

Beasley's general play is misleading, to most people. Most would assess him as a generally poor player, but few would realize just how harmful he can be when he has his bad nights. A few facts about Beasley's play. First, while he rebounds passably for a large wing (barely above average, but at least he's at the average there), he's one of very few players whose rebounding gets no better whatsoever when he plays the four. Every moment he's switched into the four-spot, Beasley ends up letting rebounds sky over his head like it's nobody's business. Offensively, he's not the worst, but he's pretty bad on-the-whole -- he's a ball-stopper extraordinaire, and a huge proponent of the "I'm Michael Beasley, clear out and let me work my magic" play-calling strategy. This strategy would work extremely well if Michael Beasley was actually good at picking his spots -- unfortunately, his shot distribution is obscenely frustrating, and he generally just ends up turning the ball over or missing the shot entirely. Believe it or not, if Beasley would pick his spots better, he would potentially be a very good offensive player for his position -- he's actually at or above average at every individual range on the floor for the SF position -- more a symptom of weakness in the position than a serious assertion of strength, but he's got that going for him. He also has, overall, one of the lowest assist rates at his position and one of the lowest %AST totals (that is, he both assists others far less than everyone else and gets assisted by others less than everyone else).

The first part (low assist rate) is awful. The second part (low percent assisted) isn't the worst, and would actually be a potential asset to him -- the idea that he's creating the majority of these shots for himself would tend to indicate that if Beasley backed off and let others create for him, he could be a markedly more effective player. The issue with that logic is that it assumes Beasley has the capacity to make that leap and realize he'd be more effective if he did it. And that's a relatively big assumption to make at this point. He's been in the league for 4 years and (if anything) has gotten worse about it as time goes on. At some point, a player essentially is what he is. I don't know if we've quite reached that point with Beasley yet, but we have to be close. And this barely even touches on Beasley's defense, which is a tour de force in not giving a crap. A bold new talent at falling asleep on rotations. A visionary approach to fouling like a madman and refusing to talk. Compound that with the actively poor shot selection, his general disregard for his teammates, and the bleeding-edge inefficiency with which Beasley plies his trade? Pretty poor picture. I have no idea why the Suns gave him $18,000,000. Even if he was worth that much (and I can see absolutely no way he's worth even half that over the life of his contract), they were bidding against nobody. This is like going to a silent auction with only your 5-year-old nephew there to bid against and putting in a seventeen thousand dollar bid on the shiny red Radio Flyer wagon to head the 5-year-old off at the pass, never once realizing that the 5-year-old has absolutely no money and hates wagons anyway. Really. The Suns have made a lot of questionable personnel decisions over the last few years, but I'm not sure any are as questionable as this one.

• • •

_Follow Ian Mahinmi on Twitter at __@ianmahinmi.___

While Spurs fans weren't looking, Ian Mahinmi found a way to (somehow) morph into a decent player. This in and of itself is enormously frustrating to me, because in San Antonio, he did basically everything he possibly could to turn Spurs fans off to his play and make himself expendable. Once he got into the Carlisle system and was able to wrangle a defined role on that Mavericks team, he managed to break out relatively nicely. Mahinmi has his flaws -- specifically his incomprehensibly bad rebounding (not quite as bad as Ryan Hollins, but relative to his size, Mahinmi is one of the most disappointing rebounders in the NBA) and tendency to get in enormously quick foul trouble (last season is the first in his career his per-36 numbers didn't feature 7-8 fouls a game) -- but he's finally carved out a role by finding a few pluses as well. He could always finish at the rim, but in Dallas, Mahinmi finally solved the art of getting there, which allowed him to actually cut to the rim when he got into in-game action against real NBA players. Before that, he could only really get to the rim or put up stats against the scrub backup's scrub backups. He's developed some proficiency with a nice 15-foot pop shot, and he has a few (awful, but existent) post moves.

The big key with Mahinmi (and the place where he's a legitimate value-add) isn't really in his relatively incomplete offense, it's in his defense. In my view. Although his poor rebounding does hurt him a bit in the overall team picture, he's a quality defender. He has serious mobility, and a knack for timely shot-blocks. His instincts aren't great, but his mobility combined with a decent system (thanks, Carlisle) made him into a legitimate asset for the team defense. In fact, with Mahinmi on the court, the Mavericks (already a solid defensive team with him off it) played better defense in 2012 -- they allowed an offensive rating of 100 to teams with Mahinmi on the bench, but only 98 with Mahinmi on the court. This was primarily rooted in the Mavericks slowing the pace down with Mahinmi on the court and playing to their old-man strengths. Mahinmi helped that by leveraging his mobility and helping to cut off passing lanes. I imagine Mahinmi will keep doing the same in Indiana -- in any event, he's a galaxy beyond the cringe-worthy pairing of Hansbrough and Amundson, and if Miles Plumlee can give the Pacers anything they'll have drastically upgraded their backup-big rotation.

Also, specific note to regular reader Mike, who had a well-thought out rebuttal in yesterday's comments to my general observation in yesterday's riddles that the Pacers overpaid to get Mahinmi. I still do think they overpaid -- while Collison didn't fit in Indiana, from a talent-in/talent-out perspective, Collison has a far higher ceiling than Mahinmi does. He wasn't working out in Indiana, though, and I agree that D.J. Augustin is a talent upgrade from what Collison gave them last year. Which does make Collison worth "less" to the Pacers than he necessarily was for any other team. The Pacers also gave away the crummy contract of Dahntay Jones, who was absolute bollocks in Indiana this past season. So while they may not have necessarily won the deal from a talent-in/talent-out perspective, from a fit and team improvement perspective, you may be right that the deal was a net positive for them. We'll see. Still, quite an apt observation. Thanks for reading.

• • •

_Follow Steve Nash on Twitter at __@SteveNash.___

This one was a bit tough to write. I want to clarify something regarding the broader point of the piece. I'm not trying to say the Lakers are going to be bad -- far from it, I think they'll be extremely good next year. But I think simply saying they'll be good and assessing them without paying heed to their incoming peaks and troughs is mistaken at best and actively misleading at worst. Age brings increased production volatility, and just about every word in this piece on degenerative aging I've applied to Nash could apply just as well to players like Pau Gasol (older than you think), Kobe Bryant (who experienced the same peak/trough give and take this past season), and almost everyone on their bench. Even Dwight Howard is going to find himself more prone to peaks and valleys next year, coming off a relatively bad back injury that may (for a time) lend itself to sap his overall game every few nights as he recovers. By playoff time, Howard should be fine. But having so much volatility to contend with confuses the picture, at least for me.

Consider it this way. The Lakers in years past embodied the natural Phil Jackson style on effort when it came to playoff basketball (try really hard and dominate certain games, then follow those up with tepid efforts that could scarcely beat an 8 seed), these Lakers may unintentionally embody that style even if they're trying their hardest. Age works in strange ways for NBA players, and more than anything, it lends itself sadly well to the idea of "on" nights and "off" nights. The Lakers, with everyone having an on night, are unbeatable. With one player having an off night, they're very good, and still a title contender. But not a title favorite. And with two or three players having off nights, on a team that top-heavy? They're going to have trouble winning a game against ANY decent competition, let alone a team like the Thunder or the Spurs. Just look at Miami without Bosh.

It's not that such games will happen often, or that they won't have a non-fleeting affair with generation-defying dominance. They'll have nights where they may be the greatest team the world's ever seen. It's just difficult to really figure out what the whole picture is going to look like until we have a better inherent understanding of the volatility we're dealing with. In today's piece on Steve Nash, I take a deeper look into this phenomenon, and reflect on both personal lessons of fragility in age and the multi-faceted legacy Steve Nash will leave behind.

When Nash has good games, the Lakers should be quite literally unbeatable. I don't think it's too hyperbolic to say that. Imagining a fully-functioning Nash-Howard pick and roll with Gasol and Kobe as weakside options is absolutely sublime. The wealth of top-flight talent on this team, combined with a fully-active Nash, could manifest as one of the greatest teams to ever take the court. It could be -- and may be -- just that simple. If Nash is healthy, his good days will more than make up for his bad days. But that's the thing. While we can envision this to the high heavens and assert the Lakers to be the new title favorites, that isn't how age works. Once you get into the weeds of extremely old NBA age -- which, make no mistake, is exactly where Nash is headed -- you start to get into unprecedented territory. The only really distinctive, all-encompassing fact is that players who stay in the league at Nash's age tend to see an increased volatility in their contributions. One night they'll be classic -- or even better. A shining example of everything they always were. One night later they'll have no lift, no instincts, no shot. So on, so forth. Variance inflates, and merely assessing the "average" game becomes more and more misleading.

For the 2012 Lakers to match their potential and become the unbeatable teeth-gnashing beast we've imagined, they require much of Steve Nash. At least considering that Artest is virtually gone, Howard's back is balking, and the Gasol-Bryant dynamo is aging as we look the other way. They don't simply require some certain set of averages, a dismal checklist of mean production. They require Steve Nash's guile to remain intact. The creativity to sustain. They require Nash's candle to flicker at just the right time. There can be no letdown game, no nagging injuries, no disappearing act behind the velour curtain. Part of the great conceit of this roster is the concept that they must be better than the sum of their parts. That Nash's brilliance will salve the cuts and soothe the wrinkles away. That Pau Gasol, in Nash's presence, will return to his 2010 form. That Bryant will become more efficient without having to carry such a heavy load. That Howard's offensive game will emerge from the fire's of Mordor even better than before, and pole-vault Bynum's production. On Nash's good nights, none of this will be a problem. It should be rudimentary, in fact. And on Nash's bad nights? It could be troubling.

In a lot of ways, the frequency of those bad nights decides the fate of the Lakers' season.

For more on Steve Nash, read today's Player Capsule (Plus) at Hardwood Paroxysm.

• • •

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. Smart guess from twitter follower @JoshsPseudonym, who got a 3/3 rather quickly.

• There was Linsanity. Then there was Sloansanity. Then there was [Player #172]sanity, at which point I began to question Cleveland('s)sanity.
• One of my favorite stories ever comes from contributing writer Alex Arnon, regarding his exploits with an intimate relation of Player #173. (Yes, this riddle is basically just an excuse to link you to it.)
• He's been OK in recent years, but I expect Player #174 to go "belli" up in Chicago. (Pretty sure this the worst pun I've ever scribed.)

Have a good weekend. Hoping I can get a full 15-player suite done next week. Fingers crossed, eh?

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 Troy Murphy, Chris Kaman, and Andre Miller.

• • •

_Follow Troy Murphy's example by becoming a franciscan friar__.___

I really feel like people don't realize how far Murphy's fallen in the last few years. Over two years in Indiana from 2008 to 2010, Murphy averaged 14-11 in a scant 33 minutes a game. He shot 81% from the line as a big man, 41% from three (on five three pointers a game!), and missed just 19 nights of play over two seasons. That's very near an all-star level. Very good work from him. Entering the 2011 season, Murphy was 30 years old -- although big men usually begin to fall off around their early 30s, it's rarely a rapid decline. I wrote my thesis on aging in basketball players and in a general sense big men tend to have the slowest decline-from-peak rates among all positions. Point guards fall off the quickest from their peak, wings fall off less quickly, and bigs fall off quite slowly. Murphy sees this trend and spits on it. From his two-year peak from 28-29, Murphy's performance descended from "patently decent rotation player" to "WHAT ON GOD'S EARTH" in no time flat.

He had a PER of 18 in that two year peak -- his PER has been 8.7 in the two years since. He went from 41% three point shooting on five tries a night to 33% on a single heave. He went from a solid and dependable 33 minutes a night to 15 minutes a game. And his defense suddenly transformed from "extremely poor" to "consistently causing blood to shoot indiscriminately out of any random fan's eyes." Bad, bad news. And he did this without any serious injury problems, too. Sure, he started the 2011 season with a strained lower back. Back injuries can sap a player's game terribly (which is one of the reasons I'm bearish about next year's Lakers). But it wasn't a break, or a torn muscle, or a bone bruise. It was a strain. He strained something in his lower back and had some hamstring troubles. That SERIOUSLY doesn't explain this sort of a rapid decline. Especially since he was never some kind of physical beast -- he's a slow and plodding white guy who makes some threes. I mean, damn. His game is as "finesse" as they come, based far more around a decent three point shot and decent rebounding instincts than any particular penchant for rough-and-tumble post play or fluid motion. And his talents have vanished.

In Los Angeles, he should've been in a perfect position to fix his career up. Make a few spot-up shots, trust in Mike Brown's system, and rebound. No big deal. But he looks like a completely different player. He went from quasi-all-star to utter schlub. Will he be in the league next season? Probably, because GMs__ love__ throwing money at old vets who look washed up. Will he be effective? Doubt it. In general, though, it's worth pointing out that Murphy's current disgusting play doesn't totally erase the fact that he was actually a really good player with the Indiana Pacers. He was a plus rebounder, a great three point shooter, and (although his defense was awful) there was nothing in his numbers that indicated he was anything other than a solid starter in the league. We tend to let a player's final few enfeebled years detract from how good they were at their peak. In Murphy's case, given the sudden transition, we're even more in danger of doing that. He was solid. Now he's not. But his current state doesn't mean he was NEVER solid, and that he NEVER accomplished anything.

• • •

_Follow Chris Kaman on Twitter at __@ChrisKaman.___

Chris Kaman has his skills, but I'll be honest with you -- I'm not a fan. I've been watching him closely for a while, due to his constant presence in trade rumors and the drumbeat of people who treat him as though he's a major acquisition in the making for any team silly enough to sign him. I've come to a few conclusions. First, he's one of the biggest shot-vortex big men you can possibly find on offense -- he has a few assists a night on the really obvious passes, and he can be efficient if you set him up right, but on almost every possession Kaman records a touch he'll end up shooting a basket one way or another. He's had a usage percentage (a stat measuring what percentage of possessions Kaman ends in his time on the floor) over 20% for the last 5 years running. In fact, in the past 5 years, Chris Kaman has had the 6th highest usage percentage among big men in the NBA. Seriously! It'd be one thing if he did efficient things with those touches, but he doesn't -- out of every big who played over 5000 minutes and over 164 games in the last five seasons, Kaman sports the 36th worst true shooting percentage. He's one of only three players on that list with a shooting percentage below 49% that didn't take any threes, and he's got the second lowest offensive win shares (-1.3) of any big over those five years.

So, yes. His offense is extremely tough to deal with, if you're a fan of a team featuring Kaman. He was notorious in Los Angeles for constantly freezing out Eric Gordon and other better offensive options to run obscene isolations from 20 feet out. He set weak screens, barely freeing up the men he was setting the pick for in an effort to try and get the ball off of every one. If he does that to Dirk in Dallas, there are going to be some major problems on that Mavericks team -- he's the best offensive center they've had in years, but with the scorers they've got, they don't NEED the center to take 15 shots a night and use 20% of the offense. They need Dirk to do that, and Mayo, and Collison. Not Kaman. If he overuses his own offense when there are better options available, he's going to raise his stats at the expense of team quality. Which would be bad. On defense, well, the story is slightly different. Mark Cuban has stated outright that he believes Chris Kaman will be a phenomenal defender in the Mavericks' system. With all due respect to Mr. Cuban, that's kind of absurd. Kaman has NEVER been an amazing defender in his career, and nothing in his playing style indicates he has the ability to do what Dallas is going to need.

Look at what he did in New Orleans, with Monty Williams -- Monty's system is manna from heaven for poor defenders, because he explicitly maps out defensive strategies and redirects players to the right spots to maximize their talents. Under Monty's system, rotations conspired to give Kaman one of the higher DPPP ratings on spot-up shooters, and allowed him the freedom to cover his man in isolation decently. Unfortunately, he also was a terrible defender in the post, and an atrocious pick and roll defender -- the key for Carlisle is going to be to transform Kaman from a bollocks low post defender to a good one. Because you really need the big man next to Dirk to have some ability to guard the post. Okafor, Smith, and Ayon were able to cover the post for Kaman and allow him the room to stick to his man and focus on the space he was rotating into. In Dallas, Dirk isn't going to be able to replicate what those three did in New Orleans. Shawn Marion will help, but as Marion gets older it's doubtful he'll be able to do everything he needs to. Elton Brand and Chris Kaman could probably make a great defensive lineup under a Carlisle scheme, but I have serious doubts that a Kaman-fueled starting lineup is going to do great shakes for Dallas defensively. Or offensively, if Kaman freezes out Dirk.

In any event, it should be interesting to see how he acquaints himself in Dallas. I'm looking forward to watching if Kaman can really evolve as a player -- he'll finally be on a team with a solid cast around him and a reasonable expectation of a decent playoff seed. If he can mold his skills to fit a new role, he'll be fine, and he certainly has the talent and skill to be a considerably positive presence on a contending team. But he absolutely needs to reinvent his game and reorient how he approaches his offense. If he can't do that? There will be serious issues. Off the court, Kaman is a hilarious gun-toting conservative with penchant for shooting everything that moves. Seriously. He shoots bobcats. He tweets pictures of himself holding assault rifles (...days after a shooting in a movie theater, even). He tweets pictures of himself gutting deer. Should be a decent fit for Texas, in that sense, though given the generally liberal bent to NBA fans I'm skeptical that his off-court gun nuttery will really endear him to Mavericks fans all that much. We'll see. He's an interesting dude, if also a moderately scary one.

• • •

_Follow Andre Miller's example and you'll eventually be__ really cool.___

So, fair warning. There are a few players in the league that I'm an unabashed fan of. I tend to try and be positive in all these capsules, because I think there's far more reason to celebrate players in this league than there is reason to detract from them. And even if there WAS more reason to detract from them, it seems like every player analysis you read nowadays is some scathing critique or dripping with vitriol. I don't like to use that, except in rare cases where I truly can't stand watching a player's game or can't stand a player I feel is absurdly overrated (as in the case of the Chris Kaman capsule above). But despite my making every capsule positive, there's definitely something that differentiates capsules I write about players I'm huge fans of from those of players I'm tepid on -- they're just way more positive. Today, at Hardwood Paroxysm, I'm covering Andre Miller. I will admit this from the start -- Miller is one of those players I find it impossible to be reasonable about.

It's not that I think he's the greatest player ever or something like that. It's more that I simply can't help but respect the absurd hardships Miller has perservered through in his life, and I can't help but love the blue-collar abandon and grit with which Miller performs his game. If the NBA was performance art, Miller would be the town's muted bladesmith, performing in front of a nearly-empty house. Always quiet, never elaborate, extremely effective. Spends these long hours pounding away with his scaling hammer on a piece whose beauty is rarely appreciated as much as their application to war. Never gets wholescale appreciation for what he brings to the table, but always comes back and puts the same loving care into every pass thrown and offense built. Miller is simply brilliant, and there's a rare few players in the league that are anything like him. I love Andre Miller, and today's capsule at Hardwood Paroxysm discusses where exactly this love stems from, and why exactly I enjoy his life and game. Apologies for the dripping positivity -- for some players, I simply can't avoid it. Hope you understand.

As a kid, I used to wonder how in the world anyone failed tests like the ACT or the SAT. I always thought I was really bad at them (and relative to the kids in Honors classes with me, even in public schools, I absolutely was), but I got decent scores and the question was less “will you pass” and more “how close to a perfect score can you get”. But as I get older I've started to gain a greater appreciation for how much of a ridiculous privilege it is to not have to concern oneself with that — I grew up in a solid public school system that had great graduation rates and that developed an excellent SAT-friendly curriculum from an absurdly young age. They taught you how to think like a test-taker, in some ways, from grade two onwards. But not everyone has that! Despite getting on the honor roll and working incredibly hard, Miller failed the ACT. Given how intelligently he plays, and how well he had done on the backs of hard work at his schools growing up, I’d consider the failure less a problem on his end and more a problem of development. It’s not his fault, really. He had excellent grades, and worked incredibly hard to get those grades by all accounts. If you get good grades you should be able to pass a standardized test, theoretically. If you can’t that’s less a failure on your end and more a failure in how the school is teaching you and how their curriculum prepares you. Which is really, really sad. So many basketball players come from these depressingly scant backgrounds, with poor preparation for both the real world and any further academic work. If a player works hard enough to excel in their school and still can’t pass a standardized test, I’ve never quite understood how we can vilify the player. That’s on the system, and the broader disparity in the quality of schooling between even comparably well-endowed school systems. In a lot of ways, it’s luck of the draw.

Still. The Andre Miller story doesn’t really end there — due to Proposition 48, due to his failure on the standardized test, he wouldn’t be able to suit up for a college team until he’d accumulated one year in good academic standing. Predictably, this dried up almost every scholarship offer Miller had received. He went from having his pick of schools to having doubts he’d get a solid scholarship from anyone at all. Which, by the way, puts something of a damper on the idiotic criticisms people throw at Derrick Rose for cheating on the SAT. What was his realistic alternative? He couldn’t possibly pay for college, his family needed the NBA money, and if he failed the SAT again he would’ve been in Miller’s position. No scholarships, no ability to go to college, no hope. Of course he cheated on it. Check your privilege — in that situation (one that’s hard to imagine for most people reading this, but consider it deeply), you would too. Anyway. Luckily for Miller, a single college chose to not rescind their scholarship — the University of Utah, wholly used to losing players for a year or two at a time on missions. So Miller packed his bags, going straight out of Compton and into the Mormon-built catacombs of the flagship Utah university. Which there aren’t nearly enough stories about — Miller said once that he went to school with “the first white people I ever went to school with” in Utah, and as neither him nor his mom were Mormon, there HAS to be a bunch of funny stories about his time at Utah. Few are published, unfortunately. But they have to exist, right?

For more on Andre Miller, read today's Player Capsule (Plus) at Hardwood Paroxysm.

• • •

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. We got a smart guess from BNB who correctly realized I was talking about Andre Miller with my last riddle, and a 3/3 guess from Chilai who put it all together. Good work folks.

• I'm of the opinion that Player #169 got the absolute worst contract given out in the west this offseason. Just completely befuddles me that a team would give him that.
• If he simply replaces Hansbrough's minutes, the Pacers will be A-OK. Should help shore up the bench. Might've given a bit much for him, though.
• "People say not to swim with sharks. But I'm faster than sharks, so it's not a big deal." Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).

Sorry for the lack of capsules yesterday. Work is busy and I've been a bit under the weather. Here's hoping I can rally through this head cold and finish the week off strong.

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 Randy Foye, Cole Aldrich, and Arron Afflalo.

• • •

_Follow Randy Foye on Twitter at __@randyfoye.___

When it comes to Foye's game, the first thing I'd think of is "bursts." No, not starburst candies, although now that you mention it I could use some breakfast. (Sponsor me, Mars!) No, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the concept of burst scoring. If you haven't heard the term, it refers to the situation where you have a player whose main purpose is to come in the game off a cold open, get the ball on a few fortuitous bounces, and proceed to make shots until he gets cold again. Then they're off, thrown in the cooler for the next round. Go on these 9-12 point personal runs, where they're scoring almost every point purely on the basis of a ridiculous hot streak. Draining shots they have no business taking and even less business making. And then the streak ends abruptly, they embarrass yourself a time or two, and they're back on the bench waiting for the next hit. It's like getting off on danger, a bit -- living from high to high, never knowing when the high is going to abruptly end and you'll fall flat. It's when you have cash flow problems and live paycheck to paycheck just trying to stretch your funds to that next so-needed infusion. That stuff.

That's how Foye's game comes to mind for me. Very feast-or-famine. Is this fair to his game, though? Not completely. Although his defense is markedly poor, to simply distill Foye's game to a "make a few shots, get the hell to the bench" style is to underrate him. One of Foye's greatest assets actually contributed to what made the Clippers such an immensely dull team to wtach for me last season -- his absurd knack for drawing free throws as a jump shooter. Of his 10 shots a night, 8 of them come outside the rim. Usually, if you're talking role players, that kind of a disparity would tend to indicate a player that barely gets to the line at all. Not so for Foye. He averages on his career three free throws a night, and while he had a down year last year, he had been hovering around four a night in years directly previous. He's very tricky -- he jumps into his defender in such a way that few can actually guard, and he draws free throws with the best floppers and gamesmen in the league.

It's always weird to me that Foye is rarely considered for the current top-NBA-floppers list -- it's not that he flops in such an aesthetically ridiculous way as the league's grandest floppers, necessarily, but that he's simply so good at drawing free throws for someone who shoots ONLY jump shots that you'd think at some point someone would notice "hey, dang, we should probably pay attention to this guy." Given his veritably insane free throw percentage (86% for his career, 89% from 2009-2011), this is a ridiculously great asset to have for a guy of his repute. Aside from the foul-drawing, he's a so-so shooter with a tendency for high-variance performances. Which isn't a bad thing, and should be a huge upgrade over the pu pu platter the Jazz put out at the two-spot last year. But it's definitely not "NBA starter" quality -- not that that's a bad thing. After all, that leaves the door open for Burks or any old D-League guard to prove their mettle in the Utah kiln. Flexibility is good, with a roster as multifaceted as Utah's. Although they probably would've liked to find a better defender, given the sad state of Utah's currently abysmal team defense. Jerry Sloan is crying on his ranch, somewhere.

Off the court, you have to respect Foye's accomplishments. He came from about as rough a background as one could possibly come from, with his father Antonio killed in a motorcycle accident when Foye was a scant two years old. He doesn't remember his father very much. His mother was caught up in the drug trade, and not three years after his father's death, she was kidnapped and met her own grisly end. Foye was taken in by his grandmother, who in his words, was a recovering drug addict herself. They had to do a lot of crazy stuff just to help him get by, things most of us can't even really imagine. At every step of his education and upbringing, Foye encountered setbacks and doubters -- for instance, the many who doubted he'd make it out of high school. He proved them wrong about as thoroughly as a man can do, as well as the people who doubted he'd get a college degree and people who doubted he'd make it in the NBA. Sometimes it's hard to really think about the crazy, circuitous roads taken by the entertainers who adorn our screen when we watch an NBA. I'd entreat you to think a bit on Randy Foye, though, and how inspiring his journey has been, grisly and awful though it may be. Here's a man who was orphaned at six, growing up in a broken household besides. Through constant work and grind, this man was able to find both prosperity and the resources to help people in his old position (hence the Randy Foye Foundation, dedicated to the constant improvement of living conditions in Newark, NJ). It's essentially the American dream realized. Beautiful stuff.

• • •

_Follow Cole Aldrich on Twitter at __@colea45.___

It's hard to find much to say about Cole Aldrich, all things considered. It's not that he's an awful player, but he's certainly not a good one -- for a 3-year college player that came into the NBA at the age of 22, he's awfully unpolished. His freshman season was notable mostly in how ridiculously bad he looked -- just a terrible fit on the court, seemingly several hundred steps slow on defense and several dozen steps lacking on offense. He posted a freshman PER of 7.0 and it felt a hell of a lot worse than that. Last season he had a PER of 17.7 (and a PER of 19.8 in the postseason), but I'm hesitant to really assess much value from that. First off, he was playing against busted competition -- the Thunder blew out a hell of a lot of teams last year, and the vast majority of Aldrich's minutes came in garbage time during blowout wins. In fact, the Thunder went 25-6 in the 31 games that Aldrich saw the floor last year. Kind of skews the picture a bit. What's worse is that not only did he virtually only play in wins against poor late-game competition, he also managed to be part of bench units that were incredibly awful.

It's nitpicky, but one of the things most don't necessarily internalize about "deep" teams like the Thunder or the Spurs is that their depth tends to mean that their late game blowout lineups are actually a bit worse than that of an average team -- when the coach is playing the "preserve your players" game you play in a blowout like that, you're putting important roleplayers at risk every minute you keep them on the floor when unnecessary. With lacking depth, your 6th or 7th best player isn't actually all that important to your team concept, so you can afford to play them a bunch of minutes during garbage time -- when you're sporting a 10 man rotation and have decent players all over the place, you quickly discover that you either need to risk injuries to valuable tertiary pieces (say, Danny Green or Eric Maynor) or play guys who might not get minutes anywhere else. So you end up with lineups featuring the INSANELY overmatched end-of-rotation level folks, and lineups that get HILARIOUSLY overwhelmed if you actually take their stats and extend them to a full-game scenario.

Anyway. Regarding this phenomenon, that general trend held true for Aldrich. Lineups featuring Cole Aldrich last year may have featured a center sporting a 17-20 PER, but that sure wasn't helping his team out much. In the regular season, if you pro-rated the performance of the Thunder during Aldrich's 173 minutes of burn, you're left with a team that was outscored by 6.5 points per 100 possessions (as opposed to a team that outscored others by 8 with Aldrich off the floor). That team featured insanely anemic rebounding, a ridiculously slow pace (which I can attest to -- Thunder blowouts ended up slowing the game down considerably, a phenomenon that made writing about games in-the-moment a bit easier but made watching them occasionally awful), and 42% shooting from the field. Gross. The crock-pot of small sample size reared its ugly head once more in the NBA playoffs, where the Thunder found themselves outscored by (no typo) 21.2 points per 100 possessions with Aldrich on (and outscored others by 5 points per 100 possessions with Aldrich off). Insanely small sample size, but hilarious numbers. And it points to the ephemeral nature of decent advanced individual statistics (not to pick on PER, either -- this is true for EVERY non-minutes weighted statistic you can possibly rattle off) for players with scant floor time. If Aldrich was actually a center with 20 PER performance, he probably wouldn't be the featured player on lineups that underperform the Thunder's overall performance by such a drastic degree. No -- Aldrich is a developing and limited big man with a lot of energy and an unfortunate lack of NBA-level talent. He could potentially develop into more, I suppose, but I've certainly got my doubts. Hasn't really shown us much of anything yet, that's for sure.

• • •

_Follow Arron Afflalo on Twitter at __@arronafflalo.___

Denver was one of the deepest teams in the league last year. One of the ways you can gain some insight into this -- beyond simply watching them play -- is to look at how the Nuggets' bench competed compared to the Nuggets' starters. Look, for instance, into Arron Afflalo's numbers. With Afflalo on the court, the Nuggets outscored opponents by about 2 points per 100 possessions -- their defense was worse, their offense was slower, and their general outlook more of a fringe 0.500 outfit than that of a high seeded, dangerous Western team. With Afflalo on the bench, and the Denver depth ravaging the scrubs of the other team (and, underratedly, the incredible two-PG offense featuring Andre Miller and Ty Lawson in concert)? The Nuggets outscored opponents by 6 points per 100, which is elite. The problem with this kind of a setup on a good team is that when rotations shorten for the playoffs, the level of competition those bench units face rises considerably, which in turn lowers their efficacy -- I have my doubts that the 2012 Nuggets could've competed at all in the first round against any team with better depth than the Lakers. The Lakers were thus the dream matchup for a team like the Nuggets -- very old (the Lakers have been one of the 5 oldest teams in the sport for the last few years), relatively plodding, and with shaky depth that left the Nuggets' bench mob facing relatively tired starters and marginal-beyond-logic bench players. But if the Nuggets wanted to beat the Lakers, they really needed one thing -- one single starter to have a good series and keep their starting lineup in the game for the bench to win them the series. Before the series, most people (me included) thought this would be Afflalo.

Okay. So. That didn't work out too well. But I think Afflalo has proven pretty thoroughly that he can be an effective NBA player despite that. Before last year's big contract, it was his defense -- he used to be an extremely effective 3-and-D shooting guard. Last year, it was his offense -- he stopped paying much attention to defense altogether in favor of absurdly efficient standout offensive performances. A bit troubling. His defense was excellent before last year, but he simply stopped paying much attention on that end in favor of taking more of a load on the offensive end -- this wasn't a terrible thing, mind you, as he's an incredibly efficient offensive player (despite a career high usage rate by 4%, Afflalo still shot nearly 40% from three and well above-average percentages from almost every spot on the floor) but for a defensive enthusiast like myself it was a tad bit disappointing. No, the question I have with Afflalo isn't whether he can be a good NBA player -- my question is rather pondering which Afflalo is going to show up in Orlando. Will it be the defensive savant or the offensive mastermind? Or, perhaps more importantly -- will it be 2012 regular season Afflalo or 2012 playoffs Afflalo, where every single one of his numbers cratered and he looked like a fringe NBA player at best? It's rough. Kobe's defense certainly isn't what did it -- Kobe was laying off his man so much, I mistook him for a Wall Street CEO. Afflalo had the space, but he just couldn't seem to make an open shot. Over the seven games of 2012 playoffs, Afflalo made just four threes -- to put this in context, in the 2012 regular season, Afflalo had five whole games with that many or more! Absurd.

I don't usually mention one specific game for these guys, but for Afflalo, I feel it's apt. Back in 2011, Afflalo had one of the best "forgotten" games I can remember for any NBA player. It might've been the game of the 2011 regular season. It was a one point home win by the Carmelo Nuggets against the fully healthy would-be champion Mavericks. It was arguably Melo's last great game as a Nugget, as he put up 42 points on a TS% of 80%. It featured 10 lead changes, an Afflalo game-winner, a fantastic Jason Terry game (in a loss, just like a Spurs fan likes it), a ridiculous pace, and some insane offense. The thing that makes Afflalo relevant? He poured in a ridiculous 19 points in the fourth quarter, missing his first two shots of the quarter then making all but one afterwards. Afflalo went completely supernova to close that game, which is doubly funny because he'd played pretty terribly on offense up until the fourth (although his defense was fantastic). I'd never seen him assert himself on offense like that... well... ever, honestly. It was a wonderful watch. And moments like that are what make me think that Afflalo -- although he's getting a bit old, although he's had trouble putting his defense and his offense together at once -- DOES still have the ceiling of an all-star in this league. I don't know if the Magic are the proper melting pot for him to get there, but he should certainly get the chance to improve his numbers these next few years. Not bad for a player the Detroit Pistons gave away for virtually nothing. (No, seriously. They traded him to the Nuggets for a second round pick. I like Vernon Macklin, but DANG.)

• • •

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. I once again need to strengthen the difficulty -- 100% 3/3 guesses were put in by Mike L, Brian, Free_Zero20, J, Atori, and Chilai.

• The Great White Wonder. Nearly an all-star in 2010, Player #166 is basically out of the league today. The most forgettable "recently sporting a 15-10 line" dude in the league, I'd venture.
• Ball dominant center with a penchant for chucking and getting ridiculously undeserved all-star appearances. Hates Bobcats, tho.
• One of my absolute favorite players in the league. Easily my favorite outside the Spurs and Cavs. Humble but tough, of low means but resourceful, underrated but assured. May retire soon. Will be sad to see him go. Will be a Capsule (Plus).

I'm almost done with my nightly Red Dead Redemption livetweeting series (lovingly titled "#reddocredemption"). Should finish the game tonight. Tune in to watch me react live to the game's (seems pretty boring?) end.

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 Enes Kanter, Ricky Rubio, and Derrick Favors.

• • •

_Follow Enes Kanter on Twitter at __@Enes_Kanter.___

One of my most notable Enes Kanter memories came back in mid-2011, when I was new at my job and meeting some friends. I talked with my friend Hugh (a fellow statistician) about the NBA, and happily discovered he was a huge fan. Big Nets guy -- incredibly excited about the move to Brooklyn. We talked about the draft, for a while, and specifically about the pick the Nets had traded away to the Jazz for Deron Williams. It had turned out to be the third overall pick, and the Jazz had chosen Enes Kanter with the traded pick. I asked Hugh what he thought about that. He scoffed and said that Kanter was why he didn't care that the Nets had traded the pick. Curious, I probed -- he went on about how he'd watched a ton of footage on players in the draft for a project for his master's thesis. He was only really confident in Kyrie Irving to actually assert himself well as a player in the NBA, and if there was one player he was low on, it was decidedly Enes Kanter. As he said, his skills weren't all that excellent -- he'd put up middling numbers at best overseas, and what's worse, he couldn't perform an in-game jump. Sure, he had a "decent" vertical in workouts, but Hugh had quite literally never seen game footage in the hours he'd watched of Kanter where Kanter made any non-hop jump in an in-game situation. Suffice to say, Hugh was not expecting much from Kanter. I admit, it doesn't really say great things about his rookie year that I find an offhand conversation like that more memorable than Kanter's entire season.

There are some positives, here. His rebounding was extremely strong for a rookie -- Kanter was among the league leaders in defensive rebounding percentage. His stats, translated to 36 minutes a night, indicate a player with the potential to put up stats hovering around 13 points and 12 rebounds a night. Extremely solid totals, all things considered. And although he still can't jump amazingly well, with a season's worth of footage to choose from, you can actually find a few nice hops. (Well. Sort of.) Despite all that, there are a few big problems. First, his defense -- it's not actively harmful, but it's not great. He's gigantic and lumbering but he tries to get into the passing lanes like a guard, which is pretty taboo when you're not very quick. He can defend individual big men decently, if they're mountains like Shaq. Against limber, quicker big men he has troubles. Unfortuantely, that's most everyone in the league. What's more, while his offensive stats were decent in a vacuum, almost every minute Kanter was on the court was a minute Al Jefferson wasn't. I'm not Jefferson's biggest fan, but he was offensively essential to the Jazz last year -- without three point shooters or wings that could really produce offense, they needed their men in the middle producing offense to function as a productive team. Hence it being a problem when Kanter saw the floor. The Utah offense was (this is not a typo) 12 points per 100 possessions worse with Kanter on the floor. Rough stuff, that. Combine that with his foul troubles, and you have a player who has a lot of work to do.

Amusing things about Kanter? Many. Just look at who he's following on Twitter for a taste of what he's like off-the-court -- he's following Hugh Hefner, a bunch of men's magazines (Maxim/Playboy), aspiring starlets, NASA, and Spongebob. (God bless you, Amar.) His most recent pictures posted to his twitter involve Kanter kissing an alligator, chillin' like a bro with some snakes, and giving a shout out to an extremely attractive Latin dance teacher. Fair warning: his tweets contain an excess of winking emoticons, exclamation points, and a strangely solemn and somber profile picture. Still. He seems like a nice guy. And with rebounding like that, as long as he can work on his mobility and conditioning (and stop the silly fouls!), he'll eventually be a decent player in this league. A man his size can make it in the league with only one or two crucial skills, and lucky for Kanter, rebounding is one of them. I think that as his mobility improves his general command of the game will improve, and eventually, he should be a decent big-off-the-bench for a contending Utah team. We'll see, though. At the very least he should be tweeting for the forseeable future. And he's a fun follow, so that's pretty excellent.

• • •

_Follow Ricky Rubio on Twitter at __@rickyrubio9.___

Today's edition of our extended capsules features -- who else? -- the international man of mystery with floppy hair and a winning smile, Ricky Rubio. I'm discussing Rubio's general game, the Who, one of my ex-girlfriends, and the burden of expectations. Should be a fun time, provided you have a different definition of fun than the majority of the human race.

In 2009, to much fanfare, the Minnesota Timberwolves drafted Ricky Rubio. This was ironically months before Justin Bieber’s first album, meaning that if either of the two are copying the other, it’s decidedly Bieber copying Rubio rather than the other way around. When he first was to come over, we were treated to several love songs about his game — Rubio was, so they said, “bigger and better” than Pistol Pete Maravich. He was the most hyped prospect in years, promising to bring together things like Steve Nash’s passing with Pistol Pete’s scoring, and a touch of Wally Szczerbiak’s good looks to really bring everything together. The floppy hair, the scrawny frame, the glowing smile. Everyone eagerly awaited for his arrival, and as the basketball-loving public waited, Rubio mulled coming over. And decided (perhaps in part due to David Khan’s “drafting another point guard directly after him” move) that it’d be best if he refrained, for a while, and continued his development in the Euroleague as he worked out his contract and figured out the exactitudes of his personal journey to America. Then, last season, he finally relented — he came over to play the point for an intriguing Wolves team that had finally accumulated some solid pieces. This tends to happen when you’ve been among the worst teams the sport had ever seen over the previous three seasons. The comparisons started up again. Pistol Pete, Steve Nash, Isiah Thomas. Every good NBA point guard — or, in Pete’s case, a scoring guard — was a comparable for Rubio. Which might’ve been a mistake.

Scratch that — it was definitely a mistake. Rubio was never to be the same kind of a scorer as Pistol Pete, and the idea that he would be was one of the most ridiculous overstatements that’s ever entered the popular consciousness. While Rubio started the year shooting a decent percentage from three, there’s virtually nothing that distinguishes Rubio’s freshman year scoring ability to that of the highly less heralded Brandon Jennings — Jennings started the year on fire from three point range, as did Rubio, but there were warning signs as to their overall scoring game even then. Poor form on the three point shot, no real long two to speak of, and (perhaps most importantly) one of the worst at-rim finishing percentages in the league. He had the 6th worst percentage in the league last year (sort by “at rim” percentage), which matches exactly Jennings’ finish in his rookie year (6th worst in the league). Both players started the year on fire from three, and neither finished the year with an exceptional true shooting percentage despite that. Their final true shooting percentages, in fact, are almost exactly equal — 2010 Jennings had a TS% of 47.5%, while 2012 Rubio had a TS% of 47.6%. Not very good at all — 50% is the Mendoza line for “even remotely competent.” Clearly, both their rookie seasons miss that not-particularly-high mark.

READ RICKY RUBIO'S EXTENDED CAPSULE AT HARDWOOD PAROXYSM

• • •

_Follow Derrick Favors on Twitter at __@dfavors14.___

Out of all the players on last year's Utah Jazz, I don't think there's a single one I'm more interested in than Derrick Favors. Kanter has the size, sure, and Burks is interesting (if only just). Millsap pretty much is who he is, at this point, and Jefferson strikes me the same way. Gordon Hayward could be really good if he puts it all together, too. But none of them make me feel the same excitement as Favors when I think on their future potential. He's got an incredible amount of potential. He made a solid leap between his rookie and sophomore seasons on defense, going from a "decent with potential" defender to a legitimate lockdown option. On offense, he regressed -- but with defense like that, you can wait a bit for the offense to flesh out. He was just about as good at the rim last year as he was his freshman year (slightly below positional-average, but decent), but he experienced a huge falloff from outside 10 feet -- from 10-15 feet, he went from 45% on a shot every two nights in Utah to close last season to an abysmal 22% on one shot a game. Outside 15 feet, he went from 36% (not great) to 28% (dear God). Some rough regression, especially for a player like Favors who isn't quite comfortable in the post yet with the ball.

But that defense? Lord, that defense. The numbers don't blow you away (the Utah defense was better with him on the court -- to the tune of 4 points per 100 possessions -- but that's not the largest gap in the league by any stretch), but visually, it's a fun watch. His on-ball post defense is stingy, rangy, and brilliant. His instincts aren't perfect yet, but they're developing -- if he keeps getting better, he's got the potential to be a Garnett or Duncan type of dominant defender from the flex-four quasi-center position. Even as his offense is a tremendous work in progress, his defense is more than enough to get him floor time and guarantee him work going forward. He's an all-star level stopper who should get his due at some point -- as the numbers catch up to his general abilities and his playing time increases, I expect to see an increasingly outsized impact from Favors on the Jazz. He may not be their best player right now, but he's sure as hell their best defender, and if the Utah Jazz are to make the leap from "intriguing lowly quasi-contender with a chance to get HCA" into "legitimately elite team in the western conference", it's not going to be on the backs of Millsap and Jefferson's offense. It's going to be on the back of Favors developing into his own and pushing their defense to a level beyond "atrocious."

The big question -- as with just about every big man on the Utah roster -- is how the heck the Jazz are going to get enough playing time to develop him well. The Jazz are currently experiencing a surfeit of "not quite" bigs -- big men who are very good and have lots of solid talents, but who simply need more development or more complementary pieces around them. In the case of Jefferson, you have to look at his game and imagine that Jefferson and Favors could make a dominant frontcourt pairing in the future -- with Favors arming the defense and Jefferson controlling the ball on offense, the Jazz could have a wonderful thing if they could get it to work. But right now you have Kanter (who rebounds like a monster but ruins offensive pacing and doesn't have the mobility to defend outside of one-on-one situations), Favors (whose defense and rebounding move mountains but whose offense actively harms his team), Jefferson (who's their best player by a country mile on offense but whose defense is substantially lacking), Millsap (whose offense is great, but again, his defense can't do a thing and his size is lacking), and Jeremy Evans (who can dunk... and that's it). The Jazz have this giant menagerie of talent to draw from, but it's mismatched, with so many players that are assets on one end and come up lame on the other. Coach Corbin has a ridiculous task ahead of him to organize these disparate talents into one coherent unit. And while I'm interested to see how he acquaints himself to such a challenge, if I'm a Jazz fan, I'm a tiny bit worried about his ability to manage this many intriguing talents at once.

• • •

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. Lots of 3/3 riddle performances last week -- it started with "animeweedlord_gavman420" (I'm not kidding), went on with Brian and longtime guess-master J. Also Atori and Chilai. Basically I need to make these harder, is what I'm figuring.

• This recent Utah acquisition should shore up their three point shooting nicely. Player #163 likes the threes. (And their quota of sitcom guest-stars, too.)
• While the Thunder don't give Player #164 enough time to really let him show his stuff, I'd argue he hasn't shown enough to warrant it. His ridiculous PER excepted.
• The question is thus: will the Magic get Player #165 from the regular season, or Player #165 from the playoffs? Depending on which they get, the trade will succeed or fail.

Sorry for the late capsules -- spent the weekend in Chapel Hill (and met @CardboardGerald!), had fun, but didn't have as much time for writing as I was perhaps hoping. See you tomorrow.

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 Jason Kidd, Taj Gibson, and Nick Collison.

• • •

_Follow Jason Kidd on Twitter at __@RealJasonKidd.___

I don't like Jason Kidd. At all, really. That doesn't mean I don't respect his game or accomplishments, mind you -- I respect that Jason Kidd was an incredibly good NBA player for an incredibly long time, even if he isn't quite there now. In his prime, Kidd was the best point guard in the league at about the same separation from the pack Chris Paul has today. He was that good. His offenses were brilliant, his defense was incredible, and (while he did have the advantage in playing in one of the least-difficult Eastern Conference slates in the history of the sport) he pushed a team with Kenyon Martin and Richard Jefferson as his other "big three" talents to two consecutive Finals. And it probably should be remembered more often, as well -- they did it in dominating fashion. In 2003, the Nets went on a 10 game playoff win streak, a streak that included sweeping Pierce's Celtics (who they'd faced in the previous year's ECF) in the semifinals and sweeping the would-be dynastic Pistons in the conference finals. In 2002, the Nets were swept in the finals, but after a shaky start against Reggie Miller's Pacers, they went 8-3 in the middle two rounds once again. People tend to think of those Nets teams as fundamentally flawed, and from a championship perspective, this is true -- the best 2 or 3 teams were in the West for every year of Kidd's Nets' reign. But you can only really play the teams in front of you, and from that respect, Kidd's Nets thoroughly dominated the Eastern playoffs. They were a legitimately solid team.

How did Kidd's play contribute to that? If you listen to the Wages of Wins advocates, the main reason Kidd has been elite has been his rebounding. And I think that's fair, in some ways -- he's one of the best rebounders the point guard position has ever seen, and there's a good reason he's got such a ridiculous number of triple doubles. But I think the rebounding is more of an indicator of what he really does well rather than the reason why, per se. Jason Kidd had two big talents, in his prime. The first was that he ran solid offenses that improved the shaky offensive acumen of the players the Nets put around him, and could turn a fundamentally flawed roster into a middling-tier offense in no time flat. They weren't brilliant offenses, and they weren't going to win any awards as pretty or aesthetic, but they got the job done and actively improved the platter of awful players he'd been given to play with. The second was that he was a legitimately game-changing defender -- he could guard up to the large wing without really giving an inch, and he was as tenacious and vicious as they came. He also had (and has, and always will have -- even at the age of 80 in the local YMCA) a spookily effective talent at boxing out smaller players on the defensive end. Usually, he'd box them out so they couldn't receive passes. Which worked well. As a tertiary benefit, though, it also dramatically increases his rebounding totals and makes his stats that much more impressive.

In terms of the modern league, if I had to assess a player most-resembling prime Jason Kidd, it'd probably be Rondo with better offense. Even in his horrendously inefficient scoring prime, Kidd was still a far more dependable scoring option than Rondo. But Kidd suffered some of the same issues as Rondo, wherein his offenses weren't all that great and his main contribution to the team was game-changing defense, and making the players around him statistically better in ways that didn't necessarily translate to a fantastic offense. I also think Kidd's late-career shift to the Mavs is something that could be in Rondo's future, whether he has to change teams or not. Suddenly, when Kidd joined the Mavs, he had better offensive pieces around him than he had at any point in his entire career. He realized that, changed his style a touch, and worked with Rick Carlisle to make the team great. And indeed, they were -- the 2011 Mavericks were one of the best offensive teams of all time, and while I'd give the vast majority of the credit to Dirk, it's hard to deny that Jason Kidd's ability to find the open seam and hit open threes absolutely helped that team make the next-level leap they needed to win a title. Can't someone else see this too? Some situation where, later in his career when he's past his prime, Rondo gets moved to a team with brilliant offensive pieces (or the Celtics actually manage to sign some) and uses his creativity in the pursuit of a fantastic offense? I could see Rondo succeeding in that kind of a capacity later in his career, with Kidd-style triple doubles seemingly every other night as he functions in the same role that Kidd did on the last few years of Maverick teams. (Not this last year -- he was awful this last year, and giving a player his age who just had a terrible year a three year contract might rate as the single stupidest move the Knicks made this offseason. Sort of beside the point, but wanted to throw that in here.)

As for Kidd's personal issues... I started this capsule by saying that I greatly dislike Kidd. He was arrested in 2001 for beating his wife. It wasn't some puffed-up charge, either -- according to testimony and evidence, he didn't simply hit her with fists, but beat her to the ground. Which (to me) is so far beyond disgusting it's hard to comprehend how a human being could do that. He told her he'd get counseling, reportedly continued it after the court-mandated counseling ended, and became active in his local church. Then in 2007 they divorced, with Kidd saying that she had grossly abused him (though offering little evidence outside of one incident where his wife threw a remote at him) and his wife filing a counter-claim saying that he had as recently as a year ago beaten her head into the console of a car, damaged her hearing, and kicked her while she was pregnant. Atop the (relatively benign, but evident) cases of Kidd fathering children with other women and cheating on his wife to a ridiculous degree. And... you know, the DWI he just got not less than 2 months ago. He's 39 years old. You shouldn't be driving drunk no matter what age you are, but once you get past 25 or so, you don't even have a vestige of an excuse for it. He could've killed someone, not least of whom himself. It's absurd. Look. I don't want to pretend like I know Jason Kidd personally, or that I really understand the full story on any of this. But this is terrible, terrible stuff. If even half this stuff is true, Kidd is one hell of an awful person. He gets a lot of good publicity because -- predictably -- he's white, quaint, and reportedly decent to reporters. But off the court there are no shortage of indications that Kidd is one of the absolute worst people in the NBA, and someone who makes just about the worst role model a man could possibly make. So yeah. I don't like him much. Respect his game, sure, but don't conflate that with respect for him as a human being.

• • •

_Follow Taj Gibson on Twitter at __@TajGibson22.___

Taj Gibson is a very solid player. Most people just sort of lump him in with Chicago's bench mob, and to some extent, that's fair -- Chicago's bench has been phenomenally effective during Gibson's time in Chicago, and it's partly the fact that when they come together they produce something better than the sum of its parts. But I feel like people often use that to the detriment of Asik, Gibson, and all the pieces that really make the bench unit good. And that's a massive mistake. Gibson and Asik are very good players in their own right, and as I was saying in the Asik capsule, people underrate Asik's status as an essentially transformative defender. The same is true of Gibson, who has a relatively strong case as being the best defensive power forward in the game today. In 2011, he led all power forwards in Synergy defensive stats -- in 2012, he improved the best defense in the league's defensive rating by (this isn't a typo) 11 points per 100 possessions when he was on the court. Click on that. Scroll down to the on/off stats. Stare in awe, because it's ridiculous. With Gibson on the floor, the Bulls flat-out destroyed teams defensively, and while part of it is the Asik/Gibson effect, part of it is simply that Gibson is an incredibly good defensive player and pretty underheralded for all the things he does. And for those wondering where that effect was in the playoffs? Well, it was still there -- the problem was the offense falling apart without Rose, folks, not the defense. In any real way.

Offensively, Gibson is less of a rock-solid player, but that isn't to say he's bad. Just a bit lacking. His at-rim finishing leaves a little to be desired (conversion rate of 61%), but that settles in right around league average for a big man, which is fine. His big problem is that he doesn't really have much on the offensive end outside of his finishing -- his outside shot is vastly overused by the Bulls, with Thibodeau's system forcing Gibson to spot up outside the paint far too often. This is bad for two reasons. First, he's simply not very good at it -- he shoots in the mid to low 30s from every range outside the immediate rim area (and an almost-there 3-9 foot percentage of 41%), which is pretty awful. This is made worse by the fact that almost 90% of the shots he takes from 10 feet and out are assisted -- these are plays that the Bulls are actually trying to run, and they simply aren't a very good use of Gibson's offensive skillset. In an ideal world, Gibson would be the 4th or 5th best offensive starter on a very good team, called upon for about 5-6 cuts to the rim per game to get him open dunks when necessary. Essentially, he'd be a slightly smaller Anderson Varejao. Very low usage offensively, but a game changing defender and a strong 25-30 MPG player on a great contender.

In general, I really like Gibson. It's partly his game. After all, I love watching his defense -- it's as aesthetically pleasing as it is effective, I think, and it's really fun to watch him going at opposing bigs and mucking up every play he can get his hands on. He's great. But it's also partly personal sympathy -- take a second and read this profile on ESPN, going over the depth of Gibson's personal tragedies during the 2011 season -- three friends dead and his beloved grandfather died of cancer. He coped with basketball, playing his heart out every night in dedication to the ones he'd lost. Absolutely heart wrenching story. And I find it really, really hard to root against a player who had to go through that. Going forward, I admit, it's hard to see how he really improves beyond simply playing more minutes. Gibson is older than most people think, clocking in at just over 27 years old as I write this. To put that in context, he's older than all but three players that'll be suiting up for the Thunder next year -- Thabo, Perkins, and Collison, in case you were wondering who those three are. He'd immediately be one of the older members of that team. But after this contract-year with the Bulls (where he SHOULD get quite a few more minutes than he's gotten the last few years, if Thibs doesn't bury him behind Boozer again) he should get a very decently sized contract, and hopefully, a chance to shine with a franchise that gives him the minutes he deserves. I really look forward to seeing him succeed and finally get the widespread, public validation as an excellent player. Whether it's in Chicago or not. Because he's a fine, fine player. And he really deserves it.

• • •

Follow Nick Collison on Twitter at__ @nickcollison4__.

I really feel like this capsule is going to stir up a hornet's nest for me, so I'm hesitant to write it. While I don't think it's an absolutely controversial opinion, it does stray from the usual tenor of discussing Nick Collison, so I'm probably going to annoy quite a few people with it. Let's start by describing Collison's game. First, he's great at taking charges -- really, really good at getting his head down and setting his feet below the offensive player. He has a great sense of space, and he knows exactly where he needs to slide to make everything work. He's a very good cover on the pick and roll, and does a great job mucking up set plays (even if that often results in leaving his own man open). He fouls a ton -- his per-36 foul rate is high enough that he'd rarely be able to play the full 36 minutes a night. His offense is pretty awful at this point of his career -- he's decent at finishing at-the-rim on criminally low usage, and he's decent at the long two (actually led the PF position at it last season, in an incredibly outlier-type year), but he turns the ball over a lot and he legitimately shoots in the low 20% range from 3-15 feet. He's not an offensive asset, for the most part, because his passing is pretty bad and he tends to turn the ball over if you "feature" him too much. Very solid defender, though. And that's why he gets minutes. Now. Read that description again, think about it, and try to take it out of context.

... Doesn't that sound like Jared Jeffries?

I realize this is kind of like throwing dynamite at a golden goose. Collison is ADORED in most statistical circles -- he's a darling of adjusted +/-, and has been among the league leaders for years. Jeffries... not so much, heh. He's been a clearly positive impact player for the majority of the last few years (and in fact, he had the strongest adjusted defensive +/- on the New York Knicks last season among all serious rotation players), but nothing quite like Collison. But their skillsets are virtually EXACTLY the same. They both take charges, they both are fantastic pick and roll defenders, they're great on help, and they're highly foul-prone players who can't really stay on the court. Neither of them are phenomenal rebounders (actually, they're both awful -- Collison was solid earlier in his career, but he's been pretty bad the last few years) and neither are phenomenal passers (they have virtually equal TO and AST numbers over their entire careers). The only thing Collison really has on Jeffries is that he can finish at the rim, while Jeffries can't. But even then -- Collison generally has a far lower usage rate, and while the difference helps build confidence that Collison is a legitimately better player than Jeffries (and he is, if only a little), it doesn't explain the vast difference in reputation.

I mean, cripes. The Jared Jeffries capsule was basically a laundry list of reasons why I don't care for Jeffries' game. His offense is awful, he's foul prone, his man-to-man defense is bad, et cetera. But how is Nick Collison so much better that he deserves the adoration of the entire basketball media? I realize that it's partly his off-court pursuits -- his twitter account is (in my opinion) one of the funniest and most thoughtful of all the players I've ever followed, his observations on being an NBA player he blogged at GQ are legitimately incredible reads, and he's an actively great person outside his sport. His intelligence and class are probably reason enough for his being assessed as so much better than Jeffries. But the fact remains -- his game and general skillset is virtually the exact equivalent of a player that suffers yearly evisceration at the behest of the New York media, and a player for whom "I Hate Jared Jeffries" campaigns have been started and supported in full. This points to one of two things. Either Collison is pretty dang overrated, or Jeffries is pretty dang underrated. My opinion? A bit of both. Collison isn't nearly the perfect roleplayer most people portray him as. But Jeffries is hardly the worthless flotsam most people portray him as, either.

• • •

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. Yesterday's riddles were funny -- almost everyone got 2/3, but nobody could ace it. Surprised nobody guessed that a Spurs fan would dislike Kidd, heh. Anyhow. Good job to Weagle, Atori, Brian and Chilai for their 2/3 guesses.

• While this Utah player has proven he's a good NBA rebounder, Player #160 hasn't really shown much else. A pity, for such a high pick.
• Why are we calling him Pistol Pete? May have the mop, but Pistol Pete never had defense half this good. Will be a Player Capsule (Plus).
• This Utah player has -- ... why are there so many Utah players at once? What? Anyway. Overrated in #NBARank, but should be a REALLY good player someday.

Again, sorry about the missed day this week. Extraordinarily busy. Get excited for next week, though. I have a ridiculous THREE capsule plus posts next week! Absurd. And one the Monday after! I better get writing those now. Have a good weekend.

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 Dexter Pittman, Mo Williams, and Juwan Howard.

• • •

Follow Dexter Pittman by throwing your entire weight into your friend's neck like a total jerk.

I tend to be a constant advocate of rookies and untested young players over worn down vets. In general, my thought goes, it's better to get new blood in the league and test out new players and styles than it is to rely on the old outmoded folks. If a player is in his mid-to-late twenties (or worse, mid-to-late 30s) without having ever made a cogent leap, signing him to be an end-of-the-bench asset is at the very best going to improve your team in the very short term, but in the long run his spot would be best filled if you rotated D-League talents until you found your own Jeremy Lin, Ben Wallace, or other undrafted gem. It takes more effort, mind you, and a larger focus on the part of the coaching staff and the front office devoted to developing young talent. But when it works right (See: Spurs, San Antonio) you'll have a scouting and player-molding system brilliant enough to keep an aging team with ever-present flaws and problems in constant drumbeat contention. Worse yet is when a player's been bad for two or three seasons and is edging into their late 30s -- you should never, in my view, be giving players like that decent-sized contracts if there's any way to test the waters with young blood, unless you absolutely only have a year or two to win a title with your core (a la the Kobe/Nash/Howard Lakers). If there's any chance you can keep your pieces (ahem, Miami!), you shouldn't waste all your money on vets who are edging ever so close to "fully washed up" -- you should be building a player development arm of the organization that can develop D-League talents to take those spots and excel in them. In my view.

If there's any single player that represents the flaws in that approach, it's probably Pittman. Immature (as we saw with his bush league performance in this year's playoffs), brash, and irrationally bad at basketball -- Pittman has very few NBA talents and has to some extent unreasonably squandered those he had to begin with. When Pittman entered the league, he was monstrously overweight for his relatively lacking height (and it wasn't "overweight with muscle", either). It took him almost two years to get his conditioning to an NBA-caliber level, and by the time he'd done that, the league had to some degree left him completely behind. In the meanwhile, he tried his hand at the D-League. He put up reasonably decent numbers (around 14 and 8 per game) but somehow managed to foul once every 7 minutes in the D-League. Generally, if you foul like that at the D-League level, you'll foul even quicker in the NBA -- this proved apt, as over his whole NBA career, Pittman is good for a foul every 4 minutes he stays on the court. His field goal percentage on right-at-the-rim shooting was OK (not phenomenal, and still below average, but above 60% is OK for a backup big man), but he simply can't do anything outside the immediate vicinity of the basket. No real success at post moves, absolutely no jump shot (and a tepid conversion rate from behind the free throw line), and poor NBA-level height and athleticism. Pittman's defense is, as well, pretty dang atrocious. He can't really cover NBA big men and he can't really guard the pick and roll. Even though he's gigantic, he can't even set very good screens unless he plays dirty. It's a rough picture for him.

The thing is, Pittman is still a better traditional big man than several of the abhorrent options the Heat have in their wheelhouse -- mainly, he can cogently outplay Juwan Howard and his game is far superior to Eddy Curry. Because of that, he can get a few minutes and show his "value" to the Heat by simply keeping those two off the court. But Pittman doesn't really bring anything to the table that you don't get from Turiaf (essentially a 100% upgrade to Pittman in every concievable fashion), he certainly doesn't outplay Udonis Haslem, and he's well short of Joel Anthony even on Joel's worst day. Compound that with the always-bears-repeating bush league hit he placed in last year's playoffs (which I maintain he should've gotten a LOT more time for -- that hit was about as dirty as hits come, and could've legitimately ended another player's career), and you have the absolute worst example of a player picked up as a young piece to complement stars. He doesn't seem to work particularly hard, he doesn't seem to care about the implications of his actions, and he doesn't seem to have enough talent to really stick in the league. In any development process you'll get a few bad apples, or talents that simply aren't what you expected they'd be. That's Pittman, I suppose. His failures don't really waver me from my general inclination towards higher D-League participation and fewer outmoded vets. But if anyone would do so, it'd probably be someone like him.

• • •

_Follow Mo Williams on Twitter at __@mowilliams._

Did you know that for a fleeting period of his career with the Cavaliers, Mo Williams was the Cavaliers' franchise leader in something important? Seriously. This is something I realized near the middle of the Cavs' nightmare 2011 season, as I tried to figure out how the players were feeling. I'm pretty sure Austin Carr mentioned it once, as well, as though he wasn't sure if it was still accurate but noted that it had been accurate at some point. I did the legwork, checked the numbers, and found that it actually checked out. So, the fact in question -- for a not-insignificant portion of Mo Williams' career, he was the Cavaliers' franchise leader in free throw percentage. Crazy, huh? The leader (predictably) is who was in a time before Mo -- Mark Price. With the Cavs, Price went 1883 for 2078 on his free throws -- that's 90.6%, which is an insane figure on that many tries. Most franchises don't have anyone in their history who was quite that good from the line. Mo, though -- Mo was. For a time. His first season with the Cavaliers, he took a relatively large 222 free throws (primarily by taking every possible technical, and drawing a decent number of fouls). He shot 91.2% on them. Eldritch. Thus, after his first complete season (you needed at least one full season for the leaderboard), Mo Williams had literally supplanted Mark Price as the player with the franchise-best Cavalier-career free throw percentage.

But there's a point to this story beyond the silly trivia. As I looked back, I realized that he'd lost the crown during the Cavs' ill-fated 2010 season. Realizing this, I wanted to see when Williams took the single missed free throw where Williams dropped behind Price, never to return to the top again. I wondered whether that individual game would make for a good case study. The harder I looked, the more hilarious the picture I found: Mo Williams actually lost the title extremely early in the 2010 season, but kept fighting back to take the lead from Price every couple games. For most of the season, essentially any missed free throw would make Williams jump behind Price, and any 5-of-5 type day would vault him fleetingly beyond Price. This back and forth went on for the entire 2010 season, with Mo taking his last ever lead over Price on April 8th, 2010, in an absolutely excellent 35-point 10-assist contest (yes, Mo Williams had a 35-10 game) against the Chicago Bulls. He went 5-of-5 from the line, 6-11 from three, and 12-24 from the field overall. It was a good day. Then, as luck would have it, Mo Williams missed two free throws on the closing night of the 2010 NBA season, taking his career Cavalier free throw percentage down to 90.3% and forever taking second place to Price's ridiculous accomplishment. As things probably should be, all things considered.

Still, you have to wonder if Mo knew about it. Given that Austin Carr did -- and given how often Austin Carr blabs about random statistical accomplishments when interviewing players -- you have to assume Carr told him. Did it bother him somewhat that every single night he performed at a less-than-perfect level from the line, he was essentially putting a small place in franchise history on the chopping block? There's something fundamentally strange about contextualizing the performance of excellent free throw shooters like Williams, Nash, and Price. We act like every player should shoot 70-80% from the line, but when you get up to a level above 90%, you're starting to reach levels of consistent absurdity that honestly boggle my mind. Every 10 times you go up to the line, you miss ONCE. You experience more absolutely perfect games from behind the line than you do games where you miss more than a single shot. And think about the free throw itself -- it's the single area of the game where the offensive player is completely and utterly alone. Sometimes there are players around him (except in the case of the technical, which represents the ultimate desolation you can exact on a single player in an NBA game), sometimes there are fans screaming at him, but the actual action of the free throw -- the dribble, the cup, the follow -- are all as untouched as they can possibly be. No defense can touch the free throw. No hands extended, no stoppers, nothing.

It's the single area of basketball where the sport feels like baseball, in my view. There are so many moments in a baseball game that essentially distill the game down to a single performer. The catch in outfield, the pitcher's wind up, the batter post-release -- a baseball team may have a lot of component pieces, but when you look at the component parts, it's a lonely game. In some ways, I think the loneliness and isolation of baseball both represents the main reasons it spent so long being considered "America's national pastime" and the main reason it's rapidly hemorrhaging popularity -- much like how Thoreau's Walden reads as an insane tract of a ridiculous outmoded ideal to most modern teenagers, in an era where we're so interconnected that we can barely imagine true isolation, the desolation of baseball is harder to stomach and harder to watch for people today than people many years ago. The free throw hearkens back to baseball, and while it's easy to point to a player and say "you should do this better", when you actually look at a player who not only does it better but actually does it to a level that approaches an all-time greatness, you wonder how the hell they actually do it. Physically, you can imagine they just have a very pure stroke. (And in the case of Williams, you'd be right -- he has one of the best shooting strokes in the league, and it's beautiful to watch him shoot just about anything.) But what about the mental implications? Does a good free throw stroke mean that a player would thrive in a one-on-one game, or a game of horse? Is it indicative of something deeper -- could Mo Williams be the single player in the league who'd excel playing basketball in the vastness of space?

Or could the loneliness of the action -- the singular quality of the free throw, or moreso, the technical -- be lost in the sheer surfeit of souls that fills a sports stadium? It's a fair question to ask -- does Mo draw strength from the crowds, or strength from the action's loneliness? Imagine Mo Williams, the last man on Earth. He enters an empty gym, somehow armed with the knowledge that if he makes a single technical free throw, the whole world is saved. He takes a dribble. The gym, of course, is empty. The lights are bright. Outside, asteroids rain down from the heavens and flames lick the countryside. There is a flicker in his mind. A thought. A bead of sweat. Tension. He takes his dribble, grabs the ball, and looks up. As he's done a thousand times before, he rises from the crouch. He releases the ball, with his signature flick. His eyes are closed on the release, sublime in perfect confidence. He steps back as though to dap his teammates, the dead and gone who were never relevant in the first place. He opens his eyes to gaze upon the ball rising through the air, and careening towards the immaculate basket. A fleeting reminder of man's imperfections before death takes the last, or another in Mo's assembly line of expected successes?

And thus, Mo Williams lost the record. Second place, forevermore.

• • •

Follow Juwan Howard by buying a telegraph and saying hello.

One of the underrated stories from the Heat's championship, to me, was Juwan Howard finally achieving (in his now-sparkling championship ring) some level of personal validation for a long, lucrative career where he'd never been completely able to really deliver on the incredible promise he showed as a child. Despite forming arguably one of the first-ever modern superteams with the Fab Five at Michigan (and subsequently attempting to form a superteam in Miami only to be thwarted by a series of not-necessarily fair applications of cap rules), Howard had never touched a championship trophy up until now. Nor had any of the Fab Five. If Howard retires now -- and all indications are that he will -- the fact that the Fab Five's last fossil achieved a ring on the backs of the most modern and overwhelming superstar team in the league is actually a pretty neat story. Deadspin's Barry Petchesky wrote one of the best pieces on the finals covering this angle, in fact -- I beg you to read it. It's really good.

Beyond that, one of the interesting things about the Heat's title (and as a Cleveland fan, there weren't many) was watching what the hell Juwan Howard would do if he actually tasted the championship bubbly. The answer? Ridiculous, ridiculous things. I'm talking "hey, guys, remember the 90s" dancing on national TV during the title celebration. I'm talking rapping with Rick Ross. I'm talking trying to fight John Wall because that's how they played basketball in the 1940s. Wait, that happened way before he won a title. Well, crap. Look. Juwan Howard is 86 and a half years old, okay? Dude has a walking cane, as you can tell by this unbelievably credible source. Back in the old days (like, before sliced bread) they used to play basketball a certain way but you can't really play that way today because the balls aren't made of fig leaves and the points actually do matter. Sorry, Juwan. I know you played the president on West Wing or whatever but you need to chill out about this stuff before someone gets hurt. Like, probably you, dude. Your back is killing me now. No reason to be whipping out your dance move (singular) while you rap with Rick Ross about the virtues of handkerchiefs and hit Erik Spolestra with your walking stick because he doesn't know how to use a threshing machine. Come on. Not cool. Just stay calm, man. Or, as some might say -- chill out, Juwan Howard.

(And enjoy retirement, if you do retire. Juwan seems like a pretty decent guy, jokes aside.)

• • •

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. After almost a week of straight perfectos, yesterday's guesses were a bit rough. Someone got each of them right, but nobody got every one of them. Tie to Brian, Jkim, and "Chilai out, Juwan Howard." New batch for tomorrow:

• There are very few people in the league I legitimately despise writing about. Player #157 is one of them.
• He's older than most people think, but Player #158 should still command a high price when his Bulls contract runs out.
• The white Jared Jeffries. Hilarious, witty, and a patently decent player. But -- it's true -- perhaps a bit overheralded for his skills.

Again, apologies for yesterday's absence. I am way too busy lately. Been in the office for 10-12 hours a day, and have work to do at home besides. Also, I'm livetweeting the first console game I'm ever playing (Red Dead Redemption) -- follow me on Twitter if you want to hear a man screaming about cougars from about 9-11 every night, like clockwork. See you tomorrow.

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 Derrick Williams, Darius Morris, and Joel Anthony.

• • •

_Follow Derrick Williams on Twitter at __@RealDwill7.___

What if Derrick Williams could shoot? This is a big question that I (among many others, hat tip to Haberstroh) often ask when watching him ply his wares. Last season, in late February, the world was treated to a fine example of what that would look like -- he shot 9-10 against the hapless Clippers, powerless to stop a brutal onslaught of threes, free throws, and short post moves. It was a great performance, made all the more interesting by looking at the other players on his team -- other than Beasley, there were virtually no Timberwolves players that played all that well, including the entire starting lineup. Kevin Love put up 10-7 on sub-40% shooting. Ricky Rubio posted 9 assists to go with 2 points, in a relatively absent performance. Pekovic only played 22 minutes for a reason -- he looked bad. But on the back of Williams and Beasley, the Wolves upset a Clippers team that sported stellar nights from Griffin, Paul, and Jordan (seriously, look at his line). If nothing else, the performance demonstrates that when Derrick Williams is making shots, the entire complexion of the Timberwolves changes. Suddenly the margin of error is wrenched open, and even with the customary Timberwolves shaky defense, the offense is so good that just about every key piece can have a decidedly "meh" game and still go home with a victory. On the road. In the Staples Center!

Of course, there's a reason I framed the question as a curious "what if" statement instead of a simple "isn't that great" assertion. Up until now, Williams hasn't really displayed a strong ability to shoot. Actually, he's displayed the exact opposite. Despite making three three-pointers in one night for that excellent performance, over the entire rest of the season (65 games, 1390 minutes) he made only 34 more. This is despite playing most of his minutes with either Ricky Rubio (whose passing needs no introduction) or J.J. Barea (whose passing was actually relatively excellent on the Wolves this year, and spent a ton of time on the floor looking for Williams and trying to get him the ball). The average Derrick Williams night -- outside of that incredible one I linked above -- featured significantly less than one made three on two attempts a contest. That number is even worse than you might imagine -- of his 37 made threes on the season, 36 of them were assisted. This isn't some example of an excellent shot maker that isn't being set-up correctly -- all but one of Williams' made three pointers came off an assist, which tends to indicate a naturally poor level of shooting. Bad news.

If I had to pick a single comparable player, I'd probably pick Jeff Green. Completely forgotten in most assessments of the so-called Thunder model, Green represents something of the dark side of tweeners and athleticism (even if Boston is paying him as though he's a minor star). In Green, you have an undersized tweener that isn't really sized properly to play the wing, but sure as hell can't play the four in a reasonable lineup. He has yet to play a big role on an actual contending team -- he was always the limiting factor in Oklahoma City, whose only real purpose seemed to be keeping the far better Serge Ibaka off the court. That's exactly where Williams stands, unless he bulks up or fixes his shot. Like Williams, Green took a lot of awful jumpers and made astonishingly few of them, with the exception of a few shining moments that tended to give false confidence to his fans and make the Thunder wary of giving up on him. Williams is a bit of a better rebounder than Green was his rookie season (which makes it more likely he could someday ACTUALLY swing to the four rather than pretend to), and is less prone to turnovers and stupid fouls. Green was a bit better at creating an unassisted shot (40% of Green's made shots were unassisted -- with Williams, the percentage was 32%). Pick your poison, if you will.

But overall, if you're trying to figure out how Williams career projects out, I'd say a slightly better-on-the-boards Jeff Green is about as good as you'll get. Not with a shot as busted as his looks, anyway. It's possible that you could've seen this coming if you'd really thought about his skillset as he left college -- while he made over 50% of his three pointers in the 2011 Arizona season, he didn't shoot all that well from the long midrange in college and was coming off a first year in college where he made just 25%. Couple that with his collegiate free throw percentage (around 70%) and you don't really have an image of a sparkling, flawless shooter. His skillset indicated he'd be an athletic tweener whose size could hamper his defense until he learns to use his body properly at an NBA level. His rebounding was solid but not exceptional, his offense good but not incredible. There were simply a lot of questions as he made the leap as to what position he'd play, where he'd operate on the court, and how his game would adjust if he wasn't a great shooter. But most people simply shrugged it off, assumed he'd be able to shoot, and went with it -- some even chastised and eviscerated the Cavaliers for taking Kyrie Irving (a player whose college play DID legitimately indicate he was going to be a star in the NBA) over Derrick Williams. If Williams could develop a reliable shot, he could be a brilliant player. Up until now, though, he hasn't. And if he never does? Well, I'll be honest with you -- it's pretty hard to see where he really fits in the league.

• • •

_Follow Darius Morris on Twitter at __@dariusmorris4._

Darius Morris is a phenomenal three point shooter. Just ridiculous. Did you know that he made 44% of his threes in the 2012 season, 16th overall in the NBA? Ridiculous! It would be even more ridiculous and impressive if Morris hadn't taken just 9 threes in the entire season. But eve-- ... wait, he only took nine threes? Alright, cancel the effusive praise. Most people have a general understanding of randomness and the problem with small sample sizes, but let's use this as a teaching example -- had Morris made just a single less three, that percentage would've dropped to 33%, pedestrian at best. Had he made two less threes, he'd have shot a disturbingly bad 22% on the season. I've heard a lot of my Laker-loving friends refer with hushed reverence over the past few months to Morris' three point shooting mark. And I agree, 44% is very good. But with just nine shots, it's hardly an accurate reflection of Morris as a player, and his sub-40% shooting on non three point shots would tend to indicate that his ACTUAL proficiency for threes at an NBA level might be significantly lower. His form looks relatively solid, but given his college numbers and his general profile I'd dial back on the insane faith, just a touch. Speaking of college, Morris was a pretty good player there. At least in 2011 -- he scored 15 a night on just-under-50% shooting and ran the offense well, fueling a solid Michigan team to a near-upset of favored Duke and getting out of the college grind while the going was good. He proceeded to get drafted early in the second round, signing a minimum deal with the Lakers.

He didn't light the world on fire in his first year, although it's worth mentioning that Morris hardly got the chance to do it. Very few minutes for this guy. We'll see how he does next year with an extra dose of Nash and a full training camp to get acquainted with everyone. He could potentially be a big benefit for the Lakers, if he can bring his play up beyond that of Chris Duhon and get Nash some rest. On the "hopeful" side, he was pretty good in this year's summer league, showing off additional weight (crucial to becoming a real NBA-size player) and an ability to look better against lesser competition (he was the Lakers' best player, on a summer league team with Goudelock and Sacre). On the "not so hopeful" side, much like Derrick Williams, if you take out a single great performance (a 9-of-9 shooting night against the Summer Swaggin' Spurs) his numbers get significantly worse (a ridiculously bad 27% from three over the summer and -- if you take out his 9-for-9 night -- an astonishingly bad 25% from the field overall). While his numbers look fine in the aggregate, if shooting like that reflects his true talent level in the NBA, Morris isn't going to be long for the league. Worth noting, though -- from my eye-test level, he's finally gotten his fitness up to a place where he'll be able to take the grind of a full NBA season. If he has the skillset to be an actual NBA player, his fitness certainly won't keep him off the court this year, which is a good sign for Morris fans.

• • •

_Follow _Joel Anthony's example and live at the gym__.____

Believe it or not, Joel Anthony has a really compelling life story. In the first place, Anthony learned basketball from books. Not coaches, not Jordan -- books. The whole story is really neat, and I highly recommend this profile courtesy of Tom Haberstroh of the Heat Index -- long story short, there weren't any nearby coaches he could rely on when he picked up the game of basketball at the age of 16 after a growth spurt, and all he really had was a book with Alonzo Mourning on the cover. Seriously. He learned basketball from the pages of that book, and modeled his game off Alonzo Mourning's because he felt like shot blocking was a thing he could do. Anthony was cut from the first college team he tried out for, joined an AAU team, and ended up transferring to UNLV where he'd eventually make a sweet 16. Anthony never got drafted, and ended up getting picked up through an impressive summer camp with the Miami Heat. He has a really solid work ethic, which is something you really need if you're going to make it as an undrafted player in the NBA.

The more you think about it, the crazier the whole ordeal becomes -- Anthony picked up the game of basketball at the age of 16, which means it took him only 5 to 6 years to become one of the best few hundred basketball players on the planet. It would be like me, at my tender age of 22, randomly deciding I wanted to be a professional pianist and becoming one of the hundred or so best piano players in the world within 6 years. The amount of work it would take to do that would boggle the mind, and the amount of work it did take for Anthony to succeed boggles just as well. The sad thing is that despite how far Anthony's hard work got him, it's still not enough to guarantee success in the league. And it doesn't erase some of the fundamental flaws that weaken and cripple his overall game. Well, the one fundamental flaw -- because it's really a single problem that infects every element of his game. It's his hands. They're oddly proportioned and his hand-eye coordination isn't very good for an NBA player, no matter how hard he works at it.

This results in several huge problems for Anthony. First, he can barely catch the ball. LeBron, Wade, and Chalmers need to aim their passes to an absolute pinpoint level for Anthony to successfully corral them. Most players master the art of catching when they're young, but when you start the game of basketball at 16 and learn it from a book with no coach to drill you, you don't really get the chance to master that. Second, rebounds often pop out of Anthony's hands, which is a problem -- again, catching. Third, he's a poor finisher, mostly because of his hands. Those dang hands. Last year, Anthony got a lot of dap as a humongous defensive presence for the Heat. As I like Anthony personally it pains me to say this, but I have to disagree. He's a fantastic shot blocker, arguably the best in the league, but I don't love his general defensive game at all. He fronts on the pick and roll relatively well, but he's undersized for the position and can't body up larger players. His offensive limitations (and they're huge limitations, don't cut corners) make him hard to play unless he's in a situation where the other team's playing smallball and he can't get overpowered at the rim. He's too slow to bother large forwards but too small to cover fives. It's tough. If it wasn't for his shot blocking and his excellent weakside help, there wouldn't really be any reason to play him at all.

Which leads us to one of the most curious statistics I've ever come across. I don't know if this is the first time this has ever happened -- it probably isn't -- but it has to be rare. The 2011 Heat started Joel Anthony every single game of the 2011 finals. He averaged 21 minutes a contest and never played less than 10. Want to know how many minutes Joel Anthony played in the 2012 finals? Two. He played two minutes in game one, then he never saw the court again. I can't think of any situation where a team with very little roster churn went from starting a player -- who at the time hadn't even entered his 30s -- every single game of one year's finals to playing him a grand total of two minutes in the next year's finals. It speaks to the Heat's total realignment of how they played their stars, and the generally good job Spolestra did in finding the weak spots in the Heat rotations and fixing them. Even if it meant -- in some ways -- completely leaving a hard working player behind. While I hope Anthony recoups a bit this year, at this point, what you see is essentially what you get. A loveable gym rat who works incredibly hard but due to his one fundamental flaw can't really see the floor when the chips are down for a title team. More than any other Heat player, I'm happy he got a ring. I just wish he'd been able to contribute a larger part to it, after all his time with the franchise and all the work it took him to get there.

• • •

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 was our only 3/3 yesterday, which pushes his overall riddle record to a ridiculous 9/9. Jkim: who gave you the power to directly look into my mind?

• Every year, there seems to be one classless jerk who makes their franchise look like fools with an overly rough play in a playoff situation. Unfortunately, this one (Player #154) has a ring now.
• Someday, at the end of the world, there will be an empty gym. To the mellow tones of John Legend music, Player #155 will take the technical free throw to save the human race. Unfortunately for him, given his years on the Cavs as reference, he'll miss.
• Come on. Chill out, Player #156. That strut isn't impressing anybody.

Anyone catch yesterday's U.S. Open epic? One of the greatest tennis matches I've had the pleasure of watching. Congratulations to Andy Murray on a well deserved victory.

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 Andrew Goudelock, Brian Scalabrine, and Ben Wallace.

• • •

_Follow Andrew Goudelock on Twitter at __@3goudelock.___

There's not a ton to say about Goudelock. It's not necessarily that he lacks the talent to play in the league, but he's really not getting the time to really say whether or not he does. Uncertainty is the name of the game. Laker fans may cry foul and point to his run of good games early last season, scoring (in succession) 14, 13, 12, and 13 points in late January and early February. I'd refute that by noting that even in that stretch, Goudelock was criminally undersized for his position and incredibly permissive on the defensive end. For the stretches he had to play point guard, he was a relatively awful passer -- he doesn't have the next level court vision that makes an NBA point guard successful, and his dribble is pretty shaky too. He throws these awful telegraphed passes that are both easy to pick off and inefficient even when they work. He's only a two-guard because he really has nowhere else to go -- his defense is so awful he couldn't possibly play the three spot, and with passing like this, he's about as effective at the one as Kobe would be at the five. Still, theoretically, he's a decent player -- he has the gusto to create his own shot against taller and rangier players, and the ability to make quite a few. He shot 37% from three last season, which is rather excellent in a system that featured no real point guards for the majority of his minutes -- it's not hard to imagine Steve Nash upping a spot-up shooter like Goudelock's percentage to 40 or over, if Nash is still good next year.

Unfortunately for Goudelock, that probably isn't going to happen. The ongoing crunch for playing time looks to get even worse this season. Last year, he was only really "challenged" in the rotation jam for Kobe's off-minutes by Steve Blake. More specifically, Mike Brown's lock-him-in-an-asylum type fixation on playing Steve Blake as an off guard. This year, though? The Lakers picked up Jodie Meeks, a player who is essentially superior to Goudelock in every single area of the court Goudelock excels at. There's not a single minute without Kobe that wouldn't be better-suited for Meeks on the court over Goudelock. Hence the problem. This could've been avoided if Chris Grant had told the Lakers he wasn't taking Walton's contract without Goudelock instead of Kapono -- it wouldn't have really harmed the Lakers' rotation at all, and as a primary backup in Cleveland with a great point guard, I get the sense Goudelock could've fit a lot better and gotten quite a few more minutes. Not to mention he'd sport the most fundamentally sound three-point shot that Kyrie Irving had ever played with, other than... well... Kyrie Irving's. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way, and Glock fans are going to be forced to sit through a -- frankly -- excruciating season as they wait for the Lakers to either trade him away or waive him for a roster spot. Because on this team, I'd be shocked if Goudelock played more than 2-5 minutes every other night. Rough times. Godspeed, Andrew.

• • •

_Follow Brian Scalabrine by stealing the show from Paul Pierce, one last time__._

I admit, I was a bit lost on ideas for this capsule. How does one distill down the complex mix of respect and mockery that make up the soft-serve swirl of Brian Scalabrine's relationship with his fans? Luckily, in a relatively unrelated conversation last night with my good friend Dave Murphy, the inimitable Lauri brought to my attention a rather amazing little piece that made clear the way forward. It was sufficiently absurd to get my attention -- it's essentially an ode to the Totino's Party Pizza, a 99 cent mockery of the concept of pizza available in frozen food aisles everywhere. For those who aren't familiar with the "party pizza", don't let the advertisement fool you. It's hardly a party at all, at least in the traditional sense. It's a personal-sized pizza with a relatively thin crust, less-than-real cheese, and a mysterious red sauce that may or may not contain more tomatoes than salt. If you were to actually try and serve this pizza at a party, I'm pretty sure the first question would be one of the other partygoers wondering how exactly they're supposed to cut a 10 inch pizza to feed more than a single person. It isn't really party food, unless you somehow have an oven big enough to make one of these things for every single guest at your party. (On second thought, that would be a hilarious party. Someone do that.)

As for Scalabrine? His career-high PER was achieved last year, where Scalabrine put up a still-below-average PER of 13 in just 122 minutes over the entire season. Beyond that, Scalabrine's only had a single other year in double digits. Which is pretty abominable -- a PER above 15 is above average, but a PER below 10 is gutter-level. Very tough. If you examine the stats (or, alternatively, watch any game film whatsoever of Scalabrine's game) you'll start to see why. He's simply not an NBA player -- there's this sense watching him that he stumbled into a draft room drunk as a skunk and won a game of poker with a team's front office, forcing them to sign him to pay off their poker debt. People would argue that he was better when he was younger, but I don't really buy that -- he had a few decent performances when he was younger, like this 29-10 explosion against a permissive Golden State defense. But his game was still fundamentally flawed. He was never all that far removed from where he is now, a plodding and unathletic white tweener with a talent for self-promotion that's as bountiful as his basketball abilities are minimal. You never really looked at Brian Scalabrine and thought "wow, this is a guy who I'd trust to be a starter on a contending team." You never really looked at him and got the idea he'd even be a serviceable bench player -- you got the image of a guy that, if he wanted to be good, would have to be playing big minutes next to one of the greatest point guards of his generation (Jason Kidd, in his early career) or be playing insane minutes for a team that's so bad they're feeding him the ball like he's Kobe.

The real key with the pizza -- and the reason something like that deserves an ode at all -- is that there's a weird mental grip that the Tontino's Party Pizza has on the minds of those who ate it. When I eat it, I tend to think not of the taste. I think of how delightfully inexpensive the pizzas are, and all those times I had it as a kid. I'm not at a place in life where I really need to rely on 99 cent pizzas, but on the rare occasion I get a chance to eat one, I generally reflect on the days of my youth. Those days where I'd want something to eat but didn't know how to cook, so I'd fire up the oven and put a Totino's pizza in. Those days where I began to expect that all pizza would have a terrible crust like the one out of every freezer, and became faintly disappointed when they didn't. When you eat something often enough, it moves the focus of your taste buds away from "food that's tasty" and towards "food that resembles." Some call it building up your palette, but it's easy to forget that you can build a palette in the opposite direction as well. You can eat bad food often enough to make your mind think bad food's good and good food's bad. That whole concept of a flexible palette is useful for understanding why Brian Scalabrine inspires such hilariously fierce loyalty among his fans. He's the Totino's Party Pizza of the NBA. When you distill him to the core, that's exactly what he is.

Sure, you can focus on the hilarious negatives. The crust tastes exactly like the corrugated cardboard it's packaged in. The cheese is explicitly stated to be "less than 100% real." The sauce would make any other pizza curl up and die. But you know what? It's still actually really tasty. Call it nostalgia, call it my thriftiness, call it a perfect blend of every awful individual component into more than the sum of its parts. Whatever you want to call it, I'm game. But the Totino's Party Pizza was an absolutely essential part of my youth. In the same way, Brian Scalabrine is an essential part of the NBA to quite a lot of people. He's got a bunch of ridiculous component parts -- the incomprehensibly silly shots, the reporter-insulting (but also hilarious) postgame interviews, the utter inability to contribute as a true rotation player in the NBA. But he combines it all in a way that's a bit more than the sum of its parts. He's cheap, so fans don't really need to view his salary as detrimental to the team. And he has enough showmanship to make his garbage time minutes into a hilarious ball-dominating tour de force. No, Scalabrine isn't a good player -- it's an open question whether he's been a player at all over the last few years. No, the Totino's Party Pizza isn't a good pizza -- it's an open question whether it's been a pizza at all, ever. But both rise above their somewhat pathetic appearance on-paper and become important despite themselves. Hilariously so.

Long story short? I'm no big fan or anything, but yes, I'm going to miss Scalabrine. I hope he's a good press analyst.

• • •

_Follow _Ben Wallace's law career on "Boston Legal" reruns__.____

Man, I like Ben Wallace. There are some players that I am incomprehensibly fond of, and Wallace is one of them. It's true that I'd probably hate him to the core if the Pistons had beaten the Spurs for the 2005 title -- the degree to which Wallace was allowed to abuse Duncan and Mohammad without any calls whatsoever from the referees was objectionable, and aggravating. But the Spurs pulled it out, so I was free to continue appreciating Wallace from afar. I suppose the beginning of my fond feelings came the year before, when Wallace put the brakes on Shaquille O'Neal and dominated the 2004 finals. Always enjoy a defensively dominant big in the NBA, and there's no big that defines that better than an in-his-prime Big Ben. Aggressive enforcer with a knack for getting under everyone's skin. Great stuff. That's only on defense, mind you. On offense, Big Ben is one big bust. Can't shoot anything, despite the fact that he drills jumpers regularly in practice and works on his shot tirelessly. His free throw form in particular has been a joke around the league for years. If you set him up right, he can finish a basket or two. But wasting too many offensive possessions trying to set him up is obscenely unwise.

On the subject of unwise, many people point to his Bulls tenure as an example as to why Wallace isn't that great of a player, or isn't that important. I find this somewhat absurd. The Bulls underperformed expectations with Wallace because they wanted him to provide offense, for reasons that boggle my mind. That's doomed to fail, no matter how much money you give Wallace -- you don't put him on the floor because you want offense, you put him on the floor because you want to shut the other team down with a big man that's a nonfactor on the offensive end. He's one of the main people responsible for the Detroit Pistons' charge at greatness earlier in the 2000s -- and they were legitimately great, overall the 3rd best franchise in the aughts and #4 isn't supremely close. They made the eastern conference finals from 2003 to 2008, and other than 07 and 08, all of those were with Ben Wallace playing a crucial part. He was a huge part of that team. There's a bit of an irritating scab, for me, related to Wallace. It has to do with his short tenure with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2009. Most people think Wallace was a failure with the Cavaliers. Hogwash. Wallace was actually really, really good to start the season with the 2009 Cavaliers -- the pock on his Cavalier legacy isn't anything under his control, really, but the unfortunate injury he suffered midway through the 2009 season that really messed the Cavaliers' season up. Part of the reason the 2009 Cavs had such a dominant regular season was that early in the year, with Ben Wallace healthy, it was essentially impossible to stop their defense.

No matter how big your center was or how crafty your point guard was, Wallace bolstered the interior defense to such a degree that it was hard to even get entry passes into the post. The Cavs lost this game, but if you ever get a chance, watch some footage of Wallace on Howard in this contest. I distinctly remember being impressed with the way Wallace kept Dwight Howard from getting to his spots and making life difficult on the inbounders that wanted to isolate him -- Dwight was the only Orlando player with a negative +/-, and the dominant Varejao/Wallace pairing is essentially the reason for it. It seemed like a good omen for the incoming playoffs, to me. Of course, then the injury happened. Wallace returned to action for the first game of the playoffs, and it was pretty obvious from game #1 that something was wrong. Wallace was the absolute worst player on that team in the 2009 playoffs, and I maintain that if Wallace had been anywhere close to healthy, the Cavs would've rolled in the ECF. No, when he was healthy he couldn't cover Howard one-on-one, but nobody really could -- he would've made it a lot harder for the Magic to simply dump it to Howard every other possession, and he would've kept the Magic's cutters and drivers like Courtney Lee from getting to the rim. Instead, he was a shell of his former self, still tentative from injury and unable to make those split-second movements that define his usual defense. So his defense was useless, which compounded with his offensive incompetence to produce a player that was legitimately harmful in every way (as opposed to a healthy Ben Wallace, who was a player that helped in a big way.) I really think the Cavs would've won that series. Seriously.

Especially looking at what he's done since then, on the Detroit Pistons. After a summer to recover from the injury, Big Ben was back to his same old ways -- defensively great, offensively shaky -- just in limited minutes and with less of a big picture impact on defense. He's no longer going to singlehandedly shut down a team, but he's still the Pistons' most valuable defensive player even at the age of 38, and I'd imagine they'll actually see some falloff when they finally move on from the Wallace era. He's been very consistent. Until Greg Monroe's rise late in 2011, it was hard to argue against the idea that Wallace wasn't their best player. My hope early on was that Wallace's mentorship would help Monroe blossom from the offensively dominant but defensively depleted big man he's been into a simply dominant one -- alas, Wallace hasn't helped much, and Monroe has maintained as one of the league's worst defensive big men (even if he has a strong center and he looks like he should be better). Fun fact: Ben Wallace wants to be a lawyer after he gets out of the NBA. He plans to use the money from his last few contracts to pay for law school and become a Detroit lawyer. This was a thing, and it's still a thing. Among the basketball fan contingent, I fully expect to see an increase in basketball-related crimes in the Detroit area once he passes the bar, hoping beyond hope that they'll be represented by Ben Wallace. Hell, I almost want to do that. Watch out, Juries.

• • •

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. TON of 3/3 guesses last week, as well as some totally clown guesses. Adam Koscielak was first with a three-spot, followed by Jkim (still undefeated!) and ... we'll assume these three are what "Ghost of HDS" meant, I suppose.

• "No, really guys. Cavs have made a big mistake. Shoulda taken Player #151." (Most people pretend they never thought this.)
• What is it with all these marginal Lakers guards? Player #152 is about as marginal as you get, and I'm going to need to watch a bunch of film to remember how he plays.
• Player #153 went from starting in the NBA Finals to playing a grand total of two minutes and six seconds in a five game series. Oh, how the "mighty" have fallen.

Lot of work this week, so capsules may have a few late days. Apologies.