The game between the Spurs and the Thunder approached its conclusion. Ritualistically, as he sat on the bench waiting for the buzzer so that he could leave, Richard Jefferson reached a hand over his shoulder and received a piece of paper. He glanced down at the paper, holding his stats for the night: Exactly 24 minutes, 10 points on 8 shots, 4 rebounds, 2 turnovers, 2 personal fouls, 1 assist. Half the game he'd been on the floor in a 20-point loss, and in his 24 minutes on the floor his team had been outscored by 10.

Jefferson smiled at the other stats: all zeros the rest of the way. Every zero Jefferson saw in his statline was like an injection of a mind-shattering drug that sent him to the center of the universe, to the Void. Even the non-zero stats - such as the points, the rebounds, and the assist - were aligned in asymptotically-perfect balance - barring the allowance of fractions into the statsheet, Jefferson had been as neutral as humanly possible in the defeat: He had neither contributed nor been a detriment to his team. He was the Void.

Richard Jefferson was Nothing.

• • •

And yet there was a paradox, an unbecoming twist in this annihilating thread. For, in order to get to this deliciously-calibrated neutrality, Richard Jefferson had made a thousand choices that had consciously determined this non-effect. The apparatus that he'd wielded in order to ensure neutrality was so elaborate and efficient that by comparison Moriarty's threads would belong on a single marionette. Jefferson had controlled the universe in order to create dull silence. He had snuffed out a part of the sun solely in order to create the room temperature room. So his zeal to become nothing had begotten another becoming, and in this other sense of becoming he was becoming God, was becoming Everything. A towel damp with sweat wreathed a powerful, swiftly-receding head and at once he was dry and the buzzer had sounded.

And in the locker room after the game, Jefferson's neutrality continued unabated. He promptly gave a postgame interview calculated to be so reasonable it could raise no alarm, then donated a reasonable percentage of his fortune to charity. After he'd dressed and said a reasonable number of goodbyes to teammates, he'd sat down - with reasonable posture - in the middle of the AT&T Center's darkened court and put dozens of wet towels over himself, so that he was utterly covered. If you didn't know where to look, you'd think he'd disappeared.

He was truly Nothing, now.

The next day they'd announce they'd traded Richard Jefferson for Stephen Jackson. Sitting in that gym with no eyes upon his signature tat and no media to feel one way or the other, Jefferson knew he'd be traded. For, in the midst of all his fantasies of being Nothing, the prescience of his causal apparatus gave him inspiration and - transporting himself many months into the future - Jefferson suddenly heard the happy shouts from all around him in the empty gym. The shouts - Jefferson noted well - promised things that he could never deliver as a player.

It would be a banner year for San Antonio, and laughing, madcap Richard Jefferson - his size, his acumen, his spirit, and, most importantly, his matching contract - would be the central agent of the change. He would be Everything precisely by being Nothing. There was an unaccountable perversion of logic in this paradox, though, and entombed in his fortress of towels he started to shiver. For suppose he were not straddling the line between ultimate power and abnegation of the same. Suppose - and this intensified his shivers - that he were not any different from any of the other competitors he interacted with. What if the apparatus of mediocrity Jefferson had built into an idol were no more complex nor more brilliant in its unifying designs than that of his teammate Tim Duncan? Suppose - after all had been said and done - that Richard Jefferson were merely an average player with an above-average self-awareness. Suppose the grand stage of basketball - so perfect and so central to his dreams of self-annihilation - were nothing but an eternal series of attempts to move the lever of one's team up and one's opponents down. And suppose further that Jefferson had only to try to move the lever up and none of this might have happened.

Now Jefferson knew he would be traded, but all happy thoughts of paradox and omnipotence peeled away from him with sudden, unwanted haste, much like were peeled the towels that had been draping him, and with no obstruction his eyes met bright lights of center court. His warmup T-shirt barely could veil a weeping mask of clay and confusion.

He'd been found in the center of the gym, and the random trainer on staff seemed pleased to see him.

"Were you... sleeping out here, Richard?"

Jefferson felt some reasonable amount of embarrassment, laughed off the situation for a perfectly reasonable amount time, and then jumped millions of feet into the air as if he were a bird of some tremendous and terrifying wingspan. What was left over from the ascendance gracefully gave an interview the next morning, saying basketball was only a business and trades a necessary part of that business. He had no complaints for anyone, and as they handed him an itinerary and wished him well, he gave a brief look to the sentimental sky before thanking them and moving on from that unfortunate stage of his life.

EDIT: _Call off the dogs. Matt was able to recover everything after a lot of hard work. We can stop cache-hunting now -- although I have to state that I'm pretty impressed we were able to collect over 525 posts in the email inbox of our cache-dump email account. Excellent crowdsourcing. Sorry it ended up being unnecessary, but had the website been unable to be recovered, it was pretty important that we get things from the cache before the caches expired. Thanks to everyone who was a part of this, and my apologies for anyone who feels it was a waste of time.___

I woke up today and went to Hardwood Paroxysm, intending to look up an old piece I read every now and then for inspiration. Imagine my surprise when I found, well... nothing. I immediately checked Twitter and heard the news -- server got hacked, entire blog was deleted, things looked grim. Very sad story. I've actually had limited experience trying to recover lost websites before. Specifically, I had a forum I ran in high school whose website was unexpectedly wiped. We tried to save as many posts as we could, but we didn't get much. Most of it (including the tales of Spiderdude, a bro-ified Spiderman knock-off that only a high schooler like me would find funny) was lost to the endless ether of the internet. In trying to recover everything, though, I became at least a little more knowledgable in figuring out how to go about recovering a site when the server-side data unexpectedly vanishes. To the uninitiated, here are two key points to keep in mind.

• Caches have everything. ... Sort of. There are three main cache servers that spider virtually everything on the web and keep records for varying lengths of time. Google, Yahoo, and the Wayback Machine are my three mainstays -- there are quite a lot more, but those tend to have everything you need (with the others coming into play only later in the process). The process of accessing files cached by Google is simple -- you search for something, hover over it, then click on the "Cached" link that comes up on the right side of the page. As seen below, on the far right side of the image.

• Time is of the essence. This is why I say "sort of." Caches have a catch. They've got a relatively quick churn rate, and because of this, a webpage that no longer exists only stays cached in Google for a limited amount of time. The time varies based on how popular the website is -- I'm not sure what the algorithm is, exactly, but after a certain amount of time if the webpage no longer exists the Google cache picks up on it and removes the file. The Wayback machine doesn't work like that, however, it picks up historical data quite a bit less often than the Google/Yahoo caches. So it may not be as useful for this exercise.

Why is this relevant? We can still backup Hardwood Paroxysm. There are two ways we can do this -- either through sifting through the RSS feeds of people who don't delete old articles, or by downloading articles based on cache data. I've already started the second process, but given the incredible amount of material amassed by the Hardwood Paroxysm crew, there's absolutely no way I can do it alone. And that's where you come in. After the jump, I outline the ways that you can help save Hardwood Paroxysm's archives and preserve the content of one of the best basketball blogs to ever grace the web. Let's get to it.

• • •

From my local drive, I was able to save many of the key style elements from HP's page -- the logo, the CSS stylesheets, et cetera. I also was able to save the text of HP's last 10 posts, which is good, because most caches don't seem to have them. When thinking about how to best organize the task of sifting through caches for over a thousand posts, I came across what I think is a relatively good structure for backing up HP before the content churns out of the cache. We start by searching the Google cache for specific HP authors, crowdsourcing the task to one or two authors per person so that work isn't duplicated. We can collect the document text by copying the cached page text into emails and sending them to an email account set up specifically to take old HP articles, so they're saved in a place we know they won't vanish any time soon. Then we can turn the archives over to the HP writers so they can undertake the task of repopulating the blog with content. That may have been a bit hard to follow, so here's an easier to follow instruction manual:

STEP 1: PICK AN AUTHOR

Here is an incomplete list of Hardwood Paroxysm authors, provided to me by Matt Moore in no particular order. Italicized authors are ones whose work is already backed up:

1. Rob Mahoney -- (Articles to be found by Mogias)
2. David Sparks -- (Articles backed up.)
3. Zach Harper -- (Articles to be found by AJ)
4. Jared Wade -- (Articles to be found by Alex Dewey)
5. Matt Moore -- (Articles to be found by Iz)
6. Scott Leedy -- (Articles to be found by Adam Koscielak)
7. Curtis Harris -- (Articles to be found by Jordan White)
8. James Herbert -- (Articles backed up.)
9. Jovan Buha
10. Steve McPherson -- (Articles backed up.)
11. Sean Highkin -- (Articles to be found by Jordan White)
12. Danny Chau -- (Articles to be found by Blake Potosh)
13. Connor Huchton -- (Articles to be found by Moglas)
14. Jared Dubin -- (Articles backed up.)
15. Jon Nichols
16. Amin Vafa
17. Eric Maroun -- (Articles backed up.)
18. Noam Schiller -- (Articles to be found by Ian Dougherty)
19. Conrad Kaczmarek -- (Articles backed up.)
20. Andrew Lynch -- (Articles backed up.)
21. Joey Whelan -- (Articles to be found by Aaron McGuire)
22. Josh Tucker -- (Articles to be found by Tim)

 

Please comment on this post with your name and the name of an author, if you'd like to take the task of helping to back up their work. We'll put your name here, so that nobody else duplicates your work in getting their articles back. Once you've got an author, move on to Step 2.

STEP 2: LOOK UP THEIR WORK

Go to Google and search for the following string:

site:http://www.hardwoodparoxysm.com "[author name]"

This should bring up several pages of results, with each of their posts on Hardwood Paroxysm.

STEP 3: EXAMINE THAT CACHE, DOGGS

So, you have a list of articles. By hovering over the article link, you'll get a menu on the right side of the screen with a screenshot of what the article once looked like and a link that reads "Cached". Click the link. You may notice that it takes a long time to load -- if that's the case, just click through to the text-only version, which'll be in the right corner of the box on the top of the screen. Like this:

STEP 4: EMAIL

This is the important part. Copy the text of the article -- including the title, author, and date-stamp -- into your email program. Then send it to savehp@gothicginobili.com, with the email titled as so:

[Article Author] - [Article Title]

Then go back to the original google search from step two, go to their next article, and repeat.

• • •

It's a tedious, mind-numbing process. But it's probably the easiest and most organized way to get HP's content stored before it gets churned out from the cache. If anyone has better ideas, I'd definitely be up for editing this post or altering the strategy. But I thought it'd be good to start something now, before articles start dropping like flies and the cache gets emptied. It's all at our fingertips right now, if we can organize enough and get it before it goes. This whole thing sucks, but hopefully we can minimize the damage and recover as much as we can. Good luck, campers.

One of the many tiny, awesome moments in this NBA season came when a team was making intentional off-the-ball fouls on DeAndre Jordan. It was one of those all too familiar "Hack-A-Shaq" moments where everyone stopped and shrugged their shoulders. The announcers slyly analyzed the strategy and talked about the free throw shooter's form and psychology. The audience grimaced at the spectacle. But -- meeting a dismal wall with a force of light -- Chris Paul used this moment to out-think the universe. See, just as the intentional foul on Jordan occurred, Chris Paul (manning the point and far beyond the top of the key) shot an insane, improbable 40-footer. Do I even need to specify? It was good.

I love that. I mean, I've watched a lot of basketball and I'd never seen that, at least when the foul was so blatantly intentional. In one stroke CP3, a preternaturally cerebral and gifted player, used his fantastic shooting ability to more than neutralize -- to actively punish -- the absurdity of Hack-A-Shaq with an equally absurd rejoinder. Unfortunately, the officials -- probably with the same puzzlement as everyone else -- didn't give Paul the benefit of a four-point play for his teammate to finish and Jordan simply went to the line. I'm pretty sure the sheer novelty of Paul's actions were the only reason they didn't get an and-one. In any case, every off-ball foul I've ever seen that was called during a made basket has led to an and-one. This one didn't. But the silent rebellion of a superstar against the most commonly dismal strategic ploy in the book remained.

• • •

Paul had taken advantage of his great knowledge of the game and had applied it in an unfamiliar, almost completely unprecedented setting. It was so clever that to me it evoked other masterstrokes of strategy such as Paul Westphal's intentional technical, Ricky Rubio's inbounds delay, the creative invention of the dribble, the Eurostep, the cross-over dribbles and variations, small ball, and so many other great facets of our great game.

Of course, on the other hand, you could also frame Paul's move as the kind of bend-not-break mentality that has also led to unsavory outcomes like flopping (himself a great practitioner of the dark arts), working over the refs (again, one of Paul's favorite domain), and the Hack-A-Shaq strategy Paul was responding to in the first place. Much of what we dislike about NBA basketball (say, absurd free throw attempts, superstar calls, inconsistent officiating, make-up calls, rip-through fouls until recently) is partially explained by the rational approach of innovators to rules with perverse incentives, even if the rules themselves are the structure needed to create the innovative improvisation that makes basketball great in the first place.

Gamesmanship is a double-edged sword, and nowhere is this illustrated better than in basketball. Since the HoopIdea project has focused on flopping and tanking above all else, I thought it would be well to talk about flopping in the general language of gamesmanship that produces it, to see if we can't get some meaningful insights.

• I've seen some talk about the worst and most egregious floppers being fined and otherwise developing a reputation as such as an incentive against flopping (never mind for a moment that such reputations [like, say, Kobe Bryant's brilliant, First-Team defensive acumen] are often false and misleading, especially late in a player's career). But I'd challenge that. If a player doesn't flop all season and then flops 5 times at crucial moments in Game 7 of a playoff series, well... their flops are probably more important to their season and career than all of those of a notorious flopper put together.

• Leverage is something that every fan of the game intuitively understands and the players with great gamesmanship such as Chris Paul (and Shane Battier) have perfected. As Truehoop has pointed out (and as Paul certainly understands), the relative importance of crunch-time performance extends to all aspects of crunch-time play, including steals, assists, and getting to the line. And yes, including flopping for an extra possession or free throw trip. The number of flops matters far less than the accumulated leverage that a player exerts in making all of his flops.

• If we want to keep the intelligence of the game of basketball, gamesmanship must be an important operative concept. Nothing is more offensive in basketball than players that can do one or two things and otherwise completely misunderstand the parts of basketball that everyone watching and everyone else playing understands. You know, like efficiency, boxing out, establishing good position, etc.

If you accept this, and you further accept that the officiating crew is inevitably fallible and inferring intent to flop is incredibly difficult (no matter how obvious you may think it at the time) and the overhead of implementing more officials is both prohibitive and deleterious to the sport... you also begin to accept the fact that flopping is absolutely inevitable. Basketball has a complex rulebook which, while not especially hard-to-understand, opens the door for subtle bending of the rules and of the officiating. There will always be workarounds to every earnest attempt (attempts that have been mostly successful) to make the sport as much about pure basketball competition as possible.

That said, there's absolutely no reason the rip-through has to be a foul on the defender, and as we've seen, the NBA found that rip-throughs had no real benefit to its style of play and only mediocre-to-worse consequences. In other words, the NBA solved for pattern and navigated the perverse incentives, and at the end of the day realized that what is not inevitable is calling a rip-through as a foul. Yes, flopping is inevitable, and I'm sure there's some complicated tree-branch metaphor between basketball, gamesmanship, and flopping where we can't cut flopping because it's not on our property or we'd have to cut the whole tree down or if we cut it off the tree would no longer produce delicious oranges (like Chris Paul) or something. But this rule change has shown that we can successfully prune flopping of its most unsightly boughs.

That's a modest goal, but like the decades of legal scholars pushing for modest goals, we must be prepared to accept that we may not be able to solve many of the problems we raise without making sacrifices, and that the truly pertinent problems may have to develop into obvious wrongs before we can in good conscience correct them. When the strategic blights on the game we aim to correct are also strategic innovations from some of the sport's brightest lights, truly separating the two and addressing the problem is at best tricky and -- at worst -- virtually impossible.

When I was 16, I wrote an "essay" that I locked away for a year without reading. It was a stream of consciousness ramble a la Joyce that went on for a good 5,000 or more words before I cut myself off and went to sleep. The intent was to strike brilliance through a mental dump of everything on my mind. Had to be something in there I wasn't accessing, right? Like many other teenagers who thought they were something special, I looked back a year later and realized that I'd failed miserably. There was no humor and no intelligence at play -- it was worthless fluff in every extent of the word. I eventually figured out why. I used to be an extremely uninteresting person. I remain that way, to an extent. Back then I was a teenager who buried himself in work and barely got out of the house. I am now an adult who buries himself in work and barely gets out of the house. The depth of my experience was skin deep. I wouldn't describe myself as that anymore, as I've lived a lot in the last few years, but I'm well aware that if I tried to do a Joycean mind dump today, it'd probably be almost as boring. My delusions are gone.

But if you want to employ a Joycean mind-dump successfully, there are one or two things you need. You don't need writing talent, really -- you can be an awful writer and still succeed at it, if you follow these two prescriptions. First, you need to be interesting by your very nature. You need to be a person who seeks out interesting experiences. Second, you need to be smart enough to have too much on your mind to properly organize. Joyce is engaging precisely because he combines an inordinately large depth of experience with an inordinately large capacity for random facts and subject-matter knowledge that most people simply don't have. Ulysses wouldn't be interesting if Joyce hadn't spent his life seeking out experiences. And it wouldn't be interesting if he wasn't incredibly smart. Because he's both, it works. I don't think I'll ever be able to approach Joyce's level of experience with the human condition, nor do I think I'll ever be smart enough to unconsciously frame it if I did.

So, all that said, I'd like to talk about Stephon Marbury.

• • •

I think Stephon Marbury is among the most fascinating people of the last decade. Influential, important, indomitable... no. None of those apply to him, when you're talking on the order of "best of a decade." But fascinating? That's his person, in a nutshell. I don't say that lightly, either. I find Barack Obama absolutely fascinating. Grigori Perelman is the most fascinating person of the last decade, for me -- the ascetic genius is a common thread, but rarely is it a genius of his level and rarely is it combined with his self-awareness for the state of his field. Tiger Woods, Vladimir Putin, George Bush -- all these are examples of fascinating famous people, and they're the people I think of when I consider Stephon Marbury. Not because he's as important as any of these people, or as smart. But because, again -- he's a fascinating person. Marbury has made his mistakes. I don't think he or anyone else would claim otherwise. The way he plays the game of basketball rubs most people the wrong way, and there's a good reason for that. It's a relatively soulless way to play the game. As one can glean from Darcy Frey's "The Last Shot", the base of Marbury's frustrating shoot-first game comes from his youth. When he was young, his father constantly emphasized that he was never going to get noticed if he didn't put up numbers. Defense, teamwork, making those around you better -- that's not Steph's general approach to basketball, though those aren't necessarily things he doesn't do. They're just things he wasn't raised to do.

Stephon Marbury was raised to score. He was raised to make the pass only if he knows it's a high percentage assist -- he instinctively doesn't do hockey passes. He is the polar opposite of the San Antonio Spurs, or any present conception of how to play basketball "the right way." He doesn't play the right way, he plays the Marbury way. But unlike Antoine Walker, Darko Milicic, or other volume scoring picture-me-giving-a-pass-I-say-never players that played the NBA in the most self-absorbed way they could, Marbury coupled his generally selfish playing style with one of the least selfish hearts in the league. He's donated millions of his salary earnings to disaster relief -- and notably donated more of his salary (around $500,000) to victims of Hurricane Katrina than quite literally any other basketball player in the world (with #2 overall being Kobe Bryant at $100,000). He donated $1,000,000 to victims of a recent tsunami -- after his playing days are over, of course, and after he's spent much of his fortune. He and his brother established a charitable foundation in 1996, the year he was drafted. Before he had most of his NBA money. It's a charity that has continued its work in New York well after Marbury left for far eastern pastures.

And then there's his sneaker company, one of the coolest things a basketball star has ever done. The entire point of the Starbury line is to offer clothes and basketball shoes that people like Stephon Marbury could afford. So far as I've always understood him, one of the things that makes Marbury so intriguing is that he remembers his roots enough that he bases his entire post-basketball career on his shoe empire. Which was, in turn, built entirely with the goal of fixing a problem for people like a young Stephon Marbury. In the same way some have surmised that the NBA response to the Trayvon Martin killing was especially stark because players could imagine themselves in Trayvon's shoes, so too were Marbury's shoes are an effort to change the game for the person that Stephon could have been. He was not successful, entirely, but he's certainly made it easier for people of lesser means to get passable ballin' shoes. Hell, my next pair of sneaks is going to be my 2nd pair of Starburies. No, he didn't break the Nike/Adidas monopoly, but he put a few cracks in it. That's worthy of everyone's praise, even if the fact that he did it in no way connects with the facts of how he plays the game.

• • •

So, to the point. Stephon Marbury is a champion.

Last week, Marbury's Beijing Ducks won the CBA title. They were extreme underdogs in every respect of the word. Not least of which because Marbury has won a title his way. That is, he scored an ungodly number of points, took a ton of shots (not all of them good), and took statistical ownership of his team. Regardless, Marbury still managed to lead an underdog group from the best CBA equivalent of the Clippers (big market, historically bad team) all the way to the CBA finals, then upended the champs. It was a 4-1 series that stands as some of the best basketball I've seen from the CBA (a league that's not NBA-quality, but with its own distinct game and certainly one of the better non-NBA leagues in the world). I haven't gotten a chance to watch all of it, and I may never seek it out. But I've seen clips, and I tried to watch most of the concluding game 5. It was some great basketball. Marbury was being defended tough, but he kept shooting. He set up his teammates for easy scores, as he's wont to do, but eschewed the hockey pass. His teammates didn't really care. He rebounded tough for a guard, and scored well (if not always efficiently). He won a title the same way Allen Iverson got to the finals in 2001 -- he played his game without apology or conscience. His teammates bought in. And they won, in dominant fashion. It's a shocking reversal of what we all thought was true.

Trying to piece together the disparate threads of Marbury's life is a fool's errand. You can't do it, at least not in a satisfying way. Marbury is as contradictory as any interesting person is. The way he played in the NBA is in no way connected to the depth of his charity. He's all at once among the most self-aware player in recent NBA history and the most outlandishly disconnected one. He's the man who made half-decent basketball shoes affordable to kids like him and the man who broadcast untold hours of his life screaming at online trolls on UStream for all to see. He's the man who many profess to have all figured out and the man who nobody really knows. He's one of the players that killed the 2000s Knicks and he's still one of the greatest pros ever produced by the cruel streets of Coney Island. He's a foolish man whose UStream broadcast laid bare the contents of his deepest impulses and a fantastic entertainer whose broadcasts may sincerely be the closest thing we've got to an accessible, global Joycean mind-dump in decades (and no, Vollman doesn't count to me). He's a saint, he's a sinner. He's a loser, he's a winner.

And at the end of the day, all the contradictions boil down to one thing. Stephon Marbury. As of today, the champion of the world -- or at least the Chinese Basketball Association, and the most famous player in China today. Put everything together and one thing is certain. I may forget how good of a basketball player Dwyane Wade is, someday. I may lose my knowledge of just how good Tony Parker's handle is. I may have to squint as I try to remember Dwight Howard's defensive dominance, or Samuel Dalembert's humanity, or Grant Hill's quiet excellence. I may outgrow the NBA, someday, and lose my passion for the sport -- and I may with it lose my subject matter knowledge and my capacity to analyze plays and intelligently pick apart the statistics of the sport I love. But I can promise myself one thing that I'll always know to be true.

I will never forget Stephon Marbury. Not ever.

Los Angeles (GG) -- Frustrated with what has been called the "disgusting" level of competition in the NBA's Eastern Conference, Western Conference teams announced jointly on Sunday that they would be seeking secession papers, effective immediately.

"Look, Kyrie Irving and Anderson Varejao were a credible playoff team before Andy got hurt," new Western Commissioner Adam Silver said, "We love both of those players, here, and they did have Ramon Sessions and, um, Alonzo Gee. We'd love to have them in our new league. But enough is enough. Kyrie and Andy were -- by themselves -- a credible threat to steal an 8 seed spot. That's simply not right. In the Eastern Conference, the teams that stumble blindly into talent and depth despite themselves bungle away that talent and depth. And the teams without talent and depth? Jesus, don't even get me started."

"Except for the Celtics and Bulls," Silver added, "they're pretty good." Silver proceeded to announce that the West would be retaining the Celtics and Bulls, who were deemed "close enough" by an independent committee to an average West Coast team to count. With these acquisitions, the as-of-yet unnamed Western Basketball Association will be composed of teams holding 42 of the previous 52 NBA titles, and 18 of the last 20.

Once populated by deep, historically interesting franchises like the 90s Bulls, Knicks, Magic, and Pacers, the Eastern Conference has grown stale in ensuing years, despite having roughly as many franchise players as the West and being hyped in each preseason as finally bridging the talent gap. Even sources from within the conference seem dissatisfied with the level of play. "Listen, do you want to know why Jason Kidd, Rasheed Wallace, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett finally broke through when they went to the East? Here's a hint: it's not like they got any better at basketball," one Celtics scout told us confidentially, adding, "The most benevolent thing Sam Presti ever did was to send over an above-average shooting guard. The Eastern Conference hadn't seen a team with 3 above-average players on the same team in years. Besides the Pistons, of course, who went to six Eastern Conference Finals in a row. The Pistons!"

The response from the newly-seceded teams has been mixed. While most players in both conferences support the move, Pau Gasol, starting Power Forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, was reported to have screamed "No! Ricky!" through muffled tears before being reminded that the Timberwolves were still in the Western Conference. Upon being reassured that Jose Calderon would be the only remaining Spaniard in the Eastern Conference either, Gasol had no further tears or comments.

Silver added that "the Magic suck and the Hawks coast through every game. Fuck that noise," while calling attention to the large number of teams on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. "Get it," Silver said with an uncharacteristic grin, "the East coast."

Notably absent from the secession talks was the Miami Heat. Scattered comments from the Heat organization and players indicate that Pat Riley is "fine" with staying in the east. More thorough investigations point to more enthusiasm. LeBron James, for example, was seen buying a trophy case as big as a house.

Due to the crushing unpopularity of the "Gothic Ginobili" brand, we have decided to take the blog in a different direction. Welcome to "Goth Gasol", a blog whose sole purpose is to make you think about death and get sad and stuff. To start things off, we have provided a statistical assessment of Pau Gasol's infinite sadness. Required reading.

I'm gonna be honest. I used to get a little jealous sometimes. Of Zach Lowe, you see. Lowe is something of a wunderkind -- a great writer, a great guy, and generally one of the smartest guys around in the NBA writing game. He also, however, has connections. (Not conniptions, those are different.) For instance, he recently had me run a few numbers for an excellent piece he wrote on defending the corner three. It was a great piece, and I was honored to help out. But had it been the me from months prior, I wouldn't have been able to help being a bit jealous of his access to such interesting numbers. However, that all changed a few months ago. I am jealous no longer. See, I found this one guy. Or rather, he found me. His name shall remain anonymous. This is mostly because I have no idea who he is. He contacted me after my prior piece on Kobe as Stavrogin to send me a detailed spreadsheet of the number of times Kobe has invented a new cuss about wizards during each NBA game in the last four years. I have no idea how he tracked this. Not a clue.

I never asked, and I filed the numbers away for the next time I do an analysis on cusses -- a rare but ever-present option for me. Anyway, long story short, he sends me completely unsolicited spreadsheets every few weeks on things that either make no sense whatsoever numerically or make me wonder who in the world could possibly have these numbers handy. Given our new rebrand around the ongoing sadness of Pau Gasol, though, the data he sent me the other day is of the most paramount value. We now have statistics for the number of Pau Gasol frowns for each game of the 2012 season. Armed with these numbers, we may now examine the relationship between Pau's sadness, egg consumption, and the Lakers' winning ways. Anyways. This is the post you've all been waiting for. It's my big break. So, let's get to it.

• • •

A few notes on the data. For the purpose of this analysis, we are going to simply assume that the number of times Pau frowned in a game is equivalent to how sad he was on the given date. I do realize there are a lot of problems with this approach. For one, this isn't the frown rate -- this is certainly not a per-possession statistic, and that's problematic. Just ask any of the prospectus guys. And given that Pau plays a variant number of minutes per game (though, it's a Mike Brown team, so mostly just "all of them") that means we aren't necessarily comparing apples to apples. As well, we have the issue that there was no data dictionary supplied by my informant. I don't know exactly WHEN Pau consumed said eggs. What if he ate the eggs after the game? That could hardly be expected to influence his performance. Also, what defines a frown? Are all frowns truly created equal? There's no type of intensity spectrum for the frowns.

Anyway. Despite the flaws, this data can really start to shed some light on what makes Pau sad. To help stomach it, here's a rudimentary correlation table.

What does this tell us? Quite a lot. First off, there's a very high positive correlation between the number of field goals more that Kobe took than Pau took and the number of frowns Pau had in a given game -- almost a 75% correlation. This would tend to back my general impression -- Pau exhibits his enduring Spaniard Sadness more when he's been frozen out for shots by Kobe. I beg you, watch his game. Watch as he stands at his favorite spot on the floor, staring longingly into the abyss of Kobe's 25th isolation jumper of the night. Gaze upon the sadness in his eyes, and try deeply to internalize it. Ask yourself, dear readers: were you that sad, could you truly be expected to go hard in the paint? Well, no, not you, you're not even 6 feet tall! We'd put you on Nash. But you get the idea.

Many other aspects of this correlation table piqued my curiosity. For one thing, why the hell did my informant put in "number of days since Christmas"? It has no correlation to anything interesting, and only served to remind me of the Christmas cards I never put in the mail. I still feel guilty about that. I don't get why he had to give me that information. (Clearly, Pau doesn't either.) We get some nice splits on the eggs dimension -- an insignificant 1.1% correlation with sadness, but a higher-than-expected 12.5% correlation with the outcome of each game. It appears that the more eggs Pau eats, the more wins the Lakers rack up. To some extent. This relationship becomes even more prominent when you take out March 7th, a game where Pau had a great game and ate a season-high 25 eggs... in a loss to the Wizards -- if you remove that game, the correlation jumps to 25%. Truly an outlier performance from Gasol. In short: if the Lakers really want to win more, Jim Buss needs to keep the Spaniard's stomach assuaged and the piping-hot Paella flowing.

On the subject of splits, let's look at some key performance splits that the data allows us to examine.

• When Pau Gasol has eaten less than two eggs on a game day, the Lakers are an abysmal 5-14. When he eats 5 or more, the Lakers are 16-3. Other than the previously discussed outlier, the answer is clear. When Pau eats no eggs, the Lakers lay one. Pau absolutely needs his eggs if the Lakers intend to be a force in the west to finish the season. This, however, will have little to no impact on Pau's sadness -- on less than two eggs, Pau averages 32.4 frowns a game. On greater than 5, he averages 29.5 frowns. An incremental decrease, sure. But nothing to write home about. Expect not a happier Spaniard, Laker fans. Also: there is a game (the OKC game a few days back, actually) in which Pau Gasol consumed negative three eggs. I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure I want to know what that means.

• Pau Gasol's play is, surprisingly, rather unaffected by his soul-crushing sadness. When Pau frowns less than 30 times in a game, he averages a game score of 15.9. When he frowns between 30 and 40 times, he averages a game score of 14.3. When he frowns more than 40 times, he averages a game score of 13.1. These aren't wonderful numbers, but they aren't really different. They're indicative of a man who fights through the pain, and plays through his sadness. The corresponding W-L records are as follows: the Lakers are 15-6 when Pau frowns less than 30 times, 11-11 when he frowns between 30 and 40 times, and 5-2 when he frowns more than 40 times. To a man of my statistical background, this would seem to indicate that the Lakers really need to keep close tabs on Pau's frown production in any given game. If he's having a "happy" game, then just stay cool. But if he's in that danger zone between 30 and 40 frowns? Turn up the taunting. Release the Kobe. The more Pau frowns, the more likely you'll get to that sweet spot of 40+ frowns a game, where the Lakers are (albeit on limited data) producing wins at a 71% clip!

• Expectedly, as Christmas gets farther away, Pau Gasol gets more and more sad. His season low for frowns was on Valentine's Day, indicating that the Spaniard was on his best behavior for his lady-friend. I mean, don't want to harsh the mood, right? Much respect to the big Spaniard. Regardless. His 2nd lowest total was on Christmas, and that makes sense to me. After all. I'm Jewish (though my father is Christian and we celebrated Christmas as well as Hannukah in my youth), and even I can't help but be happy on Christmas. It's a time of joy, if you let the commercialized dead-eye Santa dolls into your heart. As Christmas gets farther and farther away, his sadness seems to be increasing -- and given that the Lakers have a 5-2 record when Pau is at his most depressed, that's bad news for every Western team hoping they'll collapse down the stretch.

When I saw this data originally I was going to create a model of Laker wins based on Pau's sadness and the exogenous factors in the data. I chose not to, because the data is relatively limited and I didn't feel confident that a model would really do better than just a straight analysis of the data. Regardless. I hope this post has helped shed some light on Pau's sadness for the uninitiated. Pau is a sad man, and it distresses me to no end to see him this way. Please send your regards. And if you have any idea who the hell sends me this data, tell him to stop reminding me about those Christmas cards.

... Also, perhaps more importantly, tell him to stop stalking Pau Gasol.

Ever had a really bad case of writer's block? I had one when I started this post. It was possibly the worst block of my life. I was unusually absent not just on here, but also on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, et cetera -- not by design, but because I quite literally couldn't write anything. I'd tweets and delete them for being too banal. I'd write Facebook status updates and balk at the ill-fitting verbiage. I'd try to write something for ANY of the sites I write for -- here, 48 Minutes of Hell, Goodspeed and Poe, etc. -- and it just ended up being unfit for editing. I'd delete it and start over, and kept deleting it until I'd spent hours at a keyboard with naught but a cute little phrase to show for it. That's where I was for quite some time. And it was incredibly frustrating. Breaking out of writer's block is a difficult task, partially because you keep illogically raising the bar for yourself. You may know the type. I kept telling myself "to make up for this block, I need to make sure my first piece back changes the game. It needs to be one of the greatest things I've ever written. Because if it isn't, I'm letting down the readers who took the time out of their day to read my work." And then you get the yips, and you can't write anything even remotely close to your expectations. The cycle continues.

So this was my best effort yet to wrest myself out of my block, back in the block. I went going back to the basics. The very basics. Today I'll examine the main reason -- in my view -- that the NBA produces such a wealth of fun narratives in every game and every season. In pursuit of this, I drew together a pyramid of examples to examine what makes team sports -- and specifically the NBA -- so easy to frame into entertaining narratives. To pare the pyramid to its essentials: there are seven basic levels of granularity by which you can analyze the NBA. The levels range from dynastic narratives -- spanning multiple years and a full career -- to possessional narratives -- spanning singular possessions on offense and defense between component players and teams. In between, we have five different levels of granularity. And there's a split in each level between stories centered on players and stories centered on teams. I've put together a graphical representation of these types of stories -- with examples -- and will be discussing them in full, level by level. Let's begin.

DYNASTIC NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: Michael Jordan, the Duncan Spurs, the Dolan Knicks.

In a dynastic narrative, you examine an NBA story from the broadest possible view. That is, not on a single season, but on the accomplishments of a team as they go through a period marked primarily by either a single player or a single concept. Contrary to the general thought, a dynastic narrative need not be positive: you could make the argument that the 2000 Knicks are one of the stronger dynastic storylines of the last decade. They were defined by a single overriding personality in James Dolan, and the depths of their failure -- a decade without a playoff win despite being a taxpayer in 8/10 seasons -- is both memorable and virtually unprecedented. Looking at the NBA through a dynastic lens gets you to pieces like Dwyer's classic "Your Champs, in Your Eyes" piece on the appreciation of a dynasty, no matter when it may be. As I stated before, you can also look at each of these concepts through a singular player: for a lighter example, see John Krolik's "The Giving Z" for a demonstration of how you can look at a player's career without beating statistics over the head or obfuscating your point under mountains of excess words. (Example of that: everything I've ever written.)

SEASONAL NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: The title team, the upward movers, the franchise revitalists

Seasonal narratives are more common, though often less edifying. Most commonly one will find them in the form of season retrospectives -- team beat writers looking back on a long-fought season, or fans aggravated over their playoff exit leaving their keyboards bare as they excoriate their teams. And then there's the opposite pole: The team that actually wins the title. The player that put it all together a la 2011 LaMarcus Aldridge. The franchises that finally -- after trying so long -- get into the playoffs or get their first playoff win. A particularly compelling and memorable season retrospective for me was Silver Screen and Roll's 2011 retrospective following the Mavs sweep -- the format is memorable, the writing splendid, and the presentation worthy. On the player side, you have the Pinstriped Post singing songs about Dwight Howard's true value as a player after his MVP-worthy 2011 season.

STREAK/STRETCH NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: The 2011 Cleveland Cavaliers losing streak, Kevin Love's double-double streak, Jeremy Lin's rise

While this is a somewhat rarer story in the world of NBA blogging, perhaps that's an oversight on our part. If you look at any particular game, chances are there are going to be some element of noteworthy streaks at play. The streaks may last seasons, like the Spurs winning their umpteenth-millionth game straight against the Clippers in San Antonio until this year's flop. There were, however, an abundance of stories about the Cavaliers' losing streak last year -- this alphabetical take from Truehoop was always my favorite. And from the player perspective, I was going to use a story on LeBron's various 2009 streaks, but this game recap I read a few hours ago that goes into Love's current streak of eye-popping numbers spoke to me, and I had to plop that down in here.

GAME NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: EVERY GODDAMN RECAP EVER, single-game record performances, rivalry stories.

Essentially the gold standard of an NBA narrative. The recap. "How was the game?" Recaps don't have to be noteworthy to be a story, they simply have to conclude. I'm of the view that everyone should write a few recaps, but nobody should write more than 20-30. They're a bit creatively stagnant, usually, and they keep you mired in bad habits when you try to migrate to different levels of granularity, in my view. Still, my favorite aspect of the game narrative come in the form of recaps that go far beyond the facts of the game -- sure, team A beat team B, but what did it feel like? In terms of the AP recaps, I don't know if any of them can beat this late-2009 recap of a Wizards-Nets game. It pretty much has everything -- a nondescript game that demanded a larger story than just "Hyuck hyuck the Wizards won," a strange and disturbingly compelling storyline of a declawed Arenas, and a bunch of random details (the sunglasses Blatche wears in the locker room, Blatche discussing his work ethic, the fact that nobody but Blatche mentioned in this article is still on the Wizards just three years later, etc) that tie everything together. There are tons of excellent recaps among the blogs, as well. One of my favorites has always been this throwaway recap, primarily for the amazing title: "Lakers 99, Timberwolves 94: Lakers kidnapped, replaced by cardboard cutouts. Wolves still lose."

HALF/QUARTER NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: The Pacers' brilliant 20-21 quarter versus the Nuggets in 2010, the Brandon Roy quarter, Melo's 33 points in a quarter.

These are somewhat interesting in that -- like streak stories -- they tend to be ignored in the postscript but entirely compelling as they happen. Part of what makes basketball a beautiful game is just that aspect of it, and the entire reason I wrote this piece in the first place. There are amazing NBA articles written about virtually every stage of the game process -- from the dynastic to the possessional -- and as well, when watching the games, you quickly realize that any basketball game can be infinitely differentiated into the sum of its component parts. Every possession can be compelling. Every sequence can bedazzle. Every quarter has its own story to tell, if you're looking hard enough. Or, if you wait long enough, you're bound to get a single-quarter or a single-half story that's simply sublime -- this particularly close-knit portrayal of Brandon Roy's miracle quarter is the defining example of this type of pyramid story.

THE MINUTE/MOMENT NARRATIVE

Guiding examples: The Spurs' furious game 5 rally in the 2011 Grizzlies series, 13 points in 33 seconds, LeBron's last game for Cleveland.

Honestly, I don't think I can say anything that Joe Posnanski's piece on that last example doesn't demonstrate in full. At all. Just read it. That's what a minute/moment story should look like. That's how you write a story. Just look at it, now.

POSSESSIONAL NARRATIVES

Guiding examples: Buzzer beaters, game winning defensive stands, NBA Playbook

It's here that I have to stop and really think back to why I love the NBA -- and more than that, the sport of basketball -- so much.

I like baseball. I'm not a huge football fan, but I can see the attraction. Hockey is okay. But basketball stands alone, in my view, at allowing this kind of granularity. The narratives discussed above -- the game, the season, the dynasty -- all of those are truly applicable in any sport. But possessions? A possession is an infinitely differentiable conceptual puzzle piece, with a distinct beginning and ending, and a easily broken-up storyline all its own. That's special, and it's something you really only see in basketball. The offense versus the defense. The offensive player driving into the teeth of the defense. The pass, the cut, the jab step. Every little piece makes up a thread in the tapestry that defines a basic possession. Each possession, strung together, creates a minute. A minute strings to a quarter. A quarter to a game. A game to a streak. A streak to a season. A season to a dynasty.

Every aspect of basketball comes down to this -- a drama in one act, a possession where two tacticians move their sentient chess pieces and hope that nothing goes wrong. The stark calculus of the possession is probably the thing that I find the most fun, really -- a possession has a clearly delineated start, and a clearly delineated ending. In a way that no other sport but baseball really captures, the possession allows you to distill a free-flowing liquid game into a series of bite-size pieces. There's the knowledge that at any time, to enhance your knowledge of the game, you truly could take every possession of a basketball game and try to map out what's going on. In football, or soccer, or hockey... this isn't nearly as straightforward. It's as liquid or more, and as slippery to define. But a possession is a naturally occurring distinction. It's a definition that comes from the rules itself. Not all plays will be the Thunder's perfect play.

But in their own way, all possessions are different. Different defenders, different results, different tics. And it's in that ideal that basketball becomes beautiful. It's through this that a mere game takes on so many layers of differentiable brilliance, and in my view, what brings so many wonderful writers and thinkers into the analysis of the game we love to watch. The possession is the thing that drew me in, and continues to inspire me to write more. I can't say this piece itself broke me out of my writer's block, but it certainly reminded me why I love the game. And whether or not I can still write the 5 pieces a week I wrote last December (spoiler alert: probably not, though I needn't do that any longer), that's something we all need to do every once in a while.

In the end? I love basketball. That's why I write about it.

ESPN's Truehoop has had a strong few weeks. They've been rolling out an excellent ad-hoc series based around rule improvements and other game enhancements to the game of basketball that could make things better for the players and the fans, titled HoopIdea. Today, Adam will share his own idea to make the game better: ending the beneficial foul.

A series of good passes leaves a player wide open for a three. He catches the ball, rises, and hits the shot. But before that can happen, the refs blow the whistle, and the ref gives his team the ball out-of-bounds. You see, a reach-in foul on the floor a second earlier had stopped the play. It hadn't stop the passer, it hadn't stopped the play, but it was a foul nonetheless. Sometimes the fouled team gets an extra free throw, but usually this kind of foul ends with a side-out and nothing else.

Later, in the same game, a big man catches the ball near the rim. He goes up, only to be pummeled. The player sighs loudly going to the free throw line. After all, he hates shooting free throws. And as two shots clank off the rim, the opposing coach applauds his player, while the announcers swoon about how good a foul that was. The fouled team loses the game by two points, two points that they could've spared had their big man not been forced to shoot pressure free throws. Do you know any other sport where breaking the rules, committing a foul actually benefits a team? Where a foul is a strategic device rather than a mistake with grave consequences? I don't. I propose that basketball shouldn't be such a sport either. What's more, the changes couldn't be easier to make.

Let's sketch out the two major situations, and how I'd tweak the rules.

• • •

Late-game fouling: The most egregious example of beneficial fouls. You see it in almost every close game. A team is losing, the opposition has the ball, the clock is running out. Instead of taking the loss, the other team fouls, allowing it to get the ball back. The other team may even hit both free throws, but a lucky three (or a lucky and-one) can bring them right back to the game. And if the winning team misses their free throws? Overtime might be around the corner. Why are we allowing the losing team to benefit from breaking the rules? I've heard people suggest three foul shots for reach-in fouls committed outside the three point line in the bonus and such, but that doesn't change the main issue: Fouls and free throws are suddenly more important than having played 47 minutes and being down 5.

Why not just allow the coach of the fouled team choose what he wants his players to do? Free throws? Fine, go ahead, your choice. An out of bounds play? Sure, and the fouled player should even choose where he wants to take it out of bounds. Would you want to play Hack-a-Dwight, or in fact, foul Dwight on shots at all if it meant the possibility of a out-of-bounds play run from the baseline? These plays are high percentage, and pretty deadly if drawn up right, you know. They don't stop the clock either, which makes the whole concept of the intentional foul as pointless as committing fouls should be.

Reach-ins to stop a sure basket: There are two obvious situations in which this happens: on the fast break (when somebody's barely ahead of the play on defense which saves the open path to the basket), and a reach-in foul that just happens to stop an easy three pointer. There are plays in which players get easy baskets after a foul is committed on the passer. The ball is stopped, the foul might just save 2 points. There are plays where a big man gets an easy putback of a miss caused by a foul. The fouled player might miss some foul shots, shots that he wouldn't have to miss have the refs let the play develop before blowing on the whistle.

Soccer has a neat solution: if a foul is committed and the fouled team keeps the ball moving, the referee usually gives advantage and lets the play flow. In hockey, when a penalty is called, play isn't stopped until the other team gains possession of the puck. But in basketball all we have is a rather loosely defined continuation rule, and nothing else. Why not let the putback happen? Why not let the fast break continue? Why let the opposition benefit from fouling? It's so easy to change the rules so that the ref can swallow his whistle and let the play unfold before he decides to stop it.

These fouls are annoying, break the flow of the game, and don't belong in basketball. It's easy to create rules that don't benefit the felon, and yet (as it stands) the NBA doesn't seem to realize that the game is way more exciting when the players are trying to make plays, instead of fouling everything that moves. How many games have been lost because of Hack-a-Big-Guys? How many points and highlights have been wasted because of off-ball touch fouls? How many times have announcers said "I like that foul"? How many fast break dunks have we missed because of almost-clear-path fouls? The truth it doesn't really matter how many times these things happen, considering the current alternative is a disruption in flow at crucial points in the game, an awkward strategic relic, and a more stilted product. I admit there are strategic end-game situations that would be essentially eliminated and in the beginning the game might flow very differently at times. But I'd argue that it's worth it to create a more entertaining, more compelling sport.

Audiences know what they expect, and that is all that they're prepared to believe in.

A good friend of mine went nuclear on my productivity the other day through a stream of Twitter links to articles on Berfrois, an extremely interesting (though dense) site that I'd never had the pleasure of browsing before. One article in particular that demanded my undivided attention was this one, outlining the Kierkegaardian perspective on the concept of theodicy. Fully unpacking the ideas at play in Aylat-Yaguri's article is somewhat beyond the scope of this blog, and frankly, beyond my depth as a thinker. I don't intend this to be a discourse on a thinker I've always found difficult to parse, and as such, there will be little more mention of Kierkegaard today. Instead, I'd like to discuss an old Aristotelian prescription parenthetically outlined in that Berfrois article.

In Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, he prescribes that poets should in all work "prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities" while excluding entirely all that in the realm of irrationality. It's been quite a while since I've read any Aristotle -- at least two years, probably more -- but I distinctly remember being impressed by that quote when I read it the first time. It distills the heart of writing a serious fictional narrative into a simple either/or statement, and manages to encapsulate the real reason many writers flounder when pushed into action with their readership's imagination. It's not that they are poor writers, or that their ideas aren't excellent -- it's that they simply never get that inherent buy-in from the reader. They can't ford the gap between the improbable and the impossible in a way that satisfies the reader. And they leave many readers wanting, knowing the story lacks that simple buy-in that improves everything. Despite the brilliance of their work, oftentimes, they simply can't bring the reader in. One of the best writers of the last decade was a basketball player. His rival? Lesser in the eyes of the populace, greater in his own mind's eye, free from the audience at hand.

Yep. We're talking about Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan, once again.

• • •

In basketball, there are three levels of possibility. The first is obvious -- the truly impossible, the things that can never be done because the rules of basketball simply don't work that way. You can't have a six point single shot (although you can have a six point possession). You can't score from the opposing baseline -- you'd need to pass it to someone first, you literally aren't allowed to shoot the ball from the opposing baseline with no time off the clock. You can't punch other players in the face, unless you want to be suspended for the rest of the game and the rest of the season. And -- perhaps most importantly -- you can't defend every possession perfectly. There will always be some ghost of a chance that the shot is made, and as a defender, you have to live with that.

Where things get a bit trickier to describe is after you leave the comforting warmth of the absolute. The impossible not because it's logistically against the rules of the game, but because it defies the viewer's prescribed notions of possibility. There are the patently possible high-percentage plays -- the simple layup because of a blown defensive assignment, a wide open corner three from a good shooter, a Steve Nash free throw. Et cetera. There are also the virtually impossible nil-percentage plays -- a Dwight Howard three point shot, a triple teamed hail mary halfcourt shot, a post-up play against a prime Tim Duncan with less than two seconds on the clock. These aren't impossible, nor are they always going to happen -- they just seem like it. If you were to assign probabilities to them, the virtually impossible would probably happen less than 5% of the time. A patently possible play would be converted over 90% of the time. In-between those two? It becomes the province of the viewer to determine how probable a play is, and whether or not it's possible at all. That's where Kobe comes in.

• • •

Consider: the Duncan Spurs achieved the improbable with some regularity over the previous decade. Duncan carried one of the worst supporting casts in the last 30 years to an incredible title run in 2003, and he did so averaging 25-16-5 on a team that averaged just short of 95 points per game and 60 rebounds per game. As well as being the team's defensive backbone, and consistently guarding some of the best big men in the game throughout the entire playoffs. The issue is, from a narrative standpoint, that Duncan never made any claims to the impossibilities of his actions. Nor did he make it a media showcase over how dominant he was, a la Shaq. Duncan simply played incredible, generation-defining basketball.

He did not seek deification for his actions or absolution for his sins. He just wanted to play the game, and in his plodding consistency, he convinced the world that his feats -- while improbable for such a small market fan -- were all patently possible and even expected for a man of his talents. Duncan is content to simply be the best at his position to have ever played the game. He's content to consistently pull off the improbable -- but well-agreed upon possible -- feats of greatness that typified some of the other all-time greats like Bill Russell, Moses Malone, and Oscar Robertson. There is no shame in that. Kobe Bryant tries to style his game after the elusive probable impossibilities that the fans eat up. Tim Duncan simply does the improbable, night in and night out, with no concern for his fans or ego. There is a fundamental difference in approach in the games of Kobe Bean Bryant and Timothy Theodore Duncan.

Understanding this is key to the heart of the true philosophic rivalry between the perennial foes.

• • •

I am not a probabilist. I had several wonderful professors in my undergraduate education who were, but I quickly discovered that I simply wasn't cut out for it. I don't have the mental faculties to calculate probabilities on the fly, like only the best probabilists can. I'm more of the slow and steady type of statistical thinker -- the model builder, the experimentation enthusiast, the ever-considerate analyst. But there's one excellent anecdote that sticks with me from my probability lectures. One example that my probability professor was fond of involved Shaquille O'Neal and free throws. I walked into class one day only to see a giant picture of Shaq projected on the board, and a random event simulator my professor had programmed beside the picture. I don't remember most of what he said, but a reasonable facsimile of what stuck with me follows:

"Today's lecture begins with an applied example. Shaquille O'Neal is an NBA player. He used to play for the Los Angeles Lakers. He is terrible at free throws. Absolutely awful. In 2001, in just 74 games, Shaq shot 51.3% on 972 free throws. Relative to the NBA average of 74.8% in 2001, that's abhorrent. Still, given that he's essentially shooting a coin flip for each free throw, and shooting a ridiculous 13 free throws per game, what would one expect his best performance to be?"

A brave soul pipes up. "I'd expect him to have a 75% game at some point, professor."

"Interesting. Let's run the simulator a few times. I've programmed the simulator to generate all 972 free throws over and over, giving us the longest streak of made free throws Shaq has assuming that he's truly a 51.3% free throw shooter." He ran it the first time. "In this run, he made 17 straight free throws." Again. "Now, 25 straight." Again. "Now, 15 straight." Again. "Wow. 32 straight makes from Shaq. That's certainly going to have the L.A. Times waxing poetic about his free throw stroke, won't it?"

"How does this compare to reality, though?"

"Glad you asked. Shaq's best performance in a single game was a 100% performance, where he made 13 of 13 free throws in a April 17th win against the Denver Nuggets. In fact, Shaq actually had 12 games of 75% or better free throw shooting, if you count his three in the playoffs. He also had 12 games of 33% or worse. Had he coupled two of his best games from the stripe, he could've gotten 25 straight free throws in a year where he shot 51% overall from the line. We all know the law of large numbers, here -- we know that in the long run Shaq is going to hit that 51% line. After all, we programmed the simulator that way, and he's a career 50-50 shooter. But how he gets there is neither prescriptive or predictable. In the long run, you are more and more likely to see random streaks of sustained performance dramatically better than the average. Or dramatically worse than the average. Shaq also had games of 0-11 and 5-19 in 2001 -- had he chained those together, Shaq could've MISSED 25 in a row in the same season.

"Probability is a funny, tricky mistress. You know you'll be right in the long term if you go by the numbers, but when you're looking at a granular short term in a long string of draws, you're just as likely to be right in a short term prediction as you are to be horribly wrong. That's the curse of being a probabilist. You may have the greatest probability model on the planet, and you may have the perfect probabilities of every event you aim to predict. You're still going to get things wrong, and you're still going to have completely inexplicable streaks. They aren't impossible, and though they are improbable in the long term, they're probable in the short term if you consider the fact that you're looking at a long-run game. Perhaps you can claim them to be unlikely in theory. But in practice, they'll always happen. And as you try to reassure people you know what you're doing, you need to keep this in mind, and realize that you're never going to convince everyone. You will always stop short of a truly perfect prediction. That's the peril of our art. As well as the promise, if you look hard enough."

• • •

Given the subjectivity of probability, then, and the preponderance of temporary dispersions from the long-run average, there should be little question as to why Kobe Bryant is the most popular player of the recent decade, while Duncan finds himself rarely discussed. As I noted earlier, everything between a Steve Nash free throw and a Dwight Howard three is essentially a glorified gray area of what is varying levels of possible. The greatest trick Kobe and Jordan ever played on the world was convincing the commentariat that their shots are impossibilities, but regardless of that probable makes for a true clutch player. Tim Duncan's fatal flaw as an NBA player, if there is one, is that he didn't follow Kobe and Jordan's new world order. It is now required for NBA players to convince the public that their impossible feats are -- while still impossible -- altogether probable when they're in control.

That is the art of clutch basketball, as it stands today. The concept of clutch is aesthetically a concept most akin to painting a picture. As Duncan's Spurs and the Moses Sixers demonstrated time and time again, simply being clutch isn't enough. Simply being a dynasty isn't enough. Not anymore. Bird, Jordan, and Kobe changed the game. In order to be "truly" clutch, or to dominate the ESPN narratives that make the NBA tick, you need to put on a show, and paint the picture that what you're doing is something akin to Sisyphus finally rolling his stone up the hill. It is your responsibility to not only make improbable shots, but to make the audience believe that your exemplary clutch performance is a probable and predetermined success.

Kobe's exaltation of the self and his accomplishments have driven his fans -- and, as a whole, the basketball community -- to simply accept his contradiction. We all know that it's absolutely impossible for Kobe to be as good as we imagine him to be in the clutch, and as Henry Abbott has often pointed out, the numbers indicate that he simply isn't that good. But with the story as he's told it, and the image as he's built it, we have a tough time really grasping that. We have a tough time separating the Kobe of our imaginations from the Kobe that exists in reality. Kobe has positioned himself to, like Jordan, forever straddle the divide between what we all know he'll do and what he can't possibly do. Kobe's image has been carefully developed over the years he's played. And Kobe has, more than anyone, successfully created the air of the probable impossibility around his every action.

Their careers represent the parallel poles of Aristotle's prescription. As stated, Aristotle has always preferred the narrative strength of a Bryant, Jordan, or a Bird. But as Duncan and Kobe suit up for one last mutual grasp at a overwhelming triumph of their ideals, I find myself wondering just how accurate the prescription really is. Duncan may not have sought his audience as Kobe did, but in the end, his accomplishments and philosophy towards his career left its mark on history all the same. And as they cruise towards the end of their respective careers, the prospect is slowly dawning on us. As things stand, the Spurs and Lakers are the 2 and 3 seeds in the west, respectively. How better, then, for one last rodeo to come before the new age fully replaces them? Kobe vs. Duncan, the two philosophers collide once more. The audience sees Kobe, and expects him. Duncan has always been content with idling in obscurity. And as he rallies his troops and prepares to focus once more on a winning formula, I wonder just how long he can keep churning out improbable season after improbable season before we realize that he too has been fording the impossible, vintage 1999.

He just gave us a few years to realize it. Good guy, that Duncan.

• • •

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

To be a lifelong Knicks fan is to know failure. And we're not talking about your ordinary run-of-the-mill failure, but a deep, overarching failure that is so prevalent throughout your life that you begin to question all sorts of things.

You begin to become a bit of a solipsist – perhaps you are the only real person in the world and it is impossible for you to ever know hoops happiness. Perhaps you are the subject of a grand experiment in which some deity wants to give you a Job-like tribulation to see if your dedication to the great sport of basketball never wavers in the face of adversity. It's as if some sort of malevolent god has singled you out for punishment in an eternal Basketball Hell.

Maybe the city of New York struck a deal with the sporting Devil since it seems as if the Giants and Yankees will be extremely successful as long as the Knicks never are – from the beginning of the 2000/2001 NBA season, the Yankees and Giants have combined to win more championships than the Knicks have won playoff games. Hell, the Knicks have made as many playoff appearances as their city counterparts have won titles in that timeframe. This makes the ineptitude of the Knicks that much worse for a New York sports fan - in the face of the sporting success of New York’s other two most popular teams, the Knicks’ constant failure is so bad that it doesn’t feel like it could be real.

And it's exactly that sense of surrealism that has permeated this Knicks season and Mike D’Antoni’s firing for me.

I like to consider myself plugged in to the NBA Matrix and if you’re reading this you can probably relate: we follow all the right people on Twitter, read the right blogs, and certainly know our way around Basketball Reference. Due to my love for the game and the constant checking of Twitter on my smart phone, I’m used to being "that guy" who replies to everyone who gives me NBA news in the real world with some variation of "yep, already saw it." The only time I’m not religiously perusing the latest on Twitter is when I’m busy at work or asleep and dreaming of leading my beloved Knicks to glory.

So imagine my surprise when I came back from a work meeting Wednesday morning to a co-worker, a die-hard hockey fan who couldn’t care less about the NBA, inform me that Mike D’Antoni had resigned out of the blue.

"No way," I thought, "that can’t possibly be true. I would’ve either heard something earlier or seen it already, there’s no way this is real." As he attempted to reassure me that it was indeed true as he’d seen Vinny from the Jersey Shore tweet about it, I went to check my own Twitter, which was last updated two hours previous. And that’s when I realized that it was true, and it dawned on me: I had convolutedly learned about the firing of the New York Knicks’ head coach from one of the stars of the Jersey Shore. As if this year’s annual Knicks circus couldn’t get any weirder: the completely unexpected acquisition of Tyson Chandler bringing us to a top-10 defensive efficiency, the ghost of the departed Amar’e Stoudemire, the emergence of Jeremy Lin turning our season around, and finally Melo just being Melo. Take it all together and you'll see that absolutely nothing has made sense. Why should it start making sense now? But learning about D’Antoni’s resignation from Jersey Shore’s Vinny and having this latest strangeness seem completely normal to me made me realize just how surreal these Knicks truly are.

Granted, if the Knicks were this surreal and good, like the Bulls circa the Rodman days, I wouldn’t care one bit. But, as long as I can remember, they haven’t been. Sure, I own a 1974 Knicks world champions t-shirt, but who knows if that actually happened? After all, maybe this reality is just an artificial construct created upon my birth, to keep the door of hope ajar. Who knows? Yes, yes, it's implausible and arrogant for me to think that the world has me as its focal point. But that’s exactly my point – these are the kinds of delusions that being a lifelong Knicks fan gives you.

For my entire lifetime, the Knicks have either been heartachingly bad – missing the play-offs in a dilapidated Eastern conference 6 years in a row - or heartbreakingly good – making it to game 7 of the 1994 finals against Olajuwon’s Rockets, only to lose by 6 because John Starks shot 2/18 (including 0/11 from three point land). There’s also the lockout-shortened 1998/1999 season in which they barely edged out the Charlotte Hornets for the 8th seed by one game, became the first – and only, thus far – 8th seed to make it to the finals, and ended up getting embarrassed by the San Antonio Spurs in 5 games.

This pattern repeated itself last year after Carmelo Anthony got traded to the Knicks for a king’s ransom, helped the Knicks make the play-offs for the first time in a New York eternity, and were subsequently swept by their most bitter rivals, the Boston Celtics. Was it worth it to give the Nuggets the aforementioned ransom at a record of 28-26 in order to finish the remainder of the season 14-14 and get swept in the play-offs? Donnie Walsh, the Knicks GM at the time, said no, but he was overruled by Knicks owner James Dolan. And it's this same James Dolan who seems always at the source of so many "this can’t be real" thoughts in regards to Knicks moves and who is the only common thread in the past 13 or so years of surrealism. While everyone else in the organization has come and gone from coaches to GMs to players, Dolan has been the one person who has always been there through thin and thinner. What's that, you ask? Why is James Dolan the one ever-present person? Oh, well, it's because he's his father’s son. That's it. Like I said, this can’t be real, right?

• • •

Let’s run down the surreal ineptitude of James Dolan. Upon taking over the Knickerbockers in 1999, he has made an inordinate amount of common-sense-defying moves, the first of which was giving Allan Houston a 6-year contract worth $100 million… when no one else had even come close to offering him more than $75 million. The result? Houston retired after just four seasons in 2005 due to a chronic knee injury with $40 million remaining on his contract that still counted against the salary cap. Houston currently serves as assistant general manager for the Knicks. The next move Dolan made was to appoint Isiah Thomas team president of basketball operations and general manager. You probably know the next part: Isiah's decision-making ended up being so bad that the Knicks ended the 2005/2006 season with the highest payroll in the league… along with the second worst record. Just think about that. It shouldn’t even be possible. It still doesn’t feel real. To make matters worse, at the conclusion of that season, Dolan fired head coach Larry Brown who had been signed to a 5-year $50 million contract the previous year. After the Knicks had to buy him out, Larry Brown ended up with $28 million for coaching the Knicks for one year. And this wasn’t an isolated incident either: the two coaches preceding Larry Brown - Don Chaney and Lenny Wilkens, to wit - were both bought out and remained on the Knicks’ payroll for years after their firing.

The team with the largest payroll and the largest fan base (based on media market) posted nine consecutive losing seasons from 2001/2002 through 2009/2010 under the leadership of James Dolan. It’s not just the Knicks either – the New York Rangers, a team also owned by James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden company, hadn’t made the play-offs from 1998 through 2005 despite also having one of the NHL’s highest payrolls. It’s hard for me to believe that such an astounding level of incompetence is possible but in the case of James Dolan I’ve started to become convinced that nothing is beyond his incapability.

Remember the malevolent God I referenced earlier who presides over Basketball Hell? In my nightmares, that man is James Dolan. In my reality, that man is still James Dolan. I have a hard time accepting this plane of reality as actual reality. Apparently Mike D’Antoni had a hard time accepting James Dolan in his reality as well and chose to resign.

You see, Mike D’Antoni is oft described as being an incredibly stubborn man. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there’s two sides to stubbornness – isn’t being stubborn truly just fighting for what you believe in? D’Antoni believes in a sort of basketball nirvana, a system dominated by spacing and ball movement, a system directly at odds with the way Carmelo Anthony likes to play basketball. And so when D’Antoni approached Dolan with a proposition to trade Carmelo for Deron Williams and was rejected, he chose to resign rather than put up with an owner too enamored with a selfish me-first superstar to realize that his lack of effort is getting in the way of winning.

I still don’t know how I feel about this – on one hand, it makes way too much sense for the Knicks to have Deron to run D’Antoni’s system with Amar’e and Tyson Chandler as it’d be just too perfect for us. Yet on the other hand, Melo, Amar’e, and Tyson seem to be an indomitable frontcourt on paper… if Melo (and, to a lesser extent, Amar’e) tried. But they didn’t try, and offensive genius Mike D’Antoni was replaced by defensive stalwart Mike Woodson much too abruptly. In a 24/7 sports media where the narrative is always some form of "who is responsible for this?", I don’t know whether to blame Melo for playing without any form of enthusiasm and forcing the coach out, blame D’Antoni for not getting the most out of this group, or blame Dolan for, well, just being Dolan.

What I do know is that as of this writing, the Knicks have rattled off a four game winning streak in Mike Woodson’s first four games as head coach, all the while defeating their opponents by an average of slightly over 22 points a game and never scoring under triple digits. Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me in the least even through it defies what you’d expect to happen (in my case, I thought we’d have to grind out 84-80 games for a while). It is, after all, the New York Knickerbockers, the team that breaks your heart over and over again until you think you can’t take it anymore only for them to do their damnedest to reel you back in for a prime heart-crushing moment.

But this time, I know this. I’ve learned from my mistakes and I know that the Knicks under James Dolan exist only as a vehicle that runs off the fuel of shattered hopes. I’ve learned that nothing will ever make sense with this Knicks team, that the pieces will never fit perfectly together, and that no matter who is on the floor, the Knicks logo emblazoned on the front of their uniform will always have a way of making them come up short while making me question what I did to deserve it. We all know that I did nothing to provoke this of course, that there’s no such deity that exists to torment you in your own special basketball reality. James Dolan doesn’t actually preside over Basketball Hell, a mystical place where little demons with little Isiah Thomas masks torture you with a three-pronged pitchfork built from the heads of Eddy Curry, Renaldo Balkman, and Allan Houston. It’s all a figment of my imagination gone wild, a result of my brain trying to cope with heartbreak after heartbreak.

But, logical or not, the questions will always be in the back of my head: what if this life isn’t real? What transgressions did I make against the basketball Gods in a past life to be punished like this? Is this Basketball Hell – a place where no matter how good your team is they’ll never fail to disappoint you?

“Nah, that’d be crazy,” I’ll think in an effort to keep myself grounded, “There’s no such thing as Basketball Hell. And plus, if there was, we all know that it’d be saved for the Cavs fans.”