A "footnote title" respects the champion while also acknowledging that, "Look, SOMETHING funky happened and you can't discuss that postseason in detail without mentioning that one funky thing."

-- Bill Simmons, The Footnote Title

The other day, when Derrick Rose was injured, Bill Simmons tweeted a curious tweet. He said that the 2012 title was officially an "asterisk" title. I was a bit confused by this. I'm of the opinion that if you squint hard enough, you'll fail to find a single NBA champion who didn't play in a season where something funky disqualified a strong contender. We love to delve its pores for meaning, but sports is primarily a game of ephemera and luck. When your team wins the title, they deserved it essentially as much as any other, and relied on luck essentially as much as any other. According to Bill, quite literally every Spurs title deserves a footnote, as he stated outright the reasons that each and every championship they've ever won was fishy. This was a pretty big come-to-Jesus moment for me -- if my team's titles aren't really titles, well, damn, what does anything mean anymore? I feel like I've come out of the experience a better, more nihilistic person, fast approaching @NickFlynt levels. Given that this was helpful to me in my personal development, I figured I'd do our readers a solid and help fans of every team that's ever won the title learn why their titles can't be discussed without important, team-degrading footnotes.

• • •

One footnote I was actually shocked that Simmons didn't mention was the pall hanging over his beloved Celtics during the Auerbach tenure. One of the most underreported and understated stories from the Red-and-Russ era was the pernicious facilities tampering that Red engaged in for virtually his entire tenure as coach. I'm not talking about small-scale stuff, either -- Auerbach openly admitted after he'd retired that while he was a coach and General Manager, he did a number of things to make sure the Celtics had the absolute most home court advantage they possibly could. This includes (but is in no way limited to):

• Redirecting the Garden's sewage system into the visiting team's water fountain. (Really. I realize this is so disgusting we don't like talking about it, but it's been confirmed by multiple sources and even made his obituary. Absolutely insane.)

• Bugging the visitor's locker room, leading to most teams talking in code when discussing strategy knowing that if they said what they were doing outright Red would listen in on them. J. Edgar Auerbach?

• Cutting the heater in the visiting locker room, leading to a freezing mess in the winter. In Boston. He also turned the heat all the way up during hot summer days, ensuring that the players would be sweating like stuck pigs and desperately need water, which in turn was connected to... oh yeah. The sewage. Whoopsies.

It shows, too -- consider the Celtics' home and away records during the Auerbach era. Not only did they never lose a game 7 at home (something that has never happened before or since), their regular season records were often comically disparate. As a teaching example, look at the 1958 Celtics. That team ended up 11-17 on the road over the season, but went a sparkling 24-4 at home. Including a double-overtime game 7 against the Bob Pettit-led, defending champion St. Louis Hawks (at home, of course!) to win the title. The invented Auerbach-based enhancement of their home court advantage generally tended to -- ever so slightly -- inflate the win totals of the 60s Celtics. From 59 to 69, not a single Celtics team had a higher expected record than their actual record. For those not in the know; expected wins and losses are calculated based on a team's point differential.

It's extremely rare for a team to over a long period (anything more than 4 or 5 years) consistently overperform or underperform their expected wins, as all things equal, the things that cause expected wins to vary over a several season period would be things left to chance -- a team's record in close games, years where they do unexpectedly poorly at home, the number of times your team gets blown out of the building, et cetera. Given the inherently better home court advantage that Auerbach made sure his Celtics had (as well as the predictive power of wins on point differential) the effect of the inflated win totals were felt two-fold. They helped the Celtics outperform the record a team of their caliber would have gotten in the regular season, all things equal. They also ensured that out of the ten 7-game series the Celtics played in 12 years (in the shortened playoffs), only two involved having to win a game seven on the road to advance -- more tellingly, perhaps, neither occurred with Red at the helm. Again, absolutely shocked that Bill didn't mention this. It's not like he's a Celtics fan or anything -- after all, he's the head editor of Grantland. Completely unbiased. It was a homer-free list. He said it himself!

• • •

If we're really talking about titles from this era, isn't it also worth noting that you had a shorter season, an incredibly small league (eight teams, for much of the 60s -- fourteen teams entering the 70s), and only 3 rounds in the playoffs to win to get a title? It was a different game. In fact, back in the 50s, the playoffs were compressed to an absurd two rounds. The team that won the finals was essentially the equivalent of a western team that got to the WCF in two tough series. A bit insane. So let's ignore those titles. We followed with the 70s, when basketball started to look like basketball. We've invalidated every pre-ABA title, but we can't forget the ABA, either, as a factor that provides a "funky" problem with the team's title. Due to the existence of the NBA, the ABA's titles mean less than nothing -- that's a dead league! It died! Of course ABA titles don't matter! But alack. The ABA's existence also invalidates the champions of the NBA, as the ABA had "all of the talent" according to hyperbolic journalists like Simmons. This takes all titles from 1967-1976 off the table, if we're looking for a champion that really meant something. Simmons started the column in an effort to find the champions that can't be mentioned without their own funktastic footnotes -- and truly, what could be funkier than having two quality professional basketball leagues running at the same time?

Post-ABA merger, you have the cop-out that the three point line didn't exist, which would have naturally made rangey burst scorers like Pistol Pete and George Gervin quite a bit more valuable and the process of getting a title easier for them. After all, if you take 4 or 5 shots a game from three point range (as I believe those two did in their primes, from the game tape I've seen), that's an extra 3-4 points per game that these already-prolific scorers would be scoring. Adding that to a solid team's point differential can take a team from decent to dominant -- imagining what players like that would've done with the three point line is legitimately insane. In the 80s, you have the Simmons-fueled cocaine meme to fall back on if you want to simply ignore those champions -- the NBA's overall atmosphere led itself badly to cocaine abuse among stars and a gross number of players that simply never touched their ultimate potential due to the tragedy of excessive hedonism and drug abuse. You also have the Stepien era in Cleveland, where Ted Stepien would (yearly) give one or two teams a far better shot at a title by completely ruining his own team and running a fire sale on any good piece (or draft pick) he happened to have. Like James Worthy, who he traded away in one of the rare trades that was both insane when it happened and worse as time went on -- the Cavs traded the #1 pick in the draft (James Worthy) for -- of all people -- Don Ford and the #22 pick. Don't know who Don Ford is? Ted Stepien apparently didn't either -- he averaged 3 points per game in 11 minutes for the Los Angeles Lakers before the midseason trade. Great trade, Teddy.

Then, the 90s! Truth be told, I was having a lot of trouble figuring out how to invalidate Jordan's titles. I'd thought that I'd finally found a set of titles that I couldn't erase. Luckily, the master himself helped me out here. To quote Simmons directly: "And by the way, Worthy missed the 1983 playoffs, but Lenny Bias missed the playoffs from 1987 through 2004. So there's that." What this really means isn't that he's an absurd homer, but that all titles won in this period are by their very nature invalidated. After all, this period may have encapsulated the Jordan dynasty, the Hakeem domination of the mid 90s, two Spurs titles, and the threepeat Lakers... but who really cares? Len Bias wasn't playing. And don't you forget the truth. Bias was all set to average a miraculous 50-20-10 (truly a legendary leap, to average such totals straight off his rather pedestrian senior year averages of 23-7 in a down ACC) on the way to 17 straight titles, before he was eliminated from the game by Stern for a gambling addiction (thus retroactively footnoting the 5 years after he stopped playing, because he would've kept playing if it wasn't for the evil eye of Stern.) Thanks, Bill. I owe you one here. As for the rest? The Len Bias problem takes us to 2004 -- Simmons has applied personal footnotes to 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. So I don't need to deal with those guys. Thus, the only champion in NBA history now with no footnote: the 2011 Dallas Mavericks.

... except, you know, that Miami team's 4th and 5th best players played the entire series coming off of brutal injuries that had ruined their seasons. So if 2010 is ACTUALLY a footnote-type series in the Simmons view, don't really see how you get away with not mentioning that key fact in any mention of the Dallas title. After all. Four is greater than five. (I know this because I am a statistician.) You could also mention any of the injuries that knocked out contenders (or weakened teams that played the Mavericks tight); pick any Blazer injury (the team took the Mavs to 6 in the first round -- with a healthier team, is it really that impossible to consider them winning it?), the Manu/Duncan injuries that crippled a Spurs team that matched up very well with that Mavs team, the Rose wear and tear that he played through that sapped his strength and allowed the Heat to get past them. Or perhaps the incredible, unprecedented collapse of Dwight Howard's supporting cast. Or maybe the fact that LeBron had the most inexplicable finals no-show ever. Hm. You know what, I guess they do have a footnote, dang. Sorry, Dallas fans. Tough luck.

• • •

I don't really want to lose the point of this post, so I'll drop the sarcasm. No, I don't think the things I've mentioned here really should invalidate any of these titles, or even that they are necessarily things worth mentioning. In most occasions, they really aren't. But that's just me -- I also don't think the idea of a title involving shenanigans that require some kind of footnote is at all reasonable. The entire heft behind the Simmons piece is one key conceit -- the idea that it's possible to separate the idea of a footnote or a caveat-to-the-crown from the annals of vicious homerism. Is it really, though? And would we want to?

I've mentioned this to several in regards to that post -- I'm absolutely irked that Simmons neglected to mention the 2000 Lakers. In 2000, the Spurs (then the defending champion, less than a year removed from going a sizzling 15-2 in the playoffs and sweeping both the Lakers and Blazers) were a reasonably good team. They had 58 wins, the 2nd best defense, and the 11th best offense -- the usual marks of a contending San Antonio team. Duncan was playing out of his mind that season, with to that point the best PER of his career and a marginally more dominant defensive presence with his body more conditioned to the league and his scouting of player tendencies better than ever. He was co-MVP of the all-star game, and after a slow start, the Spurs were preparing for a strong title run. But alas; Duncan fell on the 77th game of the season. He'd torn his meniscus. The Spurs bowed out in 4 to a vastly inferior Phoenix Suns team in the first round, as the Lakers crushed the Suns in the 2nd and went on to take the title. The problem? That Spurs team had gone 7-1 in their last 8 games against the Shaq-Kobe Lakers. Duncan resoundingly won the matchup with Shaq every game that season, and David Robinson was getting into a good rhythm going into the playoffs. The 1999 Spurs -- no matter what you want to say about the lockout season -- had one of the absolute most dominant playoff runs of all time. Duncan is one of the 10 best players of all time, and he was entering his absolute prime. And you're telling me that the reigning finals MVP going down in the 5th-to-last game of the season -- robbing the Spurs of a rematch with a team they'd swept the year before -- is somehow less of a "funky note" than Kendrick Perkins missing a single game of the 2010 playoffs?

Now. I just wrote a long paragraph that was -- if nothing else -- extremely homer-ish. Other than a Spurs fan, virtually no NBA analyst would immediately think of that paragraph's content when they think of the 2000 title. A Spurs fan would. And even if it isn't the guiding view on that year's title, it's also a pretty damn good point. As all of Simmons' footnotes are, in theory. But the guiding idea behind the Simmons piece isn't rooted in the individual merit of the footnotes (which they almost all have in spades). It's rooted in the idea that you can create a fair and honest cardinal ranking of champions by an unbiased ranking of "footnotes" you have to discuss when you discuss those champions. But you can't do that. You simply can't separate the homerism from examining the "footnotes" to apply to every NBA title precisely because it's the absurd logical leaps of being an unabashed homer that leads fans to ones that are actually worth talking about. Assessing which footnotes you think matter and which footnotes you think are absurd will depend on what you value in an NBA season, and what team you're paying the closest attention to -- there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all set of values, and there's no font of all NBA knowledge that's paying close attention to every team and every contender (except for Kelly Dwyer). There's really no way to properly assess a homer-free list of the nature Simmons proposes he's created.

And in the end, we're left with a list that reflects Simmons' values and the way Simmons views the game. It's a valid opinion. It's a reasonable list. But it's also -- above all else -- the absolute essence of subjectivity. And that's not a bad thing. What IS a bad thing is pretending that a subjective view is anywhere close to unbiased, and that gets at the heart of what makes many recent Simmons columns so frustrating. This is bar-room chatter. It's "smoking with a few friends and drinking a beer" discussion. Fun, but really. It's impossible to come up with an unbiased view on a subject so inherently tied to your fandom, no matter how hard you may have tried and researched. AND THAT'S OKAY. It's perfectly fine for this sort of an exercise to be dominated by sore losers and the half-credible whining of a fan who mourns a title lost. But if you claim to be assessing the 20 teams that most deserve footnotes in history, and ESPN plasters your story on the front page saying you've got the all-inclusive list of "champs that had the most help"? No.

Just because you got famous as "the Sports Guy" and got a nice job doesn't really make your bar-room chatter any more credible than a well traveled old Schmo at the bar. For most of his career, he's understood that. But with Grantland, post-novel, post-developing NBA connections? He's lost the thread of honest humility that made him engaging. He's lost the ability to say "here's a list, and god damnit, I am going to make it incredibly biased because I am a Celtics fan and this list is inherently biased" and be straight with his readers. THAT'S why Simmons has aggravated me over the last few months. And -- as John Lennon might say -- I'm not the only one.

In the end, bias is fine -- just admit it, own up to it, and stop pretending you're an unassailable font of all sport knowledge. That's all. I'm done.

Hey, Gothers, what's up? Last time we met I had a long anti-HoopIdea piece. Judging from the feedback, I'd say the frustrations I expressed were quite real and quite prevalent in the NBA blogosphere (even if my piece itself wasn't exactly flawless). Now, all that said, I have always appreciated deeply the writing at TrueHoop blog in general. Their coverage of the Sloan conference has been superb, among the many, many other things that they've done quite well. Whether I agree with them or not, they do tend to be one of the more thought-provoking NBA blogs on the web. For example...

In my HoopIdea piece, maturity was the name of the game. A couple days ago at TrueHoop, after the miraculous Clippers' comeback in Memphis, Kevin Arnovitz found Gilbert Arenas to meditate on the elusive conscience, or lack thereof, of the NBA's great tradition of chokers and closers. The piece is quite good. I want to call attention to one of the things Arenas says, because it strikes me as being poignantly half-true. Check it out:

His creativity lets him do that. It's a shot he thinks he can make. Just like Kobe. If you think about the best players in the world, they have no conscience. They try anything. They do anything. Brett Favre -- he threw any pass he thought he could throw. That's his creativity. That's what he's like. He's going to fail and he's also going to win.

But a guy with a conscience won't pull that trigger.

Arnovitz, voicing the natural response, counters "that Kevin Garnett has a conscience, that he exercises an uncommon discipline and has still been one of the best players of his time." But Arenas responds immediately with the hilarious rejoinder: "And that's why he doesn't get the ball in the fourth quarter." The dichotomy Gilbert paints is stark, but not uncommon in NBA culture. Overall, Arenas is giving us an exceedingly-well-expressed take on conventional wisdom, with a dose of Arenas's own creative flair.

• • •

It's interesting stuff, especially coming from Hibachi: There's little that's more creative in basketball - little that brings to mind athletic genius in basketball more readily - than a player creating their own shot. There is a certain brilliance in scorers that often evokes the sheer joy of a body in motion - as in ballet and figure skating and dancing and David Foster Wallace's Federer. It's why for many the GOAT conversation begins and ends (as maybe it should) with Michael Jordan, who was not only the greatest scorer ever, but simultaneously the most brilliant and efficient athletic genius that basketball has ever seen, remaking the game a little bit on a nightly basis. It's why - years after his prime - Kobe still gets a bit disproportionate share of the MVP and All-NBA First Team votes. Not just because his play is still consistently and inexplicably great (of course it is), but also because his moves are ever more laser-focused and deceptive and beautiful. You can tell from just about anything Kobe has said publicly that he revels in the spectacle of a game-winner. That spectacle in essence is the instant narrative running from the do-or-die-problem to the impossibly courageous protagonist to the impossibly brilliant solution all in a neat arc that places Kobe at the top. It's a narrative that places Kobe's game exactly in its right place: in the hallowed pantheon of bottomless creative genius, while deigning to let the mortals afterwards scrutinize (to no consequence) the infinitesimal flaws of his masterpiece. The rings are a longer take on the same story.

At least that's the theory. It's littered with problems here and there: Like all memories, we remember disproportionately Kobe's most extreme, exceptional successes and his most extreme, exceptional failures (we see the latter with perceptions of LeBron). And because of the media's fawning and Kobe's impressive persistence, we tend to allow ourselves to forget the failures over time.

No big deal: After all, selective memory isn't so much a problem for, say, works of art, because art lives in the memory as much as it lives in the moment, but also because not all art is created equal. When I went to the Art Institute of Chicago about four years ago, I saw a whole lot of paintings, but I mainly only remember seeing a gigantic Seurat and being shuttled around by my friend. When I went to the Peggy Guggenheim collection, in Venice? I basically only remember this one (god, what a cool concept, though, right?). Part of it is that I'm not an art aficionado, but I select for the very best (and occasionally very worst) memories I have: melodies, experiences with friends, algorithms, wines (check out Riesling, peeps), proofs, ideas, and mathematical constructs. I remember the best and forget the average cases.

Just like art, moments in sports are not created equal, and it doesn't do to remember them equally. When either the apparent leverage of the game/moment in question was high (buzzer-beaters, Finals performances, rivalry games) or the seeming improbability of the moment in question is high (that time Tim Duncan hit that three against the Suns), we ought to have selective memory. Those are career-defining moments, even if at the end of the game or series Pau or Bynum shot much better than Kobe, etc.. Quite seriously, basketball is a rational game, but a) who can remember the aggregate intuitively? and b) who would want to, given the choice? Putting aside the valid statistical arguments: Basketball features expression prominently, just a notch below efficiency, and it's a valid, defensible choice to choose the former for some people.

Granted, I dislike Hero Ball and the way in which Kobe consciously fashions his legacy for the media (remember, when he manipulates the media, he's reaching out and manipulating you and me). I think, as I always have, that Kobe's pecking order quotes are a mockery of the game of basketball and the team concept. If Kobe is to be defined by heroic wins, then he should also be defined by his tragic losses, however loudly he himself may lead the train of confident rationalizations for his fanatics to give senseless, endless voice to later. All that said, Kobe is an athletic genius like MJ or Bird or Magic, and in Arenas's parlance, you could rightfully say that Kobe has no conscience, and his mind and creativity are that of a great assassin. And it's a lot of fun, therefore I can't fault Kobe for his molten passion nor his relentless drive to express this individual passion through the game of basketball.

I want to be clear that I am absolutely exalting Kobe up to this point in this piece, despite criticisms. I think that Kobe is the greatest of all time with respect to some perfectly reasonable perspective that I happen not to share. He's certainly not the greatest winner or the greatest scorer, but his refinement and competitiveness and creativity and constant becoming and selfishness in some strange sense make Kobe - flaws and all - the most ideal version of Kobe.

• • •

But reflecting on Kobe in the wake of Gilbert's comments about conscience, I'm drawn again to that parallel bastion of their mutual era Tim Duncan. Tim Duncan is just as much an athletic genius as Kobe. If you doubt this, I'd just note that when he really takes over a game, he usually doesn't do it by hitting a bank shot or a 20-footer over and over: he usually does it by immensely creative, persistent and-ones and off-balance jumpers, crisp interior passing, impressionistic defense (as Aaron puts it), and - like a composer - taking the established themes of success and varying those themes endlessly and complexly over the course of the game as defenses try to contain him (and analogously, as our minds try to frame him in a finite view). Tim Duncan is an athletic genius that revels in his and-ones and tricks and buzzer-beaters like any other player.

And yet Duncan is known as a quiet, efficient player. For good reason: Duncan makes the game as simple as possible for himself and his team and only intuits the situation within a simple framework. By the time Tim Duncan's swift and incisive mind has gotten to a configuration of players, his space of choices has become as limited and as simple as a gunner trying to "get buckets" or a defensive savant to "get stops."

I think we elevate Kobe over Duncan partially because Kobe's in a big market and Duncan's not, but beyond that? The main difference comes from the way they present their genius. Kobe flaunts his gifts to anyone that will listen, but Duncan is the true assassin, hiding his secret weapons and infiltration methods until they're declassified, leaving bullets in his clip until the final scene. Or maybe Duncan simply never has to deploy his full genius, because he has cultivated the full collective powers of his team in advance. Or maybe there's something a bit more sinister and amazing in Duncan's approach that cuts to the heart of competition.

Maybe Duncan has had to actively stifle his athletic expression, time and time again. Maybe - like Kobe - Tim Duncan has the constant itch to express his individual greatness, to prove how he is streets ahead of his opponents' minds. Maybe Duncan feels like sacrificing efficiency to prove his own creativity is a sign of poor discipline unbefitting to a man whose teammates call him captain. There are some sentiments that a man can never express to his family without putting all his other expressions to them into doubt. There are some roads not taken that we cannot romanticize without losing our grip on the present. There are some things that an artist feels are deeply true but must never voice to protect and comfort the integrity of art and of the human condition.

With Kobe we get the vicarious pleasure of facing our doubters and haters with an impossible problem and watching ourselves find the impossible solution. You don't wonder what you'd have missed if Kobe had plodded away unselfishly for his team. Probably Kobe could've been a player with 90% instead of 85% of Jordan's offensive efficiency and maybe won a few more playoff series. But he also wouldn't have been Kobe.

With Duncan we don't get vicarious pleasure, we don't get to vicariously prove ourselves individually again and again, we get only the vicarious weight of responsibility: We have the ability to find impossible solutions, but with it we also have the unspeakably sad and earnest discipline never to express or even to explore most of these solutions fully. With Duncan we get conscience, sacrifice, and responsibility. I'm sure Tim's happy with the way things have turned out and have continued to work out. I just wonder sometimes what we've missed.

Please see the parts I, II, and III of the Prognosti-Rank series for our picks through the first 3 rounds of the playoffs.

And so, it comes to this. The predicted finals matchup. I'm really not 100% confident about the Western team here, as you may have gathered by this whole exercise. I think if the Grizzlies win against the Spurs, they'll probably be good enough to beat the Thunder, but not necessarily. And I think the Thunder could -- if they steal game one and Durant has a breakout series going up against Kawhi Leonard or Tony Allen -- potentially oust either the Spurs or the Grizzlies. And honestly? I could see the Lakers in here as well, because if Bynum puts it together they're a team that can blow out any team in the league, four times in a row. Home, road, wherever. There are any number of combinations for the final western team standing that makes sense to me. One thing you would've had trouble convincing me of before the season, though, would've been that any of them stood a chance against the Heat (who I've had penciled in as the presumptive Eastern champion since opening night). In my season preview -- "A Lion in Autumn" -- I essentially gave the Heat the trophy. I didn't think any team in the west would have the firepower to beat them. At this point, though, given the vulnerabilities the Heat have shown this year? I'm officially not certain that any of them CAN'T beat the Heat in a series.

• • •

The key to the finals isn't any lazy narrative about LeBron, or a tedious joke about Chris Bosh. The key to Miami's title hopes, realistically, is going to be how Spolestra adjusts when teams key on his stars in the Finals. Last year, despite my general admiration for the job Spolestra did over the whole season, he flunked the final. Carlisle and Casey put their heads together and generated a fantastic scheme, one that kept Wade from record-breaking numbers and one that bottled LeBron up in the most embarrassing possible way. While I think the Heat make another finals, I don't think it's going to be a cakewalk, even in a depleted east -- I have both their series against Chicago and their series against Indiana going 6 or 7 games, as you may have noted. And despite the game one blowout, I'm not 100% positive the Knicks can't steal a game or two as well (though without Shumpert I'm less confident in that assessment).

The long and short of it is that as they enter the finals, I don't think the Heat are going to be quite as rested and coasting as they were last year. The gap between them and the rest of the East isn't as vast, and this year's Heat team is far more prime to random bouts of in-game coasting, much like the 2009-2011 Lakers. The reasons are several-fold, but primarily what separates all our highest expectations for the Heat from their reality lies in the supporting cast. Chris Bosh's awful year, the disappointing plummet of Norris Cole, and Udonis Haslem's incredible collapse as a contributing player. Wade's defense is as good as ever, but his offensive attack has been slightly less efficient and slightly more prone to the occasional "Wade can't jump tonight" games you see from aging athleticism-reliant superstars. The overall schema of this Heat team has become a relatively one-dimensional exhibition of the incredible might of LeBron James. It's more akin to LeBron's late 2000s Cavs teams than the talent-dripping death machine we thought we'd have, preseason. And to the Western champion, that's totally fine by them.

In terms of the Spurs, this is a better Spurs team than last year. Not because it's particularly different in composition, but because the red-hot worldbeating Spurs team that won 44 of its first 52 games in 2011 is the kind of team that's entering the playoffs rather than the team that ended the year on a 17-13 schneid. The only real difference is timing -- the team's three stars are all healthy, at the moment, and the depth behind them has finally developed into a concoction that fits Popovich's rotations. The Spurs feature more defensive firepower than they did last year in Kawhi Leonard, Stephen Jackson, Danny Green, and a healthy Tiago Splitter. (EDIT: nevermind that last one. But hey, we've got Boris "Oscar" Diaw, we're good.) They enter the playoffs having improved to a team closer to the top 5 in defense (as they were over the last month) than the bottom 15 -- something completely untrue about last year's unit entering the playoffs, whose defensive collapse as the year went on was evident to everyone watching. They Spurs are healthy, they're more talented than you think, and they have enough interchangable parts to adjust mid-series if something is going wrong. Not to mention the improvements of last year's standouts -- Matt Bonner worked on defense the entire offseason, and it shows in his now-passable individual defense. Tim Duncan is in the middle of his best month since the Spurs' last WCF season in 2008. Tony Parker just had his best year as a pro. And the Spurs did virtually everything they accomplished this year without Manu Ginobili, whose game has been at 75% or worse capacity since coming back from his first deadly injury. He's gotten better, though -- and, scarily enough, it's possible to conceive of Manu being back in full force by the Western Conference Finals.

And he's the Spurs best player, for crying out loud!

• • •

The actual matchup here -- Spurs vs Heat -- would be an instant classic. Neither team plays lock-down defense, though at their defensive peaks they're both reasonably solid. Both teams are capable of generationally dominant offense. The way that Pop would employ his defensive talent on LeBron and Wade could make-or-break the series, as could his adjustments as Spolestra tries different offensive strategies. Can Stephen Jackson make Wade's life a living hell in the same way he battered Richard Jefferson in 2003? Will LeBron average 30 a game, or will Pop figure out a way to bottle him just as Carlisle and Casey did before him? If the game is close, how does Spo figure out what Pop's going to call?

In the end, somewhat unintuitively, I think the finals (no matter who makes it) will come down to health and rest after a season as brutal as this. I don't need to tell you Popovich has done a yeoman's job at making sure his guys are rested -- Spolestra, primarily through necessity, has had to ride his guys hard through the regular season. I discussed this before, but the 2013 Heat are going to look a great deal more like the 2009 Celtics than the young, hip team of the future. In that same sense, I'm not sure that LeBron's body is going to hold up through a long finals series. It won't be a choke, necessarily, but a gradual lessening in LeBron's powers wrought by his overall exhaustion from a too-long, too-tough season compounded by the knowledge that he's less than a month from having to report to a Team USA training camp where he'll be forced to do quite a bit more than he did in 2008.

I don't think the lack of home court advantage is going to sit well for this Miami team, one that -- in their only game in the last two years in San Antonio -- lost by 30 (and was down by even more before Pop explicitly allowed Spolestra to play LeBron and Wade on D-League talent). And in the end, in a winner-take-all game 7? I think Popovich will have a pretty good idea of Miami's playbook. I think he'll find a way to keep Miami as throttled as he can with the personnell he has. I didn't think so last year -- I thought they were 2nd round fodder at best. This isn't revisionist history -- entering last year's playoffs, I was cautiously optimistic that if everything went right the Spurs might make the Western Conference Finals. Once Manu went down to injury, I was pretty sure the Spurs would be out in the first or swept in the second, a la 2010. The Grizzlies were too good, and that Spurs team was completely out of a rhythm when the playoffs rolled around. But this time? With this year's Spurs team?

I'm a believer. It won't be easy, but the Spurs can be the 2012 champions. And in the end, despite some hesitancy... I think they will be.

• Spurs in 7 games •

• • •

We hope you've enjoyed this year's playoff preview. More playoff coverage tomorrow with another Outlet.

As advertised in our Prognosti-ranking series, we’re bringing our formerly retired series of daily vignettes — titled “The Outlet” — back for the playoffs. “Don’t call it a comeback.” Though, you can call it series 2, as we are in the title. Every day, we’ll try to share two or three short vignettes from our collective of writers ruminating on the previous day’s (or weekend’s) events. In this case, the previous few days. Should be a fun time. Today’s Outlet covers primarily Amare Stoudemire's hand injury, and includes the following two pieces.

• "All is Well, All is Good." by Adam Koscielak.
• "Wow, no it's not. I Punched a Cactus Once." by Aaron McGuire.

A distinctly punch-drunk theme, today. Continue at your own risk. If you're made of glass, that is. Which does beg the question: how are we going to save Amare... from himself? (That was a Bad Joke. I should feel Bad. And I do.)

• • •

All is Well, All is Good
Adam Koscielak

The reports came in last night. “After their crushing game 2 defeat, Amar’e punched a fire extinguisher” ... “Amar’e bleeding all over the place, because he punched straight through the glass casing” ... “Amar’e surrounded by security and paramedics, getting stitches now." In response, the non-reporters tweeted a collective “What?”

And somehow, it just fits. It just fits so effing perfectly.

Of all the losing teams out here, the Knicks, a team that honestly has no business even pretending they can compete with the Heat in a seven game series (and I say this as an optimistically joyous believer in the chaos theory of sports miracles) are the ones frustrated to the point of PUNCHING A GLASS CASING. Perhaps this is the epitome of the Knicks season somehow. The high point, somehow. It’s really all hindsight, ifs and buts, and pure insanity.

From Linsanity to Pringleburnia, the Knickerbockers have been going from great to bad, intense to lazy, all while the New York Media Big Brothers are staring and passing judgements. And as STAT is surrounded by paramedics you can’t help to think that it fits. Delusional fans will have an(other) excuse and a scapegoat, the media will have the producer of the casing and the details of the lawsuit, bloggers will have another meme, all will be well in the world, and the evil Heat empire will bask in another power forward attempting to physically harm an inanimate object because of their dominance.

All is well.

All is well...

• • •

Wow, no it's not. I Punched a Cactus Once.

Aaron McGuire

I disagree completely, Adam. All is not well. Though perhaps that's just my background obscuring my vision. You see, dear readers, I am a man that has made mistakes in my life. And I may understand more than just about anyone what Amare is feeling right now. This is because -- when I was 13 years old -- I punched a cactus in a bout of misguided fury at a less-than-stellar Biology test. I'd studied and studied, and done my best. Didn't matter. I came short of passing, by just a few points. In the interests of helping our readers understand how the flying fuck a person could make such a stupid decision (as well as solidarity for Amare Stoudemire), I have produced from memory a retro-liveblog of my own incredible punching exploits. Proceed with caution.

The date: April 22nd, 2004. The place: Phoenix, Arizona.

12:32 -- School is out, and we got out quite early that day. I am walking home with my friend Jean. We are discussing my failure to secure a passing grade on my latest Biology test. My parents had been pushing me to finish the semester strong. I at that point had a C in Biology and a few Bs as a freshman. The weight of failed expectations bubbled up. I felt impotent dissatisfaction in my throat.

12:35 -- "Damnit, Jean, I'm angry enough I could punch someone." Jean looks around. He is the only person present. After declaring that he was quote-unquote "not it" he suggested I find something of the non-human type to punch. I like animals, so the passing pigeon was a no-go. As a joke, he points out the cactus right ahead that we pass on our way home every day. Hmm...

12:36 -- "Yeah, I'm going for it." ... "Wait, what?" Before I can respond, I throw my fist at the cactus in feckless rage. Time seems to slow as I realize the sad and unreasonable truth. This was a remarkably bad idea. I slow my hand as it approached the cacti, but it was all too late. As a note of ultimate irony, the test I almost passed had ironically been about the biology of plants. Being that we lived in the desert, cacti played a big role in our studies. This was no ordinary cactus. I should have realized it. This was a jumping cactus. Welp. I'm fucked.

12:37 -- I somehow manage to slow my hand to a gentle love-tap by the time I reach the cactus. Really doesn't matter. After all, it's one of the dreaded jumping cacti. (They exist. Really.) The second I tapped it, the entire fucking limb jumped off and lodged itself into my balled up fist. Because that's actually how those things work. Jean stares at me for what seems like a minute. I stand there staring at my hand, which is now home to a medium-size limb ejected clean off the cactus. Instead of making any notice of pain (Jean was and is 5 years my senior, and I felt as though it was my duty to appear as Kid Badass) I start laughing. This -- contrary to my deepest expectations -- does not make Jean join in, and instead makes him stare at me as though I have gone completely nuts. I realize this is a preeminent possibility, note it, and continue laughing. He asks if we can stop laughing and keep walking. "Yeah, man. Walking. I love that shit." I am Kid Badass. I am the king of the Jungle. Wait, I live in Arizona. I've never even seen a jungle. Fuck.

12:42 -- We pass by a little league game taking place in the local park. In an effort to amuse myself, I wave my cactus limb'd fist at the umpire. He stares at me and gets hit in the chest by an errant swing. I laugh, accidentally managing to get the cactus limb stuck on my shirt. Oh god damnit why did I do that.

12:47 -- A senior citizen is walking his dog, and trying hard to pay no attention to the dumb kid with a cactus in his hand. I nod at the dog, and narrow my gaze. I am superior, Mutt. I have a cactus in my hand, and you do not. This is my day. I am Kid Badass. Vacate my sight. The dog barks at me and I jump in a start, getting one of the spines stuck past my shirt and painfully into my chest. Oh for the love of God are you kidding me right now.

12:54 -- We reach Jean's house. There are maids about, all of whom are staring quizzically at the all-too-obvious result of my impromptu fisticuffs. I begin the careful process of extracting the cactus limb from my hand with all the care of a retired bouncer, indiscriminately rending it from my shirt (and, more painfully, my chest), tearing exactly four holes in the shirt and a small patch of skin off my chest. "That could've gone better." I ask Jean for a swiss army knife, because those are useful. "We don't have one. I do have these scissors we use to cut cereal boxes open with though." ... "That'll do, I guess?"

1:29 -- After about 30 minutes, I finally have carefully extricated the limb from my hand. I cut off the limb proper, deposit it on the ground, and take each remaining spine out of my hand with tweezers. Shockingly, there was very little blood -- sometimes it pays to have poor circulation and extremely bony hands. I am not done being a moron, though, because in my pride at finishing I proceeded to pick up the cactus with my other hand and throw it into the trash can like a basketball. I made the bank shot, before realizing the cactus husk had left its last three spines in my other hand and completely covered it with smaller splintered spines. Apparently Kid Badass is another word for "total fucking idiot."

1:45 -- I return home, play it cool, and pretend like nothing ever happened. I spend the next month with cactus splinters all over both hands and strange prickly scars on my right hand. I tell nobody, because why would I do a thing like that.

So, long story short, I feel for Amare. That's what I'm saying here. Sometimes otherwise smart people make stupid decisions. Sometimes, these stupid decisions are not your garden-variety "wow, I did a stupid thing" decisions, they're incredible stories that will forever remind you of how much of a bloody moron you were, for at least one ephemeral moment in time. Today, it was Amare having one of those moments. On April 24th, 2004? It was a 13 year old Aaron McGuire, showing beef with cacti and picking fights over an insignificant Biology test. So, I hear you, Amare. I hear you deeply. I feel the struggle. Get well soon. And... despite everything I just said, for the love of fuck, stop punching things. From one Kid Badass to another, it's not a good look.

• • •

As advertised in our Prognosti-ranking series, we're bringing our formerly retired series of daily vignettes -- titled "The Outlet" -- back for the playoffs. "Don't call it a comeback." Though, you can call it series 2, as we are in the title. Every day, we'll try to share two or three short vignettes from our collective of writers ruminating on the previous day's (or weekend's) events. In this case, the previous few days. Should be a fun time. Today's introductory Outlet covers the first weekend of playoff action, and includes the following two pieces on the Grizzlies/Clippers opener and the Mavericks/Thunder opener.

For more, click the jump.

• • •

"A New Easter Sunday for Christopher Paul"

Aaron McGuire

When I dig back to try and think of a reasonable comparison to this particular meltdown, I keep going back to the opening game of the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals. The Cavs went up huge, as you may remember. LeBron had a legendarily impressive game, and the Cavs were rolling. They'd scored the first 4 points of the game, and were up 10 less than 3 minutes into the contest. Lead was up to 17-33 late in the first. Mo Williams made a 66-foot three pointer at the half to put the Cavs up 15 at the half. They had lost just twice at home that season -- a 15 point lead at the half, with that kind of a home court advantage? Really seemed insurmountable, for Cavs fans. An impossible climb for a Magic team that was very good, just not good enough.

I admit, it wasn't as sudden as this particular loss. It wasn't as jarring. But the stakes were higher, and in a sense, I feel it was even more unexpected. The Magic chipped away at the Cavalier defenses, and by the fourth quarter, the Cavs were only up 4. They looked like they had the game close in-hand, though, after LeBron took a two point lead with just 25 seconds left. That was fool's gold. Rashard Lewis made an impossible three, and Delonte missed a shot he ALWAYS used to hit. The Cavs (and their fans) were left with a freshly burning loss as they wondered what the hell happened. I remember that feeling. And I feel impossibly bad for the Grizzlies and their fans. They worked hard for this win, and would've had it in the bag if they hadn't allowed a 26-1 run. Perhaps if they'd allowed a 26-4 run, or a 26-5 run. Then this is just a cautionary tale, a reminder to the Grizzlies that they can't take their foot off the gas on a Chris Paul team. Instead? They let the Clippers close the game 28-3, and still lost the game by a single point.

That's the feeling that the Grizzlies players -- and their poor, beleaguered fans -- are facing today. And I feel for them. Because that's a feeling I remember all too well. As might some Clipper fans, deep inside. Clipper fans can relate, in some ways, to the abject failure of unexpected loss. But I'm really giving myself shivers, here, so I'll stop and move on to lighter matters. When the game ended, with Memphis fans frozen in abject horror, Chris Paul got his customary endgame interview with Craig Sager. It was funny, because even though Paul's role in the comeback wasn't nearly as extraordinary as anything he's done in recent years (and to be frank, Nick Young deserved the interview just as much), he ended the interview with a classic quip that made it all worth it. Remarking on Craig Sager's pastel-blue suit with the bright pink tie, Paul commented with "oh, also. Nice suit." America's most grandiose color man grinned and thanked him. Paul patted Sager on the shoulder and followed with "Easter passed, though."

It hearkened back to the classic Sager-Garnett interview where Garnett told him to burn all his clothes, but there was something a bit different about it to me. In the case of the Garnett exchange, there was really nothing there but a hilarious joke. No deeper content, other than Sager's inherent loneliness. In this case? Paul's statement was true both in the factual and the narrative sense. Easter was -- literally -- the 8th of April, quite some time ago now. It passed. But in the 4th quarter of last night's game, the Clippers and their fans experienced something incredibly special -- it may never happen again, and it may be a flash in the pan in a series the Grizz take in 5 or 6 games. But it was indeed the greatest moment in franchise history for the bedraggled, downtrodden, luckless Clippers. And in that sense, the game was nothing less than the Clippers' own Easter Sunday. A miracle resurrection, a metaphorical pentecost, a high that Clippers fans will always carry with them. It passed as well. And why not cap a night like that with a timeless quip at a quixotic journalist? If you came back from 27 points down to most improbably win the game in a hostile field of battle, wouldn't you crack a few jokes too?

• • •

"Building a Legacy, one Bounce at a Time"
Jacob Harmon

There’s something to be said for building a legacy.

Dirk Nowitzki sealed his with some supernatural play last year, nearly single-handedly willing a team of aging veterans to the Finals and triumphing over the duo of hyped and signed legends in LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. But that was then, and this is now. Though Saturday night wasn’t Game 7 of the NBA Finals, from the reaction in Oklahoma City after Kevin Durant dropped in a prayer in the final seconds of Game 1, you’d have thought it was. As much as Dirk Nowitzki and the 2012 Dallas Mavericks showed that they won’t be relinquishing their championship title without a fight, the Thunder showed once again that they hold their own unlikely grudges. This young team, perhaps by virtue of its relatively small body of experience, remembers every major slight against them.

This game was by far the most entertaining and heart-pounding game played on the opening day of this year’s NBA playoffs, and even after it ended with the kind of bang basketball fans appreciate more than any other, it left me wondering about the game's real significance. On the one hand you have the Mavericks, an undermanned team, the lowest-seeded defending NBA champion team in playoff history. A team that even the most stalwart of tradition-obsessed pundits wrote off as an afterthought. Yet they're also a team that absolutely outplayed the Thunder. Right down to the wire. Out of the gate they made a statement. "We will not be swept." They in one fell swoop dismissed the notion that the only real threat to Kevin Durant and Oklahoma City’s Western conference juggernaut was the ruthless efficiency of the Spurs.

But as I watched the replays of the deafening celebrations in Chesapeake Energy Arena from a crowd that looked like it wouldn’t disperse until the series ended, I couldn’t help but think about legacies. I read recently that if Kevin Durant and the Thunder were to make it to the Finals this year, it would only be fitting that they would have to pass through Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavericks, Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, Tim Duncan and the Spurs. From a narrative sense, it would only be right. And as basketball fans who revel in melodramatic advertisements that muse on glory and legend, could there be anything more fitting? If anyone thought Dirk and the Mavericks wouldn’t put up a fight, did anyone actually want that? If any OKC fan thought Kevin Durant would simply rampage through the west, knocking off aging, impotent rivals as he went, I think they should question whether that’s what they really wanted to see.

For the amount of times I’ve already seen Durant’s game-winning shot juxtaposed with the famous image of “The Shot”; this is not 1989, this is not Game 5, this is not the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Kevin Durant is not Michael Jordan. The Mavericks are defending champions, there is a series yet to play out, Dirk Nowitzki is a Hall of Fame talent, and there are many more like him standing between the Oklahoma City Thunder and immortality. But Saturday was Kevin Durant’s night, and there’s something to be said for building a legacy.

• • •

May the action tonight be as tense as this weekend's closing slate. Catch you tomorrow, folks. (Or, alternatively, later today when we drop the last part of our Prognosti-Ranking series, covering the final five teams and my finals prediction. Should be a barnburner when I inevitably miss the mark entirely and get mocked for a solid offseason or two for my awful predictive abilities. I can't wait!)

Continuing from Part I of this series, I’m going to prognosticate which teams will be the best in the playoffs. I started from the predicted worst first-round out, and I'm going to go all the way to the team I think will raise the Larry O’Brien this year. Thus, a prognosticated ranking. A... prognostirank! (I’m still bad at words.) For each team, I’ll do my interpretation of why they should be higher than they are, and why they should be lower than they are. Yesterday, I went over teams 16 to 11. On with part two of our preview, from the 10th best projected team to the 6th best -- in other words, the two best first round losers, and all but the best of our projected second round losers.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: Chris Paul is the greatest point guard in the game today, and Memphis really isn't that much better than they are. The Grizzlies have -- hilariously enough -- gone from "hideously underrated" going into last year's playoffs to incredibly overrated now. The difference between these two teams is minimal. The Grizzlies are a better defensive unit while the Clippers are a better offensive unit, and they play different styles. It remains to be seen if Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan can really cook at the Memphis pace, but it also remains to be seen if Zach Randolph can really come back and contribute to the Grizzlies' in any tangible form. If Chris Paul plays to his talent level, and Blake Griffin does enough to make life difficult on the Grizzlies' bigs? The Clippers will win this series, and could potentially win against the Spurs as well (a team they match up surprisingly well against, and a team that they would've led 2-1 in the season series if the Spurs hadn't won a miracle overtime game at Staples earlier this year.

WHY THEY WON'T: Although Paul always gives his team a chance, this Clippers team simply isn't very good. Blake Griffin is exactly the kind of big man Zach Randolph makes his bread defending, and the general makeup of this Clipper team is unremarkable. The Grizzlies are an extremely well built team, and in Tony Allen the Grizzlies have exactly the type of defender that can make Chris Paul's life hell. Given that, I see this series turning out more akin to the 2009 Hornets-Nuggets series. The Nuggets -- for that series only -- played smashmouth basketball and beat Paul up. Despite being (roughly) equally good teams, the Nuggets roughed up Paul and dealt that incarnation of the Hornets one of the worst series losses in the history of the franchise.

I see the Memphis style -- all grit, grind, and hustle -- causing the Clippers as many problems as those Nuggets caused the Hornets, and leading to a relatively easy six game victory for the Grizzlies. And on a tertiary note... the Clippers have the worst coach in the league. By a larger margin than you think. That hurts them, in a matchup with a coach that's had a fantastic two-year streak and makes excellent in-game adjustments. And in the end, it's the main reason I'm not even sure this series is going to be close. How does a Vinny Del Negro team make the defensive adjustments needed to shut down Gasol and Gay over a full series? How does Blake cover Randolph? I don't have a good answer to any of these questions. So, yeah. I think the Clippers lose it. In six games, in fact. Now, Chris Paul, feel free to make me look incredibly silly.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: At their peak, this isn't a first round exit sort of team. This Laker team has their flaws, but they're also a team that includes one of the most confoundingly dominant post scorers in the NBA in Andrew Bynum (a player who shoots an insane league-leading 82% from the floor in the last 5 minutes of a game within 5 points), a still-criminally-undersung star forward in Pau Gasol, the unconscionable Kobe Bryant, and a better-than-you-think Ramon Sessions manning the point. They also happen to match up rather well with the two best teams in the conference, with Bynum able to bully the Spurs and the Thunder as though they're a JV team, when he's locked in. This Laker team beat the Nuggets 3-1 in the regular season, and Bynum scored 30 the last time they met. What's stopping him from averaging 25-15 and crushing the Nuggets in 5? Not all that much, and given that, there's ample reason to think the Lakers will not only outperform this particular prediction but also win the whole shebang. How do they lose this series?

WHY THEY WON'T: ... You know, if you ignore the other factors at play here. While I don't think the Lakers are a bad team (nor do I think the current incarnation of the Nuggets are a particularly great one), I really don't like this matchup for them. Without Artest's havoc on defense, this Laker team doesn't really have an answer for any of the Nuggets' three leading scorers; Danilo Gallinari, Ty Lawson, or Arron Afflalo. Or my favorite not-Kawhi/not-Kyrie rookie, Kenneth Faried (who I drafted in fantasy in every league this year, because I love his game. Then Karl proceeded to not play him until I dropped him. DAMNIT, KARL!) One of the Nuggets' biggest flaws (and one that led to quite a few lost games throughout the season) is their defense of the three -- they allowed the highest percentage from three point territory in the league, which generally would be a terrible thing in the playoffs. Not so against this Laker team, who were the 26th worst team in the league at shooting behind the arc (and were dead last as late as halfway through the season). If there's one team that can't take advantage of the Nuggets' largest defensive weakness, it's the Lakers.

And all this ignores the gigantic elephant in the room, and the big reason why I don't feel I can pick the Lakers in this series. Minutes, minutes, minutes. The Lakers are not a young team -- other than Bynum, they don't have a single rotation player under 27, and their two non-Bynum superstars (Pau and Kobe) both played an insane number of minutes this season. To wit: Pau Gasol is pushing 32, yet played the 2nd most minutes in the league this year (despite missing a game). He's the only person above 30 in the top 10. Kobe is #11. Combined, the Pau/Kobe duo represent the only players over 30 in the top 20. Overall, there were 45 players who played over 2000 minutes this season -- just eight of those were over the age of 30, and none of them played as many games as Pau. His numbers have been down this year, overall, and we've seen this story before. In 2011, Phil Jackson ran Pau into the ground, prompting some to think he may be due for a poor playoffs. He responded by putting up by far the worst playoffs of his career. He's a year older, and despite the lack of rest and compressed schedule, he actually played more minutes per game this year than last year.

Atop all that, Kobe is a year worse, and while Bynum is a great deal better, the 2012 Nuggets are a much better team than the Hornets team that pushed the Lakers to 4 in the first round. The Nuggets have had less of a home court advantage than expected in this year's regular season, but I don't see that continuing into the playoffs. The Nuggets have historically had a stronger home court advantage than can be expected by their point differential, and I see a reversion to the mean on that front in this year's playoffs. Which means I don't see the Lakers winning in Denver. And if I don't see that happening, the series depends on whether the Nuggets can get a win at Staples. Fortunately for the Nuggets, they're the only western team with a winning road record outside of the Spurs and the Thunder. And, to make matters worse for the Lakers? The Nuggets are playing about as well as the Lakers right now, going 11-5 in their last 16 games to the Lakers 11-6.

It comes down to this. I don't think the Nuggets can shut down Bynum. But if Pau has a disappointing series and Kobe isn't quite as good as he was last year? It probably won't matter. I'll take the Nuggets in 6, knowing full well that if I'm wrong (and I think I have a 50% chance of being wrong), the Lakers have a good shot to win the title.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: This is about as far as anyone has them going. But, theoretically, if the Nuggets get this far they'll be playing a second round series against a Thunder team that they're not all that poor of a match for (while they went 1-2 against them in the regular season, one was an overtime game and the other was a home blowout that happened in the depths of their most injury-riddled act of an underwhelming Denver season). They're better than they were last year, though the Thunder are as well. Honestly, though -- I don't see the Nuggets going any farther than the second round, and while I think they'll beat the Lakers, I don't see them beating the Thunder. Does anyone?

WHY THEY WON'T: I covered this rather heavily in the Laker section, but it bears mention here too. The Nuggets can't stop Andrew Bynum. Getting past the Lakers at all is going to be tough for the Nuggets, though I think they've got the power to hack it. Going farther than that would require two of three things to happen:

• Gallinari has the series of his life, and thoroughly outplays Durant.

• Ty Lawson and Andre Miller combine to undress Westbrook on defense and thoroughly win the matchup.

• JaVale McGee needs to outplay the Ibaka/Perkins bashers.

I don't think any of these are going to happen, let alone two of them. The Thunder beat the Nuggets 4-1 last year, and while the series was closer than that, the Thunder are a lot better than last year's incarnation. The Nuggets are different, but fundamentally the same team. I love Karl, but getting the Nuggets past the Thunder is a step too far. I have them losing in five, giving the Thunder an 8-2 postseason record entering the Western Conference Finals.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: The Celtics are an interesting team. They started out this season playing some absolutely abhorrent basketball -- at one point, they had a <50% chance of making the playoffs in both the Hollinger playoff odds and the STEVE NASH playoff rankings. Then, when we'd all left them for dead, they pulled a fast one on us. Avery Bradley began his defensive renaissance and Kevin Garnett pulled a 2012 Tim Duncan on the league from the center position. Suddenly, the Celtics weren't a bad team -- they weren't even a shaky one. They were a defensive juggernaut, and what they did over the last two months defies logic entirely. After starting the year completely unable to get off the ground, Garnett found his lift and with it his defensive dominance. The second-half Celtics posted -- in one brilliant 15 game stretch -- a defensive rating of 92.9 points per 100 possessions.

Let's try to help you grasp the significance of that figure. The 2012 Charlotte Bobcats -- the worst offense since the 2003 Denver Nuggets -- averaged 95.2 points per 100 possessions. The Celtics -- for 15 games -- held opponents to an average offensive efficiency worse than the average Bobcats game. In this stretch, they faced 10 playoff teams, including 3 of the top 4 offenses in the league. The defensive numbers the Celtics put on the floor in the second half of the season were absolutely legendary stuff. If the Celtics put up defensive numbers like that in the playoffs? They'll essentially need to play offense that's barely as good as the Charlotte Bobcats if they want to win the title. Think about that. Put that in context. That's insane. And the fact that they've shown the capacity this season to play defense that good would tend to indicate that anyone picking against them is partly insane.

WHY THEY WON'T: I'm a bit shaky about this pick. But the biggest problem the Celtics are facing right now? First, as I discussed in the Atlanta Hawks column, they've ceded home court advantage. If they can get past Atlanta (a 50-50 proposition, given the customary road woes of the playoff Celtics), they're facing Chicago in the 2nd round. For all the positive talk we can give about their defensive statistics (and it's considerable), the Celtics have kept one of their early-season mainstays constant throughout the year. They've been absolutely atrocious on the offensive end. In fact, the Celtics were actually worse on offense after the all-star break than before it, and finished the season as the 25th worst team on offense in the league. They're the worst playoff team by two points per 100 possessions -- that's the same gap that separates the 15th ranked (among playoff teams) Mavericks from the 8th ranked Lakers. That's... not good.

In the second round, the Celtics will be facing the 3rd best defensive team in the league. Even though Rose's injury should make the Bulls offense a bit less potent, their defense has easily held the court with Rose off the floor this year, and has actually performed 5 points better per possession with Rose off the court (in a significant sample size this year, given his injury woes). And even referring to the Bulls offense, it wasn't THAT much less potent -- without Rose on the court, this year, the Bulls' offense was 5.3 points per 100 possessions worse. But you could make the case (as I made on twitter yesterday) that the less ball-dominant stylings of the sans-Rose Bulls may match up better with the Celtics defense than an offense that relies on a single creator to form the crux of the offensive attack -- Bradley and Rondo could conceivably combine to shut down Rose, but the whole team defense of the Celtics is going to need to be sharper than a few standouts to shut down the Rose-lacking Chicago offense (which also runs a genuinely more complicated playbook than the Bulls do when they're using Rose as a crutch).

But even if you get past the offense, the real question remains -- how do the Celtics score on the Bulls? The Bulls absolutely dominated low-tier offenses last season, no matter whether Rose was in or out. The Celtics have the worst offense in the playoffs. That's really not a good combination for the Celtics, even if they do stop Rose's offensive attack. It's worth appreciating the incredible strides the Celtics got to get us this far. But all things considered, their chances of upsetting the Rose-less Bulls aren't nearly as good as the consensus would indicate. I think they fold in 6, moving the Bulls on to a Ewing Theory powered slot in the Eastern Conference Finals.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: When I put together my original rankings last Friday, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't change them. So imagine my dismay when I watched the Pacers give up an 11-0 run to the Magic in the last 5 minutes of their game 1, in Indiana. That was pretty harrowing, and the overall complexion of the upset was based exactly in what I feared -- Stan Van Gundy coaching the HELL out of his Magic team, and running circles around Frank Vogelsong (... wait) in crunch time of a close game. I still think the Pacers win the series in 5, perhaps 6. They're a markedly better team. But the Magic were exactly the team I wanted in my previous paean to the Hornets, and I'm really happy to see it.

As for why the Pacers go farther than the second round? The Pacers are rather underrated, relative to the actual quality of their team. The Grizzlies get a lot of dap for their slowdown style, and it's truly a wonder to watch. But the Pacers may very well have the best non-Laker frontcourt in the playoffs. Roy Hibbert was a worthy all-star this season, and has made his mark as one of the 5 best centers in the league. David West spent most of the season a shiftless vagabond unsure of his role or his place, but as the season ended he got into a great rhythm with Hibbert and Granger, and entering the playoffs he's playing better basketball than he's played since early 2011. He's also -- interestingly enough -- forming a considerably strong defensive pairing with Hibbert. If there's any two-man unit of big men that can replicate what last year's Grizzlies did, it's the Hibbert-West pairing.

Not only that, but unlike the Lakers, the Pacers have high-upside guys at every guard position. Collison has been a disappointment this season, but were he to return to his rookie form, he'd be one of the 3 best point guards left in the East. George Hill may be an artificial point guard -- the singularity, some could say -- but he's an excellent defensive presence and he's found a great rhythm on this Pacers team. Paul George would be my most likely pick for "surprising, remarkably unexpected star" of this year's playoffs -- he certainly has the talent for it, and he's shown flashes all year. Danny Granger is the only member of the team I'm not completely sold on, but if he plays as he has the last month, the Pacers are as good or better than every single team in the east. I'm not usually high on teams with admittedly low downsides just because their upside is so incredible -- but with this Pacer team, a top-10 offensive unit and a top-10 defensive unit, I can't help it. This is a team that could very well make the finals.

WHY THEY WON'T: ... if they weren't facing Miami in the second round. In the playoffs, Miami is a markedly better team than they are in the regular season. If they were facing the Bulls or the Celtics, I probably would've picked them to go to the conference finals (and perhaps even the finals). But they're facing the best team in the east. They don't have serious playoff experience, and (as the Orlando series has already shown) they don't have a coach who's great at in-game adjustments yet. I love Vogel as a full-season players coach, and I think he has promise as a play-caller -- but at the moment, he's eminently beatable from a strategic perspective, and I think the criminally underrated Spolestra is licking his chops at the matchup. I think the Pacers will make the Heat sweat, much like the Grizzlies did to last year's Thunder. But no more than that. Heat in 7, with the Pacers wondering how exactly the series slipped away.

• • •

I wasn't entirely sure how we should do playoff previews here at the Gothic. I knew how they were going to start, with Thursday's piece about the New Orleans Hornets and how one of my fondest wishes was that there was one underdog in the 2012 playoffs that approached the contest with the dedication and grit with which the Hornets approached their doomed season. That's a start, but certainly not a finish -- I do have picks, after all, and opinions as well. I tried to think of original ways to present my picks, and settled upon this not-particularly-creative way to do it. Here's what I'll do. I'm going to prognosticate which teams will be the best in the playoffs, starting from the predicted worst first-round out to the team I think will raise the Larry O'Brien this year. So, a prognosticated ranking. A prognostirank. (I'm bad at words.) For each team, I'll do my interpretation of why they should be higher than they are, and why they should be lower than they are. Not particularly original, I realize, but it gave me a platform to share my oh-so-dear opinions, and hopefully, it'll be of interest to you guys. On with part one of our preview, from the 16th worst projected team to the 11th worst.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: They aren't going to win a series, but Stan Van Gundy can be -- at times -- an absolute maestro at getting career performances out of neglected bench players. Look at their 2009 Finals run, for pete's sake, or the incredible job he did with the 2004 Heat. Van Gundy is a fantastic coach. I feel bad predicting that he'll be swept, because a coach of his caliber doesn't really deserve to be swept. Their best case scenario, alas, is winning one or two games against an excellent Pacers team. Even at their best, they'd still be one of the three worst teams in the entire playoff picture.

WHY THEY'LL DO WORSE: ... well, you can't actually do worse than getting swept, so we'll just discuss why they'll do this badly. Look. The Magic are a relatively flawed team, as they're currently constructed. They're Dwight Howard and a bunch of players that fit well around Dwight Howard. In last year's playoffs, Howard's supporting cast put in one of the most pathetic performances by a supporting cast of all time. It's rare that any NBA player deserves a Razzie, but the Magic's supporting cast would've swept the balloting for "worst supporting actor in a drama" if the world was just. Not one of Dwight's supporting rotation players shot over 40% from the field (against a relatively weak Atlanta defense), and the Magic's awful end-of-season spill without Howard doesn't help matters. Nor does it help that their current 2nd best player after Ryan Anderson -- Glen Davis -- is currently out injured. This is the closest thing to a first round bye the Pacers could possibly get.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: While you need to reach a bit to come up with a scenario where the Sixers actually BEAT the Bulls in the first round, you don't need to reach to figure out how they might at least make it a competitive series. By point differential, they're one of the best eight-seed teams the East has seen since the 90s. Their anemic offense was going to be a problem no matter who they faced, but their defense -- among the best in the league -- is actually rather well tailored for stopping the Bulls attack. The Sixers make their bread off of eliminating the spot-up shot, with teams shooting 39.7% on the season against the Sixers in spot-up situations. Sebastian Pruiti went over it the phenomena in his excellent playoff preview -- if the Sixers make the series competitive, it'll be on the back of neutralizing the Bulls' spot-up attack and engineering the most offensively ugly first round series in the history of the human race.

WHY THEY'LL DO WORSE: ... On the other hand, have you seen the Sixers this month? They look about as bad as a team could possibly look. I realize they went on a tidy little 4 game winning streak to end the season, at least before the unmentionable blowout to the hands of the Detroit Pistons on closing day. The Sixers haven't won in regulation to a playoff team since March 31st, and since the all-star break the Sixers are 6-12 versus other playoff teams. Unless Collins pulls some magic fairy dust that turns the Bulls into a creampuff team the likes of which the Sixers feasted on to get their absurdly high point differential, they aren't going to outperform last year's Pacers. That means they're out in 5, and even that's kind of pushing it.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: Now we start to get into some realistic scenarios. I'm a Spurs fan, and I don't think Utah is anywhere near as deadly as the Grizzlies were last year. However, this Jazz team isn't quite as soft as some have noted. While their defense is poor, the Jazz offense has been positively humming to close the season. They've been offensively brilliant using monstrously huge lineups that -- while not great at covering quick guards on defense -- have absolutely dominated on the offensive end of the floor. The recent Jazz experiment with using a super-big lineup of Devin Harris, Gordon Hayward, Paul Millsap, Derrick Favors, and Al Jefferson was the fifth most efficient lineup in the league per Basketball Value, sporting an offensive rating of 121 points per 100 possessions scored and a defensive rating of 80 points per 100 possessions allowed. Very good stuff. And to a Spurs team that was shocked by a monstrously large frontcourt a year ago, a bad thing to read about.

WHY THEY WON'T: ... unfortunately for the Jazz, other than that lineup, they don't have_ a single other lineup_ that's played more than 50 minutes together that rates as league average on defense. They're facing the best offense in the league, and a coach that excels at lineup adjustments to handle poor defensive teams. The Jazz relied on an excellent offense and some great play from young players to reach the playoffs -- they've got the talent and the ability to take a game or two from the Spurs, but this shouldn't be all that close of a series when all is said and done.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: All things considered, the Mavs probably should be thankful they dropped into OKC's bracket. There's no other team in the west -- save the Jazz -- I'd consider taking the Mavs over in a series. The Mavericks are (as I noted earlier this season) impossibly old, extremely creaky, and lost the season series to the Thunder 3-1. But at least they played them close. If Dirk has a vintage, finals MVP-type series, it's possible the Mavs could push it to 7 and get close to an upset.

WHY THEY WON'T: I debated putting the Mavs under the Jazz, though the championship boost let them get a tad bit higher. Look. The Mavericks won an amazing title last year, and the 2011 Mavericks were a fantastic team. This year's edition, though? They're pretty damn bad. Offensively shiftless, with a defense that feasts on lower-tier teams and wilts against higher tier teams. Not only that, the Mavs have been gradually (and quietly) getting worse as the season rolled along, culminating in the team you see now -- one with very little identity and (frankly) a snowball's chance in hell of even putting up a competitive performance against the Thunder, let alone beat them. Dirk will win them a game, perhaps two, and (if he has an amazing 30-15 type series) maybe even 3. But no more than that, unless the Thunder beat themselves.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: The Knicks aren't exactly a team that's going to take you by surprise at this point. They over-saturate sports media like the best New York teams all do, and they've got a roster with significant upside. And in drawing the Heat, whether Knicks fans realize it or not, they've probably gotten the most favorable draw they could've. Assuming they had to choose between the Bulls and the Heat (and yes, they did -- it took one legendary collapse from Philadelphia for them to even move up from 8th, chalking in another for Orlando defies all logic and reason), I like the Heat as a better matchup. The excellent rebounding the Bulls could throw at the Knicks would make it virtually impossible for them to get second shot opportunities, Noah could keep Chandler from getting the touches he needs to contribute on offense, and the Bulls' stout defensive rotations could easily revert the Knicks into an iso-Melo team for the ages. Against the Heat, there are a number of cogent advantages the Knicks could potentially point to.

• Tyson Chandler essentially beat the Heat at their own game last year -- he knows their defense and offense front-to-back, and was the head of the defensive attack that neutralized them late in games in last year's finals. He's a Knick.

• In Iman Shumpert, the Knicks have one of the best defensive rookies of the current class. Theoretically, he could keep a hobbled Dwyane Wade from doing much of his damage in a full series.

• In his career, Carmelo Anthony has always played supernaturally well against LeBron James on both ends of the floor -- perhaps because their old friends, perhaps because he knows him too well. But he does. If that translates to the playoffs, that could swing a series.

Which would all lead me to pick the Knicks over the Heat...

WHY THEY WON'T: ... if it wasn't for the fact that, quite simply, this Heat team is just way better than this Knicks team. For the Knicks to win, they'll need LeBron James to have a series roughly as bad as last year's finals and for Chris Bosh to play awful basketball. Shumpert -- while a fantastic defensive talent -- is not going to be up to shutting Dwyane Wade down over a full series. Tyson Chandler is battling minor injuries and a bad flu. THE TEAM STARTS THE UNDEAD REANIMATION OF BARON DAVIS AT POINT GUARD (AND GIVES SIGNIFICANT MINUTES TO MIKE BIBBY). If this team beats the Heat, it's going to be a massive upset. And while their theoretical ceiling may be about as high as any of the teams I have pegged as first round outs (except for one), they're just as likely to get swept themselves as they are to beat the Heat in 6. And they'd need to. Other than Game 4 of the 2007 finals and Game 6 of the 2011 finals, neither LeBron nor Wade have ever lost a home elimination game in their lives. And those were the finals -- this is the first round we're talking about, here, and all the jitters that come from the Finals are essentially absent. I think the Knicks will win a game or two, and make the Heat sweat a time or two. But no matter how many advantages they theoretically have, I don't think they've got a legitimate shot at this series. I just don't. The Heat are too good.

• • •

WHY THEY'LL DO BETTER: The next three teams on this list are all teams where I could realistically see them winning their series. In some cases, I could realistically see them winning several. But the prognosis is much less dire for these three than it is for the teams above. Starting with, of course, your AtLAAAAANta Hawks! It may be a surprise to you that I actually think they've got a nearly 50-50 chance to win their series with the Celtics, primarily because the prevailing logic around the Celtics is that they're the far better team. I don't necessarily disagree. There are, however, a few factors that run quite to Atlanta's favor.

• Over the Big Three era, the Celtics are 13-22 on the road in the playoffs. In order to win this series, they'll need to have either a winning record on the road or -- at worst -- a 1-3 record on the road. While we spin yarns about the Celtics' veteran prowess, we generally fail to note that in the last four years the Celtics have never had a winning record on the road over a whole playoff run. The best was 2010, where they were 6-6 on the road. They actually did terribly in their 2008 title year, going 3-9 on the road over the whole playoffs (including 0-6 in the first two rounds). The Big Three Celtics are -- in general -- front runners. They aren't particularly great at winning playoff road games, and ceding HCA in this series by punting the game in Atlanta may prove to be an awful mistake.

• The Hawks have played a ridiculous number of games against the Celtics in the Big Three era. The Celtics are 15-9 against the Hawks in the last 5 years, but just 4-6 against them in the last 3. One of those wins was an overtime game. While the Hawks did rather terribly against the Celtics in the first two years of the Garnett-Pierce-Allen era, they've done pretty well for themselves over the last few years, and have begun to take the upper hand in the matchup -- at least in the regular season. Remains to be seen if they'll translate that to the playoffs, but it's a good trend for them.

• While the Hawks have had some poor injury luck this season (for the first time in a few years), they'll enter the series as ostensibly the more healthy team. Greg Stiemsma (the Bill Simmons pick for the Dwight Howard replacement on Team USA -- and dear God, I wish I was kidding) is hobbling with plantar fasciitis in his right foot. Additionally, Pierce has a sprained toe, Kevin Garnett has sore hips, Rondo has a sore back, and Ray Allen still isn't quite right from his midseason injury. The Hawks are missing Horford, but their key pieces -- Josh Smith, Joe Johnson, and Jeff Teague -- all enter the series relatively healthy. In a close series, the more healthy team generally wins, if they combine that health with home court advantage and experience with their opponent.

WHY THEY WON'T: For the same reasons the prevailing sentiment is that they'll be outclassed in the series -- the Celtics are playing some truly special defense right now. The Hawks are a decent team, but not a great one. The Hawks this season have been much like the Hawks every season for the last three years: win a decent number of games, utilize a non-creative offensive attack (though Drew's offense is still more creative than Woodson's iso-Joe stylings), beat the teams they're supposed to beat, play teams that are nearly as good as they are close, and lose miserably to teams that are better than they are. The Hawks winning this series depends on the Celtics being -- instead of the team we saw in the last month or two -- the team that they were over the whole of the season. Which is a team that's not quite as marvelous on defense, shiftless on offense, and roughly at the Hawks level overall. I wanted to pick the Hawks to win the series, and I see it as a strong possibility. But I just can't pick the Hawks to beat a team that's better than they are. They haven't done it yet, and without Horford, I don't think this will be their year. Celtics break the Hawks' second round streak, and beat them in six.

• • •

Given the length, I'll cut this off here. We'll continue tomorrow with teams 10-5 (which will take us to our projected conference finalists), and Sunday with teams 4-1 (culminating in my prediction for this year's NBA title winner). Please note that all picks have already been made, and a draft of each post is done as well -- just because the last few teams will come up after a few games have been played doesn't mean I'm gaming the last few. Enjoy the playoffs, campers. I will.

The most telling sign of maturity is to accept the consequences of our actions, whether those consequences are accidental or essential to the nature of the action. Since it's generally hard to deny the essential consequences of our actions (if you steal something or assault someone, you are pretty much by definition hurting the victims), most immaturity takes the form of denying the accidental consequences. "I meant to <steal from, scare them, block them> them, yes, but I never wanted it to get out of hand like this. They weren't supposed to <move into the path of the knife, retailiate, faint, etc.>," is the essential refrain of the immature, and as we get older it becomes more and more unsympathetic. We all take risks in life, and owning the negative accidents of those risks is just as important as owning the negative essence of those risks.

This definition of maturity also applies to the accidental and essential consequences of our words, systems, and ideologies. In the recent NFL bounty scandal, Gregg Williams and the Saints were wrong because their actions had essentially negative intentions and consequences. To use a phrase from our deceased Guru, the Saints were "violating, straight up and down," the spirit of professional athletics. There is no excuse -- even in a violent sport like football -- to hurt players intentionally in structural ways. You try to win, and you try to play hard (even if inflicting pain in the short-term is part of that). But the second you try to hurt someone structurally you become an assailant, little different from a common criminal.

• • •

As a teaching example, let's change a couple things so that the Saints' situation has more nuance. Let's say that Williams had completely avoided the bounty system. Boom. Just like that, it never existed. Let's also say the coach avoided those absolutely horrifying pregame speeches where he talked about specific injuries to target. Instead, let's suppose that in his pregame speeches Gregg Williams would simply point out certain players' structural weaknesses and say something like "Bring the pain. You know who will feel it most." Is he still culpable?

In this lightened example, Williams still has opened (if only slightly) the Pandora's Box of chance. It's not a stretch for an intensity-fueled linebacker or two to take his speech to to heart and decide to focus on hitting that one Pro Bowl fullback's ACL his coach mentioned as his motivation. Perhaps he'll even feel that causing such an injury would gain him respect with Saints coaching and management. So, in the game, suppose the linebacker hammers the fullback's knee with calculated malice, and the fullback's career ends right there in one brutal hit. Is Williams to blame now? He's probably not culpable, right? Maybe Williams only mentioned the dude's ACL to give his defense hope that they could stop a talented-but-vulnerable Pro Bowler. That's perfectly reasonable, and Gregg Williams is in this example almost certainly not at fault for what a stray linebacker does. Williams is in the right legally, probably morally, and certainly ethically in his capacity as a coach.

On the other hand, perhaps Gregg Williams would in this example later take stock and recognize that focusing on some guy's ACL in the pregame speech may have had the accidental consequence of putting that poisonous thought in that linebacker's head. Perhaps Williams would choose his words and incentives more carefully in the future. Or perhaps he would explain to himself that this is football and in order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs. Maybe if you're an NFL fan that's how you explain the bounty scandal in the first place. Maybe you see the bounty scandal as an accidental consequence of a football culture that at its essence is truly about achievement, swagger, teamwork, and toughness. Maybe you see the concussion issue the same way. Perhaps the only truly bad people here are the one's involved long in covering up the ill effects of the concussion. And -- only after that -- the people like Williams that mired in the most hateful parts of their sport to manipulate the NFL's culture of machismo into a culture of violence.

My point is not to take a side on this issue, though you can probably tell I'm decisively against Gregg Williams and the Saints at least. Whatever you feel about the bounty scandal, my point is that -- as a mature adult -- you must own up to the accidental and the essential consequences of the sort of league you promote. If the kind of league you like also leads to some disabled 45-year-olds down the road, then you must have those disabled 45-year-olds in mind -- at least in your peripheral vision -- when you're watching. If the kind of league you like also leads to a wussy, 2-second-long fights by preening superstars that've known each other since they were 5 in place of actual toughness (link to 99% of NBA fights)? Well, you have to own those consequences, and tendinitis, and your favorite little backup point guard TJ Ford lying supine and unable to get up and retiring a day later. You have to own that as part of owning the spoils of the playoffs of the present-day NBA.

• • •

Aaron and I have been unreasonably frustrated by the shrill of anti-tanking rhetoric that has consumed ESPN's formerly excellent HoopIdea series. Let's get one thing straight before anything else: tanking absolutely sucks for everyone involved. It distorts the playoff picture, makes games less worthwhile for fans of a team, and gives all too much power to 6-7-8 seeds once they've clinched a playoff berth. What the Warriors had to do to keep their pick was a travesty and a debasement of a competitive league. They should never in a million years have had that specific incentive to tank or lose a first round pick entirely. No one should ever have to trade for Richard Jefferson. My hands are bowed in prayer. And #1 seeds should get to choose their first victims as a privilege of their seeding. Most everyone agrees with these things. I'm cool with it, Aaron's cool with it, and the 2011 Spurs would DEFINITELY be cool with it.

What I'm really not cool with is the immature (as I've framed it above) attitude that HoopIdea takes towards unintended consequences. Listen, as extreme socially liberal fiscal libertarians with a healthy respect for leftist economics and an encyclopedic knowledge of War and Peace, Aaron and I have been fascinated by and fixated on the accidental consequences and the epistemic limitations of essentially well-intended economic and social systems. Pretty much ever since we met each other. Some of our favorite teaching examples:

• Prescription drug crackdowns that ultimately make life a living hell for pain patients.
• Government spending on various in-and-of-themselves positive things that ultimately combine to crowd out valuable private investment that would have been more efficient to solve a broader problem and suited to finer granularities of individual and collective problems.
• Insanely complex tax and legal codes (whose complexity is built on generations of intelligent and prudent minds) that by their complexity alone end up favoring the well-represented upper classes over the poor and the minorities of this country, even without getting into the cryptic racism and sexism of various popular legislation.

Or, we could get to the truly relevant example. That is, a sports league whose draft lottery -- intended by the powers that be to create parity -- ultimately ends up incentivizing losing under certain circumstances.

• • •

Look, I get the imperative for the Hoopidea project. It's a fine goal. But you know what? Economists spend their whole lives trying to eliminate these sorts of unintended consequences and (better yet) trying to understand and harness the unintended consequences to become a force for good when possible. Politicians may spend their entire careers trying to eliminate the occasionally insane bureaucratic waste and complexity of our government and end up having to maintain their position by producing yet more flotsam themselves. Have you seen The Wire? That was kind of the main theme with the chessboard, really. And the main theme is rather similar. It's really hard to solve these problems. I find it appalling that a few smart and talented intellectuals who have been selected for their extensive basketball knowledge with no apparent training in economic systems are lecturing the rest of us about perverse incentives and the small-scale evils that an overall good idea can produce. Especially with an inconceivably flimsy grasp of their own unintended consequences.

Let's be honest. If many of the solutions to eliminate tanking proposed by the HoopIdea project were to be adopted, a team will end up contracting. The next day, as they're clearing out Stern's office (he had left in disgust and shame after hearing about the contraction) they're going to find a copy of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations." They're going to wonder why the hell they had underestimated his (all considering) massively credible approach to the business end of basketball. And they're going to wonder why their own unintended consequences had to be so dire. As we've said -- tanking is an abomination of basketball. But in the league as it currently projects to be for many years, there are worse unintended consequences than a tank-and-renewal strategy in which the vast majority of teams feel they have a punter's shot at a title if they can tank for a few years.

Believe it or not, as much as Stern's aversion to contraction may seem outdated and quaint, it also stems from the fact that teams are not just in a market competition with each other. The idea that they are is an incorrect convolution of the league's economics with the league's goals as a sporting competition. Teams rise and fall in direct proportion to the rest of the league's success and failure. Contraction as a real and ever-present option would massively deflate the currently huge price tags on NBA franchises. Teams are not sales reps pushing against each other, they're more akin to countries vying for power while valuing peace above all else. Teams are not tanking because they want to lose, they're tanking because they want to win, but are intelligent enough not to confuse 5 extra wins (a single outcome) with a healthier franchise (a robust process). They're tanking to show the rest of the league what a hard time they're having competing in a deep, solid league. These teams that are making a case that they - and not their comparably hungry counterparts - should have the most claim to the next shipment of rice and wheat.

In the history of unintended consequences, this is more or less about as innocuous as it gets. We don't have teams trying to lose eternally except the Clippers and various other cheap owners, and there are plenty of good disjoint solutions to those problems, anyway (like the recently-raised salary floor, for example, that Aaron has often noted was perhaps the best new provisions in the new CBA). We have to have tanking because tanking that is strategic and consistent with respect to a few key rules is massively preferable to the unintended consequences of nearly everything HoopIdea has yet proposed. If HoopIdea wants to continue to be taken seriously in this respect, they ought to gather their best anti-tanking ideas together and then go further... to organize their best ideas into one or two key manifestos or visions of the future in which tanking is reduced or severely curtailed, and replaced with substantially better and less prevalent perverse incentives.

These manifestos - like all the ideas that have ever succeeded in history - should lay out clearly (in both positive and negative senses) the essential and accidental consequences of their vision. Emphasis on the negative -- an ability to achieve self-awareness of your pet idea's flaws shows the maturity that befits a truly great thought. It would filter out much of the "this lineup is so pathetic they obviously want to lose #StopTanking" patronizing inherent in the campaign, as well as the growing aura of immaturity that has surrounded their unnecessarily thoughtless attack on a problem that deserves not just invectives and rants and denouncements, but mature solutions that own their own consequences.

You'd think, in our introductory post of the Gothic Ginobili playoff preview series, I'd be talking about the overall composition of playoff defenses and playoff offenses. Something about coaching, perhaps? A look at the matchups at hand. Some interesting statistical tidbits, some oddities that keep us intrigued. A look at how past champions did? Aging metrics? A mournful introduction to a disturbing fictional take on the situation by Alex or Jacob? The possibilities are endless. Must be one of those. ... Well. You'd think. But you'd be wrong.

It's Hornets time, folks.

• • •

The 2012 Hornets were, by all intents and purposes, an abominable group of talent. The 2011 Hornets were pretty poor as well, but they had Chris Paul and David West to smooth over the gaps. If you take the top two players off of a wholly two man offense -- one of them being an MVP-caliber point guard -- you aren't left with all that much beyond a shell of a team and whatever exogenous value the coach can give you. And if you noticed, the Hornets lost their only promising young talent (Eric Gordon) three games into the season. He played less than 10 games this year, and the overall talent level on this Hornets team went from "bad talent" to "oh my god how will they win 10 games" talent. They proceeded to perform the following feats.

• Ended the season with an average point differential of -3.8; despite being tied for the 3rd worst record in the league, the Hornets had a better point differential than six other teams. For clearly bottom-of-the-barrel talent, that's rather impressive.

• They had 10 wins over playoff teams, including a 26 point blowout of the Magic (who had a healthy Dwight Howard), a 13 point road win over a rested Denver Nuggets team, and a 19 point shellacking of the Celtics that really wasn't all that close. At all.

• They pushed the 2012 Spurs -- who took the #1 seed in the Western Conference -- to the final possession of a basketball game twice. They pushed 4 playoff teams to overtime, winning one. In 33 home games, they lost ONLY TWO by over 20 points -- the Hornets rewarded their home crowds. A Hornets season ticket holder who went to every home game saw fewer 20+ blowouts than a Magic season ticket holder, or a Knicks season ticket holder, or a Mavericks season ticket holder.

You can't look at me and tell me that those accomplishments aren't fairly incredible, given their roster.

• • •

Look. The Hornets were gritty, incorrigibly talentless, and all manner of a tough out no matter who they faced. They lost about as much as anyone, in the regular season, and had the occasional game where they looked their talent level. But if the game was important to them or the opportunity arose to make a statement, they made it. They put legitimate scares into half the teams that beat them. They accomplished it all under incomprehensible duress, acting as a franchise with no owner and no guarantee that they'd even be in the same city in two years. If you coasted for a game, Monty pulled you. If you got injured, Monty sat you and made sure you healed. The team was bad, certainly, but it cared about its players.

As we go into this year's playoffs, the 2012 Hornets represent to me the undertones of just about everything you'd want in a playoff sleeper. They embodied the spirit of all great upstart teams. There was never a sense of "oh, phew, this team is finally performing to expected levels" when they had a good game. There was never the ruddy complacency that permeates through a blowout Heat win, or a Lakers win, or a blowout Bobcats loss. That sense that the basketball placed before you was preordained. Expected. Exactly as planned. The Hornets scrapped, clawed, and made clear that they weren't going to succumb to everyone's expectations without a fight. You didn't simply show up and beat the Hornets -- you had to come to play, or they'd make you sweat it out and give your fanbase shivers. "Did you see that? This team almost lost to the second worst team in the league! We're terrible!" Or so they'd say. But this Hornets team, despite the awful record and the incomprehensibly thin talent, was not the second worst team in the league.

I promise that.

• • •

The season's over now. They lost their last game, and I wave my goodbyes to the shiftless 2012 Hornets, and so long for memories more poignant and stirring than anything I had the right to expect. I hope that during the playoffs, we can find ourselves a good pastiche. I hope a coach pulls a 2011 Monty Williams on us and pushes an underdog roster to a height greater than the sum of its parts. I hope Stan Van Gundy inspires the Magic to sweat the Pacers out in 6 tense games, or Doug Collins micromanages his men to push Chicago silly. Like the 2011 Hornets, they probably won't win -- they may not even go 6 games. But a series of close, gritty, grind-it-out ball where the favorite has to count their lucky stars they got a few bounces to keep the score respectable over their unsung rival? That's what I want to see. It's what, to a certain extent, we all want to see.

... You know. As long as the Utah Jazz aren't that team, right?

In 2008, the Boston Celtics won an NBA title. They won it on the backs of three aging all-stars players, an excellent coach, and a killer defensive system. In subsequent years, the surrounding pieces changed, but the team continued to contend far past their star trio's refreshingly crisp salad days of yore into the significantly-more-wilted salad days of today. Entering this year’s playoffs, the Celtics are playing extremely well. They may have one last title run left in them, though it'll certainly take some luck. That said? Very few would honestly say they can see the Celtics keeping their team together next year. They'll have cap room if they give up some of their stars, and it IS a business -- it's unlikely that this year's Boston team returns for another go-around, no matter how successful their swan song.

In 2010, the Miami Heat won an NBA offseason. This too you may have heard about. They were able to keep their home-grown finals MVP and add to that a young and versatile all-star finesse large forward and the reigning two-time MVP -- by most accounts, one of the greatest basketball players on the planet. Like the 2008 Celtics, the 2011 Heat got to the NBA finals in their first year as a dynasty-by-design. Unlike the 2008 Celtics, they didn’t win. They of course have their own advantages, though, not least of which the mysterious allure of the unknown. As everyone’s quick to note, the stars assembled in Miami are significantly younger than the ones that set up shop in Boston. Their time together will be larger than that of the Celtics’ big three, if they care to keep it going. Given that, and the fact thatMiami’s stars are (in a general sense) better basketball players thanBoston’s, wouldn’t one have to expect greater things from their collective? Not necessarily. That may be our expectations, but having seen this team for two years, I’m of the view we’re approaching a full-scale revision of the generally understood “ceiling” of this Miami team. Here's why.

• • •

When the Celtics acquired their big three, the general consensus was that they’d be a dynasty of some import. To these eyes, they succeeded with some caveats. Assuming they break the team up this summer (as I do assume), the Celtics’ Big Three Era will have been a five year dynasty. At all points in those five years, the trio was in at least fringe contention for an NBA title. That’s a relatively successful legacy in the modern NBA, although winning only a single ring will certainly lessen their staying power. All things considered, the Celtics’ reign is more akin to the 2003-2008 Pistons than, say, the 2002-2007 Spurs or the 1999-2004 Lakers. Not necessarily a bad thing -- those Pistons are criminally underrated, and a dynasty doesn’t necessarily mean multiple rings. At least they got one, right?

When the Heat acquired their three, a similar consensus was formed. Danger Will Robinson; a Dynasty is here. Not one, not two… well, maybe two or three, but only at a minimum! The general impression the league had as theMiamitrio joined was the Celtics dynasty on steroids – not just one ring, several were at hand. Here, we had three extremely young and talented players around the same age joining together to win titles. The players were not only younger, they were slightly better – LeBron’s two-time MVP trophies to KG’s single, and two finals appearances already present among the collected stars. If the Celtics could accomplish so much with just five waning years of their stars’ careers, how much could the Heat accomplish? The possibilities were endless, the ceiling too high to comprehend. Until now, anyway.

In this table, I’ve provided the ages, minutes, and games played over the careers of the individual components of each team – the 2011 Heat, the 2008 Celtics, and the theoretical 2013 Heat (assuming, as I do, that despite their current struggles they get out of the east and play as many playoff games next year as they did last year – 21 – with the same minutes distribution). The G/MP columns correspond to the regular season, the PG/PMP columns correspond to the playoffs, and the TG/TMP columns correspond to their total games and minutes of both playoffs and the regular season added together.

Age is a funny thing. At the close of the 2012 season, the trio the Heat will be left with is going to be, rather ironically, closer to the 2008 Celtics than a team of young up-and-comers. LeBron has played more playoff minutes than almost anybody else in the league over the last 7 years, and as such, LeBron’s regular season minutes (already very high) are extremely amplified by his insane playoff minutes. Same with Wade, though he’s starting from a lower base due to his regular injury issues. When the Boston Big Three came together, they were combining three men in their thirties who had played a lot of basketball. The 2013 Heat will combine:

• Chris Bosh, a 28 year old power forward who over his career misses an average of 8 games a season and has played barely 300 fewer minutes than Paul Pierce at the start of the Celtics dynasty – the equivalent of less than 10 games.

• LeBron James, a 28 year old wunderkind who despite his young age has nevertheless played over 32,554 minutes in his career. That’s more than Marcus Camby, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, and – believe it or not – Chris Webber ever played in their careers. He’s avoided serious injury in his career, and while nobody would PREDICT that it will happen… one has to wonder how long he can go on like this. Of the Celtics’ big three, only Kevin Garnett had played more minutes than LeBron will have played at the start of the 2013 season. And while KG has had his moments, he’s been an injury risk for years. That’s a problem, for this team.

• Dwyane Wade, a 31 year old former Finals MVP whose game is predicated on wild injury-risking drives to the basket and athletic feats of brilliance that – while still necessarily present in his person – are certain to begin decline sometime in the next two or three years, if not sooner. Also, misses about 15 games a season. Also, is a relatively poor shooter – his game is not primed to age like Ray Allen’s, although Heat fans certainly wish it would. I discussed Wade's evolution with age earlier this year in a season preview post that I still think turned out reasonably well. Perhaps worth a read now, if you never got the chance to check it out.

It’s interesting how time works. Two years into the Miami dynasty, we’re already at a bit of a crossroads. Despite the Heat’s struggles this month, I don’t see them losing the East this year. The Celtics don’t have the offense to defeat them, I think, and I certainly don’t think the Bulls (with a gimpy Derrick Rose, of course) are going to be able to muster up the offense to crack the Miami playoff defense either. But assuming that any championship series in an even-conference year is something of a crap shoot (and, quite honestly, I think in the right circumstance this Heat team could be evenly matched by any one of the Thunder, Spurs, or Grizzlies), where does that leave the Heat if they let slip another Finals from their grasp?

• • •

Entering next year, the Heat will be almost exactly where the Celtics were five years ago.

They have their best player and the team core, who has not coincidentally played way more minutes in his career than either of their other two stars. They have their oldest player, who in 5 years may not be a starting-quality guard in the league (as Ray Allen is only on the fringe of one now, despite a much more age-defying game). They have a solid, versatile big man who nevertheless will not provide an eternal defensive anchor behind their two perimeter stars as they fall off. And behind them? They have even less than the Celtics, whose non-Big 3 assets in 2008 weren’t exactly chopped liver. The Celtics had a young and dynamic defensively dominant wing in Tony Allen, three promising young pieces (Kendrick Perkins, Leon Powe, and Rajon Rondo), and the soothing calm of Brian Scalabrine’s tender gaze. The Heat will enter 2013 with just one player outside their big three with particular import or promise in Norris Cole, and beyond that, a roster of flotsam and ring-chasing veterans. Unfortunately for them, they’ll also inherit a more restrictive cap structure that makes adding pieces quite a bit more difficult than it was for the Celtics dynasty. This leaves the Heat in an odd position – having through their actions brought upon themselves the popular expectation of a multiple-title dynasty, they’re approaching a period where the most likely outcome of their partnership is a single ring bookended with many competitive (if not ultimately successful) seasons, perhaps some pocked by injury, but all with the knowledge that their core could've been more if they'd gotten together sooner. If only, if only.

Titles aren't particularly easy things to get. In any sport, but especially in a sport as rigorous as the NBA. Even if the Heat win just a single title, that's still quite an accomplishment. There are few who wish to denigrate the Celtics dynasty because they won just a single ring together, and when it comes time to write the book on the Miami Heat, I doubt there'd be many historians chomping at the bit to lessen their accomplishments. Except, of course, for the key aspect that differentiated the Heat from the Celtics or the Pistons or any other one-title dynasty in the NBA -- I refer, of course, to the Heat's own inflation of their own expectations. The giant party when their trio came together. The crying on court after beating the Celtics. The odd post-game conferences, the unnecessary jabs at the media that fuels them, the unsportsmanlike disregard for their opposition. We don't really fault the Celtics for winning a single title, because while they certainly wanted to compete, the Celtics didn't spend two or three years talking about all the titles they'd win. They reveled in it, and did nothing to counteract the sprawling media machine's over-hype of their team. If they disappoint their arbitrarily large expectations, why did they allow them to be set so damned high in the first place?

In that sense, that's where the Heat went wrong. And where they may -- someday -- find cause for regret. Not in their accomplishments, but in the way they framed them. It's true that a team with a ceiling of the late 2000s Celtics is still a team that’s the envy of 90% of the league. But as we enter this year’s playoffs, it may be time to start revising our personal expectations of the cadre. Not four, not three, not two – if this group wins a single ring together, it may be time to admit that such an outcome would well validate their dynasty as much as the Celtics’ one ring validates them. For fans of schadenfreude (or Cavs fans, like myself), it would still be a hell of a funny situation. And it's quite possible that the Heat's failure to live up to the expectations they set for themselves will color all subsequent historical interpretations of their reign. Flying Death Machine? More like a Flying Disappointment Machine, if you account for all the hype.

But for fans of the game, and the game alone?

Let's just stop expecting to shoot the moon, here. The Heat are the Heat. That's good enough.