In a two part series, Adam and Aaron are going to examine two aspects of Kevin Love's 2-game suspension following the inglorious footwork he employed against Houston Rockets forward Luis Scola last Saturday. For today's half, we'll examine the hypocrisy of the NBA's incessant emphasis on "respect for the game" when a player mouths off to the refs that becomes curiously absent when the livelihood of a player comes to call.

When the NBA assesses technical fouls, how often does it cite "respect of the game?" Remember all of Dwight Howard's technicals last year? When asked to explain the one game suspension Dwight received for angrily chucking the ball at the refs, all we could hear echoing from the office of the Commissioner was “respect." Me, personally, I never really understood what agreeing with every call the refs make has to do with respecting the game. The refs are the authority, but even the best authority makes mistakes. The NBA's response to players trying to express their unhappiness in an emotionally charged moment is basically akin to the “Say what again!” scene in Pulp Fiction.

Nobody can forget the epic Sheed techs for virtually nothing, everyone's seen the infamous Duncan technicals, and we’ve all seen an aggravated Dwight have to leave the game early because he’s had it with the zebras. And I don’t think a single person among us knew what this all had to do with respect. And now the NBA has lost another part of it’s credibility, demonstrating how respect for another player has nothing to do with their particular definition of "respect." Personally? I'm a bit disgusted.

• • •

Kevin Love has been suspended for 2 games for what I would describe as one of two things. Either an outrageously bush league stomp on Luis Scola’s face, or — if Love’s “accidental” version is the case — a careless, dangerous play that should be seeded out of this league for the same reason calling foul on a ref warrants a technical, in Stern's eyes. Respecting the league. Respecting the other player’s career, respecting his health, and respecting his life. Love did not just push his leg off of Scola gently, he kicked back with a lot of strength, causing Scola’s head to fall back, hit the court, and bounce. He also made big time contact with his chest, as though the face stomp wasn't enough. Scola may not have been hurt, and as he played 36 minutes that night (many after the offending incident), he probably wasn't. But this could’ve been a concussion, a broken nose, a broken jaw, if Scola’s not lucky even a broken rib. All because of one careless play.

I’d like to believe Kevin Love didn’t do it on purpose, I really would. He’s a nice guy who doesn’t bear much resemblance to the bush league virtuoso I initially wanted to compare him to -- Andrew Bynum -- in terms of how he plays in a general sense, or how reckless he is on the court. And yet, that play seemed everything but unintentional. Love must’ve known Scola was under him. I mean, you feel things like that, it’s not hard to notice that there’s a 6’9” guy lying on the floor under you. And then, when you first make contact with his body, in this case his head, why would you follow through with your step after looking down? Why would you strengthen it? Why not just take the fall forward, a la ninja Blake Griffin and James Posey. I just don’t see any excuse for Love to do what he has done, and yet his suspension is 2 games. Robin Lopez got 1 game for brushing with an official earlier this season, and given he was also ejected from the game where the incident occured, I’d say that he served just as much time as Love will. Now, why the hell would a little brush be worth as much as a stomp?

Perhaps what I’m getting at here is that the NBA needs a reformed thinking about penalizing players. A little brush, a few spur-of-the-moment shouts don’t hurt anyone. Stomping on someones face does. I don’t care if it was intentional, and to an extent neither should be the NBA. A reckless move is sometimes as bad as an intentional move, and if you enable players to get away with bad plays just because they look unintentional, this league is going in the wrong direction.

Perhaps, the NBA should take inspiration from a league ran by David Stern’s former protege, Gary Bettman. The NHL has realized that reckless plays are as bad as intentional plays, and launched a new platform to explain to the players and fans the cause for suspension through a video narrated by NHL Vice-President (and former player) Brendan Shanahan, or his deputy (and former player) Rob Blake. Personally, I’d like to know how the Love suspension wasn’t worth 3 games. Yes, I know it’s a one game difference, but the NBA should draw a line, a bare minimum on someone’s carelessness, to be upgraded in case of evident malice.

Times like these are the times when this league shows it’s inexplicably bad judgement, protecting its officials from the most minor and meaningless wrongdoings by the players, all the while not protecting the players from their peers. I can't think of the last time a hockey player was suspended for insulting an official, and believe me, they yap a lot. And they’re not nice about it either. What I did see, however, were players suspended for reckless play early in the season. The suspensions were harsh, unforgiving and well explained. And guess what? There hasn’t been a suspension in 2 weeks now in the NHL. Perhaps it’s time for basketball to realize what their real treasure is. Not the refs, not the people who don’t want to hear “shit” uttered on their TV screen, but players. It's players who make this game great. And it's players who aren’t protected adequately from the recklessness of their peers.

We'd like all our readers to give a warm welcome to the newest member of our writing staff, Adam Koscielak. You may know his work from his excellent work at Sun-N-Gun. He's an incredibly smart, witty fellow studying law across the pond in Poland. I thought I had things bad -- I went to college in a non-NBA city, and now work in a city two hours from DC and terribly far from every other NBA city of note. Adam, of course, has no sympathy for me -- he's in Poland, roughly 6000 miles away from the closest NBA city. For his introductory piece for the Gothic, we asked him to explain what it's like being a fan of a sport that's so far distant. He blew us away. Without further ado, Adam's excellent introduction.

5:00 AM — I’m prying my eyes open, trying to stay awake. This happens all the time. And if it doesn’t happen, it probably means I woke up a mere few hours earlier. There’s something inherently unnatural about sitting out in the dark, trying to keep quiet not to wake anyone around you up. And yet that’s what I do, night in and night out. I sit at my desk, a game is playing on my 24 inch screen, and ESPN’s Daily Dime Live is flying down on my laptop screen, along with a Twitter feed. An empty beer mug once filled with coffee sits on the table next to my desk. Does it stand or lie or sit? I never know: for all I care it could be flying right now.

The first quarter of the night’s late game is just coming to a close.

• • •

It started with hockey. During the 2010 playoffs, I suddenly realized I could actually watch games online. And so that year I sat there, rooting for the Canadiens (my dad’s second favourite team) to beat the Capitals. The Canadiens pulled an upset off. Then I watched the Penguins and it was the same story. They may have eventually fallen in the Conference Finals to the Flyers, but I kept on watching hockey. I saw Patrick Kane’s overtime cup winning goal, the confusion surrounding it, and the moment in which everyone realized the puck was in the net. Then I started watching hockey in the regular season, and finally I started watching basketball.

But let’s back up.

See, I've always been a basketball fan. Ever since I can remember, I loved playing it, I loved watching people play, and I loved any video games connected with it. The problem is that I was living in Poland, and found uncomfortably that basketball was unable to see anywhere. The timezones made it hard, the fact that the only NBA license in the country was on a paid channel made it hard, and the lack of exposure in the media made it hard. I was limited to watching Youtube videos filled with highlights of various players, reading Wikipedia entries and reading box scores. The closest thing I’ve seen to a full basketball game at that time might’ve been the one in Space Jam. And yet, year by year I'd find teams to root for, players to love and on-paper knowledge of the game. I may not have known what a pick-and-roll was, but I sure as hell knew who won the 2005 MVP award.

The first team I rooted for was the Chicago Bulls, or should I say, "Team Jordan". The only NBA name known widely in Poland at the time was Jordan. Every jersey was a Jordan jersey, and kids like me got their basketball knowledge from NBA Live games and from Space Jam. I remember having a Jordan jersey and a Bulls photo album commemorating one of their championship runs. That album made me think that Luc Longley was a very good player. Yep, Luc Longley. He was big, and had pictures of him dunking. It made total sense, I swear. I can also proudly note that even though I was a child, I just knew that there was something inherently wrong with Dennis Rodman’s sanity (if he ever had any of it, that is).

But as fast as the Jordan era came, it went away. Jordan retired, making way for guys like Shaq. Shaq was probably the only basketball name widely known in Poland for a long time. You wouldn’t hear about Tim Duncan, Patrick Ewing or Reggie Miller. Hell, even the swagger of Allen Iverson wasn’t really known. Just as hockey knowledge ended with Wayne Gretzky, basketball knowledge ended with Michael Jordan, with a little Shaq for good measure. And yet, I knew a few more names besides those two. I knew a team other than the Lakers and the Bulls. An illustrious crew, to be sure.

That's right. I knew the Minnesota Timberwolves.

• • •

See, one time my dad had come back from a business trip to Minny with a nice present: a Kevin Garnett jersey. At the time, I would choose my sports allegiances solely by my favourite jersey colours. The colours? Blue and green. The Minny jerseys at the time? That’s right, blue and green. The Garnett jersey was blue and green. Everything fit perfectly, so naturally I became a T-Wolves fan. Now, I don’t remember most of the names of back then. I mean, I know that guys like Sam Cassell played with them, but I just don’t recall knowing that. Honestly, I only remember two: Kevin Garnett and Wally Szczerbiak. I absolutely loved both of them. KG, because I had the jersey (of course) and because he could dunk the ball in NBA Live. Szczerbiak, because he had a Polish surname and was able to nail the three almost every time in that same game. This fandom remained until I got hold of the internet.

The first broadband connection I ever had came when I was 12 or so. I was a big geek back then (hell, I still am), and I got hold of it pretty quickly. Back then Youtube didn’t exist: It's funny to say, but at that time virtually all movies were formatted for viewing in either Real Player or Quicktime, slowly lagging through a bunch of pixels. Live streaming would’ve been considered a miracle, not a chance.

But there was Wikipedia, and so I had a way to check regularly on the players I’d seen in NBA Live. That's about when I became a Steve Nash fan. After all, as soon as I learned a Canadian - like my dad - was an All-Star, I jumped on the bandwagon. Two years later, I was in the 2-time MVP's bandwagon. Even though I was rooting for the Suns, I hadn't actually watched them. At least not until I'd found a weird motivation.

See, as with Nash, I'd been observing Marcin Gortat’s career with some interest before he joined the Suns. The only Pole in the NBA always deserves another Pole's attention, I figured. Still, with Gortat getting so few minutes in Orlando, it was hard getting excited about his rebounding rate in limited action. But when I heard Orlando made a trade with my favorite team Phoenix, I decided it might be time to start watching basketball more actively. I watched the Suns get blown out by the Heat in Gortat’s first game, and I watched Steve Nash live for the first time, outside the highlights, outside the montages, just in the flow of the game. I experienced the beauty of Steve Nash’s game firsthand. Ever since that game, I tried to make sure I’d watch every Suns game I could. Whenever school was starting late, I’d stay up and watch pixelated Steve pass to pixelated Marcin on a pixelated pick-and-roll. Slowly, I started getting involved in other facets of the game, ESPN’s Daily Dime Live, Twitter. I dove in, and emerged a blogger. I don’t know how it happened. It was probably Andrew Lynch’s inherent niceness and recommendation that brought me to Sun-n-Gun (I was blogging independently before that) but whatever the case, at some point I wasn’t a basketball fan anymore: I was a basketball maniac, up all night. And not even for games, for lockout news, because I wanted, no, needed basketball to come back. I don’t think many people in Poland did.

• • •

Most people out here still don’t know a lot of basketball. Don’t try to ask them about anyone aside from Kobe, LeBron, Marcin and Steve, they won’t have an idea. Tim Duncan? No. Manu Ginobili? “Is he a soccer player?” people’ll ask. This is perhaps the most awkward part of being a basketball fan in Poland. The hours are survivable, the distance between me and my team isn’t a problem with a League Pass subscription. But the weird looks you get from people when you tell them you’re a basketball blogger, when you sift through box scores on your laptop between classes. I can't even get past the first line of their defense, let alone tell them about an entire post of weird, unfamiliar names.

I’ve done a lot of nerdy things in my life, but I've never felt like a bigger nerd than I do right now. I end up as a bit of a closeted NBA guy. I don’t tell many people about it, I think around ten of the people I know in real life actually know what I do aside from studying law. It's sad to say, but here sports fandom makes you seem rather dumb. It's not surprising, considering how most sports fans in Poland are destructive soccer hoolies. And people here have yet to find an ambitious way - a different approach - to talking about sports. Here every story is a recap or a report, a boring approach lacking the fascination and passion that bloggers bring to the table. Almost nobody tries reading between the lines or appreciating the hidden beauty. They opt for a black-and-white view of a colourful world. As a result, nobody treats sportswriters seriously or thinks they can be serious. The subject matter seems too simple. No, ambition is reserved for film critics and literary journalists. In the end, everything seems to come down to a simple equation: “If you write about smart things, you’re smart. If you write about stupid things, you’re stupid.”

Yes, it’s a silly mindset, and it should change, as the writing evolves. But until that day comes, I won’t be waving around my “sports blogger” flag. It would take me too much time to explain everything, to go past the surface, and it's not worth the effort. And I don’t really mind: I managed to hide my Star Trek obsession without a hitch, and this should be easy. I don't mind, but on the other hand I’m the odd man out, a man displaced in time and space. I feel like half of my life is somewhere in Phoenix - in a media box behind the scorer's table in the US Airways Center - and the other half is in Warsaw. He's studying law and doing the things that young people usually do. He's the Bruce Wayne to my Batman.

• • •

6:30 AM — I lay the finishing touches on my piece as the game’s third quarter comes to a close. And as I feel the night coming to an end, I don’t mind. I don’t mind being tired, I don’t mind going to sleep at sunrise. After all, for the time zone switching, the weird sleeping patterns and the tiptoeing, I’m having fun, just because I’m watching basketball. I joyfully take in every jumpshot, every dunk, every pick and roll. And I wonder: How the hell did I go from a box score pruning jersey-based fan to a live-watching insomniac blogger?

I don’t think I’ll ever know.

Eric Freeman of Ball Don't Lie talks about Tim Duncan's awesome, comic-book-vintage knee brace. Freeman reflects on Duncan's personality, and then on his marketability:

"The easy answer is that he doesn't want it to be out there. And yet Duncan did in fact star in several national ads in his first few years in the league, so clearly he's not totally averse to getting media attention. What's more likely is that Duncan's personality, as nerdy as it is, was decided to be too out there for a basketball star. His media anonymity might not have been self-imposed, but rather decided by the companies who need to project a particular image when they hire athletes as endorsers.

That's fine, obviously: Duncan's doing fine for himself. But it's a reminder that what we know of players' personalities often isn't decided entirely by them. Sometimes it's up to the corporate gatekeepers who decide which players fit their needs."

There are niche actors all over Hollywood that exist specifically to play a single role in commercials. Basically Freeman is telling us that professional advertisers can't find such a role for a nerdy, iconic (apparently willing) basketball player with MVP-type credentials for the better part of a decade with a more-or-less impeccable public record. According to this narrative, Duncan didn't tempt large advertising firms enough to offer him a big ad campaign because his nerdy personality is too out there. And that just doesn't add up to me.

I'm definitely not trying to idealize Duncan or insulate him from the forces of economic motivation just because he is a class act on my favorite team but Freeman's unqualified cynicism seems to follow incredibly specious logic here. If Sprite, Edge, and adidas were willing to sponsor him and give him national exposure when he was a rookie (and when he was writing weird stuff like this), why wouldn't they be willing to continue that exposure as Duncan built the Spurs into a dynastic force as the foundational force? Duncan - for all the talk about the Spurs being boring, dirty floppers - has always been fairly well-regarded, especially in terms of character and consistency. The question I have for Freeman is: Did "corporate gatekeepers" overlook that? Are you seriously telling me that with all the weird, abstract ads from the last decade that an ad firm couldn't find a national spot for Duncan selling something "boring but dependable" like insurance or something "fun and nerdy" like sports video games or something "with a quiet tenacity" like batteries using Duncan's reputation?

Yeah, I'm a big Duncan fan, so maybe I'm just overestimating the imagination of ad men and Duncan's Q rating. But I find Freeman's explanation incredibly tenuous, especially when there's a much more likely explanation: Rookie contracts and the economic uncertainty of injury, and those rationally explain Duncan's increased willingness to seek an ad campaign early in his career far better than a Mad Men-esque box-out of a willing Duncan. See, Tim Duncan was on a rookie contract for his first few years in the league, when he had a much less comfortable and uncertain amount of wealth (according to Basketball-Reference, Duncan earned a relatively paltry $3.4M for leading the Spurs to the title in 1999, and less than $4M the *next year*). If he had gotten a career-ending injury early in his career (before the big paychecks), it's possible the next few years of public commercials could have offered him a tenable, remarkably wealthy start to the next part of life. Being an intelligent guy around wizened veterans like Sean Elliott, Avery Johnson, Steve Kerr and David Robinson, it seems absurd that Duncan wouldn't be aware of the ways in which a basketball player's fortunes can change with a single injury, and so he might have chosen those spots on the sheer level of ameliorating that financial uncertainty a little bit. What's more, even though he stayed healthy, Duncan's short-term contract was absurdly below his market value (thanks to the NBA's cartel and the most recent CBA that had altered rookie contracts into their less lucrative form), and these spots also served to compensate Duncan with an income much closer to his true market clearing price and a decent amount of unqualified positive public exposure. Personally, that seems to me an economic explanation that doesn't rely on unfalsifiable hypotheses about faceless corporate gatekeepers.

Finally, well, by all accounts any of Duncan's apparent "nerdiness" (which Freeman aptly gets at in the article) comes in at least equal measure with a taciturn, understated, stoic personality that sees both rising and falling fortunes as transient and imperfect, which is a picture you'll get (often in those literal terms) from any interview Duncan has done in the last 15 years. With Duncan's personality as it is (or at least as it appears by all accounts), it's pretty plausible to say he's somewhat reluctant to endorse companies for massive national exposure as a sort of "victory lap" for his successes, when he knows an athlete's fortunes are always trending downward with the ultimate (and swift) passage of time. Maybe he's just a quiet guy that wants to hold up the trophy this year and go at it again next year until he can't anymore, as he's specifically said in multiple interviews.

Freeman is giving us an interpretation that Duncan's image is low-profile because his "nerdy" personality was not picked up by unnamed "corporate gatekeepers". But this interpretation is specious, given any interview, profile, or secondary account of Duncan's life and personality, which has him as genuinely avoiding the spotlight and the transient joys and pain of victory of defeat. And Freeman's only evidence to overturn this large body of evidence seems to be two commercials that Tim filmed during Duncan's insanely below-market rookie contract. But once you can account for this below-market contract, then everything else is consistent with someone that genuinely wants a low profile. Duncan was well-compensated after his rookie contract and the ads stopped for the most part, except for the occasional well-written and funny ads (Sprite, edge), in-depth profiles (adidas), and local shilling for his owner that's redeemed by humor (HEB). Father Time is undefeated, and Duncan knows it, so maybe a completely financially taken-care-of individual decides instead to make his few moments in the advertising sun about mentoring, reflecting, and laughing. I don't know but that seems far more likely_._

Hey, everybody! This is the fifth edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple -- STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams' SRS projections before the season. So -- during the season -- we've been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week's results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE's projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Bobcats fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 25th.

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

Today, we're going to go over how the Eastern Conference picture has changed (in the view of NASH) since the start of the season, using sets of three. Next week? We'll cover the West. Today is the East's time to shine, though. If... if "shine" is really a word that can describe this Eastern Conference. (Spoiler alert. It isn't.)

THE REELING ATLANTIC
Dec 24: #1 BOS (40), #2 NYK (38), #3 PHI (36), #4 TOR (29), #5 NJN (23)

The main story in the Atlantic, to this point, is simply how indefensibly uncontested the Atlantic has been. Preseason, virtually everyone was talking about how this was going to be an interesting divisional title race between the Celtics and the Knicks, with the Sixers as a possible intriguing wildcard. Instead? The Sixers have been the only decent team in the division, and unlike the Northwest Division (the only division in the league that currently projects to have every single team over 0.500), the Atlantic may very well end up with only one over 0.500. While the Sixers have stayed relatively consistently around 44-46 wins since their rise peaked around January 10th, the Celtics and Knicks have hemorrhaged terribly since the season's start, and at this point, the Celtics project out as a barely 0.500 team and the Knicks project even worse. A sad projection for a division that looked to be full of interesting teams at season's start.

THE SURGING CENTRAL
Dec 24: #1 CHI (40), #2 MIL (33), #3 IND (32), #4 DET (30), #5 CLE (23)

Chicago is great, Indiana is good, the Cavs are recouping, and the Pistons are straight up atrocious. These are all facts. A lot of us were very high on this Pistons team, even thinking they had an outside chance to break .500 behind a Greg Monroe breakout season. We were half right, let's put it that way. On the other end of things, the Bulls' prospects are very good. Bullish, even. A tight loss to Miami showcased how far along Derrick Rose really is, and if you haven't seen him lately, well, it's a treat, and the Bulls' endless train of stat-stuffing bigs is always an defense aficionado's delight. And of course we have the Cavs, in a season that could alternately be termed a slide and a fantastic over-achievement in the same sentence. Kyrie Irving (instant offense, ROY favorite) has been mindblowingly good and Anderson Varejao has shown himself as simultaneously one of the fastest centers in the league, one of the best defensive bigs in the league, and perhaps the single best offensive rebounder in the league (or he's right behind K-Love). The Cavs might sneak into the playoffs. With the Bogut injury, I think the Cavs are the prohibitive 9th seed at least. Right now NASH has them at 10th.

Here's where STEVE NASH breaks down a little from insufficient data: The Bucks are on a two-game winning tear (including a remarkably scrappy dismantling of the Lakers) but losing Andrew Bogut never helped anyone. One expects their 51.7% chance of making the playoffs to drop dramatically. Losing George Hill never helped anyone either, as the Pacers don't need to be told -- Alex and I are both Spurs fans who have been sort of watching the Pacers for George's greatness alone, and his ankle fracture makes this a really sad day. Still, the Pacers have plenty of depth and the Bucks don't look catastrophically bad even without a true C.

THE CONFUSING SOUTHEAST
Dec 24: #1 MIA (44), #2 ORL (40), #3 ATL (31), #4 CHA (27), #5 WAS (27)

As for Orlando? Well, they got bitten by the newly-christened Lowe curse. You see, on January 23rd, Zach Lowe pronounced the Magic the strongest fringe title contender in the league. At the time, NASH projected the Magic for 41 wins. Since then? They lost to Boston by 31 points on the night of his pronouncement, crushed the Pacers, and proceeded to hemorrhage in the NASH standings ever since on a 1-5 slide. They've gone from 41 predicted wins 9 days ago to just 34 wins today -- the equivalent of going from a projected 50 win team to a projected 43 win team. Their playoff percentage is still high, but as of today, they're projected to end up with the 17th best record in the NBA, a negative SRS, and a snowball's chance in hell of anything good happening. I don't really know what happened. I don't think anyone does. But really, if Zach Lowe finds himself forever banned from the Amway center, I'm not gonna be shocked.

• • •

So overall, the East looks kind of pitiful, but there are also some pretty good teams in there. The Atlantic Division is hilariously bad, the Central projects to be about average, and the Southeast is so polarized that Orlando was up 27 in a game, en route to HCA in the first round before taking a six-minute rotation off and suddenly finding themselves in the second circle of Hell, populated only by Bobcats, destined for an 8 seed or the lower tiers of the lottery.

Thanks for reading.

Lately I've been reading George Karl's 101 Basketball Out-of-Bounds Drills. This is a virtually unavailable book from 1999: I only found it through the Borgesian library of the Internet's darker channels. It's not impossible to find, but if (work with me here) 100 of you went out and bought it, I feel like that would actually prevent the next 100 of you from trying to get it. But despite this, I think Karl's book is worth talking about, if only as a lead-in to talking about halfcourt offense as a whole. After all, the book delivers exactly what its title promises, nothing more, nothing less -- the whole thing is about 115 pages long, and about 14 of those pages are non-drill pages, if you catch my drift. And while each of these pages contains a "drill," the drills are mostly full, workable descriptions of set plays with a couple extremely helpful diagrams per description.

• • •

As an exercise, I turned off all of the lights last night (last night when I wrote this, i.e. December 3) and got into an improvisational reverie and just tried to visualize and memorize a few of the inbounds plays. After doing so - despite the sparse nature of the book's coverage (I run through a couple of the plays below) - I was able to formulate some general principles from what I'd read. Some of the mostly implicit principles behind the plays were:

• Have a "safe" option on the wing in case the play (or even the initial inbounds pass) fails. Kind of obvious in retrospect; if you're coming out of a timeout you don't want a 24-second violation or even a turnover.
• Use a screen or an unscreened flare-out to the corner in order to create space for the inbounds pass.
• Use screens constantly to force mismatches and confusion, and realize how powerful rolling towards the basket off a pick is, even when neither player has the ball (as in a P&R). It's the old wisdom: "If you want to get open, set a screen," presented in its full generality.
• Use v-cuts and backdoors with quicker, smaller players in order to keep the defense honest and positioned to the offense's advantage.
• Use motion across and down the lane in order to force the defense to make bad or inconsistent switches that the offense can exploit for an easy path to the rim.
• As in folk basketball wisdom, the inbounder is extremely dangerous and useful to an inbounds play, but this is only true if the other four players can create the spacing or the screens to allow him to work after he comes inbounds, and only if he's actually suited and prepared for the action called for by the play (usually Karl seems to use PGs when he needs a lot of motion by an inbounding player).
• Passing the ball around the perimeter is powerful and works to the advantage of 3-point shooting teams and dominant driving players. Having great passing big men (like Tim Duncan) and oversized points (like Andre Miller) is a huge competitive advantage on inbounds plays, enabling lobs and post-ups that use their extra skills, which the defense must compensate for or (to the bane of every defense) simply must allow to happen.

And so on. There are so many little tidbits of understanding, so much domain expertise encoded in these diagrams and descriptions. I'm sure this is obvious to many of you that played basketball for your high school or college. But for those of us that played gritty street ball at recess, this book (and no doubt, the hundreds of others like it) is a revelation.

One of my biggest concrete takeaways is that, in sheer basketball terms, Dirk is an offensive coach's dream, and the book demystified to an extent Dirk's apparently miraculous comebacks these playoffs. With all of the marginal advantages Dirk has, both in iso and two-man plays, it's little bit less of a wonder that a loaded staff, an experienced supporting cast, and Dirk's basketball knowledge were able to beat the all-world Heat defense so consistently at the ends of games.

But Dirk's just a concrete example of why Karl's book fascinates me: Making and defending an inbounds play near a team's own basket sort of captures the whole problem of team basketball in a short microcosm of process, with fewer passes, seconds, opportunities, and with a much smaller margin for error on everyone's part. The competitive processes of inbounds plays don't of course match exactly those of team basketball as a whole. No, it's not a perfect microcosm. And there are plenty of elements of basketball that the inbounds play doesn't really cover: Transition, iso plays, rebounding, and perimeter passing come to mind. All of these form tangential considerations in an inbounds play. But just as in team basketball as a whole, the basic process of moving the ball and getting a good shot is the central question.

As with basketball as a whole, an inbounds play gives the advantage - the serve, so to speak - to the offense. However, just like basketball as a whole, this advantage is marginal and contextual. What's more, any number of factors such as poor execution, a lagging fifth player, great defensive rotations, and a bad matchup can instantly and rather decisively tip the scales towards the defense. To ensure that the players have a chance to win the serve, Karl's plays deploy all possible resources: Aside from last-second plays, spot-up shots and quick lobs, Karl uses at least 3 players actively. Most of the plays use 4, and quite a few use 5. It's fair to say that all the drills covered use all five players at least as decoys and for spacing purposes. I mean, most of the plays use 3 players just on the inbounds pass, much less the play as a whole. So these drills really do encapsulate the problem of committing totally to an offensive possession.

Above, I sketched the general principles of all of the plays in the book, but reading that bulleted list again, I note there's a principle I'm still missing. It's of the more abstract variety and it goes like this: Through a decent amount of practice, dedication, focus, and intelligence, a normal, decent offensive team can take on a normal, decent defense, and - through a topology of holes in time and space created at the moments when defensive players must decide to switch - can utterly destroy that defense.

• • •

Drill #53

Now let's go through a couple of drills. We're gonna start out nice and easy with this first drill, and by the end we're going to be nice... and rough (yes, I'm referencing Tina Turner's spoken-word intro to "Proud Mary"). For each of these drills I'm going to show you an image copy of the page, my thoughts, and a gif sequence showing the options of the play that I made from the diagram. Warning: gifs may be canon.

Drill #53 is quite simple. Straight up, your team will use a double screen to sweep out the free throw circle and make a switch at least difficult, creating space for a jumper from the top of the key. And if the defense eventually switches on the double screen, the two big men (conveniently located at the baseline) can start a solid post-up or lob situation as a fine second option.

It's very simple, yes, but note the subtleties of resource management: a double screen is about creating a wall of space more than it's about size*, so the size (PF and C) goes to making and receiving the inbounds pass. The center flares out to give him space to receive the inbounds pass but also to give him an angle to the top of the key. The power forward runs a suggestive route with an establishing cut, so the defender can't avoid the lob question. At best, PF's defender is looking at a battle in the post and not much else.

*Spurs fans might note that Popovich will often use double back-screens (with basically random players like RJ/Bonner/Hill) at the basket to allow Duncan to curl around for an easy two. One rather stark example is easily seen in Sebastian Pruiti's solid breakdown.

And that's just on the inbounds pass. The second pass from C-SF "starts" at the beginning of the play as a dangerous interior cross-court pass, right across the blocks, and when the SF v-cuts into the lane, the pass becomes just plausible enough to have to defend. An option Karl could have added would be an actual cut to the basket for a lob, and you have to think that the SF has to be a lob threat or a threat under the basket for this to work. But despite all of this, the "end game" of the pass is a relatively simple, uncontested pass between two players that have flared to safe spaces.

One of the reasons this review took so long to post was just the simple challenge that I had in making .gifs that didn't look like a child had drawn them -- specifically, a child like myself, with conspicuously poor motor skills and even more questionable design skills. If you must know the whole story of the .gifs, check out their alt-texts. Anyway, here are the .gif files, one for each option.

Anyway, both of these plays are fairly simple to execute and differ only in that in the second version, the SF hasn't gotten open, so the C goes to the PF as the second option.

Drill #19

Well, I chose one simple drill above: Now it's time for one hilariously convoluted (but possible) one.

Now, this drill is exactly as complicated as it looks. Just look at it: It's that complicated. It's probably the most complex and complicated drill in the book, for those of you into maddeningly pedantic distinctions. And there's no "use a screen as a means of confusion". This drill seems to assume that the defense will make perfect rotations. For my part I've only seen a few perimeter possessions where the defense honestly would stand a chance against this play if executed correctly. The only weaknesses I see are: its complexity, its dependence on dozens of quick passes, its length (it might be possible to execute the fourth option in 7 seconds, but realistically, this is an entire 14 or 15 second play).

To understand this drill it's important to see it in real time, as visualizing the above play takes quite a while from the book's description and diagrams. This is a cool thing if you're a reader trying to understand the geometry of basketball. It's not so cool if you're trying to convey the motion of this play to a blog reader. My final version of the fourth option .gif had 44 separate frames, almost all of which consisted of a screen or a perimeter pass, despite the staggered motions inherent to stop-motion animation. It's a very busy play involving all five players.

Above is the first option. The SF basically greases the wheels with three screens in the lane (and the center makes two screens on his way to the wing, too). This isn't a play built on deception, really. The SF stays around the elbow after the double screen for the PF to set a back-screen for that same PF. You can account for that, but you're asking the defense to make switch after switch, switching even as a switch is in progress. Note also that the center's pass in is essentially an open lob or an oop if the PF is open. Not all frontcourts are capable of this, but for me this immediately brings to mind set plays involving David Robinson and Tim Duncan.

In the second option the point guard comes from the wing and curls around and flares out off of a SF screen to the open jumper at the FT line. Notice that this second option is set up by the PG and SF following the PF into the lane from the first option. It's not hard to see a simple variation to salvage the first option in which the PG screens for the PF in a second attempt to allow the C-to-PF play, perhaps instead for a five-footer at the block. In either case, the PG can quickly finish the screen and end up with space for a jumper. But the PG-to-PF screen serves a second purpose:

For the third option, the pass to the PG wouldn't yield an open shot, so the C feeds the PF in the post and comes down to help for a two-man game. So long as the PF isn't dribbling and there's time on the shot clock, the PF can basically just hold while the C comes down to screen.

Astonishingly, as you can see, Karl includes yet a fourth option for this play: Supposing the two-man PF-C game doesn't work, the PF can reverse the ball around the perimeter again and immediately cut for the other side of the basket "around" the defense to complete the reverse. Notice that even here (on the fourth option of the play) there are other variations that could easily have worked and been incorporated: A SF jumper, (reward for all those screens in the first part, maybe!) a two-man game on the baseline with the SF-PF or on the wing with SG-PF, or a jumper at any point in the second reverse.

Yes, this play is mighty complicated, with a lot of moving parts and a lot of assignments. But it is also robust and expressive enough to encapsulate much of an offense's skill, is plenty able to be modified to reflect the different advantages and disadvantages that an offense might possess (as it is, this play with its lobs and center decision making seems more at home with a great frontcourt like Tim Duncan/D-Rob surrounded by decent shooters with limited driving ability).

• • •

Conclusion

It's hard to call George Karl an innovator - a... bridgelayer, so to speak - without having a robust knowledge of what came before. I've not heard him been mentioned in those terms before, so it may be safe to assume not. But whatever the case, it's just as hard to deny that George Karl is an incredibly solid coach in sheer basketball terms that has brought every type of lineup to high levels of achievement in his career. You get the sense that it doesn't matter all that much what players he has at his disposal: he will find a way to get the most out of them (though, of course, every player and lineup's ceiling is different) most of the time. There are no doubt clearer playbooks out there, and there are in all likelihood quite a few coaches that are right at Karl's level, or even better. But this book gave me a little insight into how he thinks, and that's a story worth telling. Hope you enjoyed listening.

For the Eastern Conference edition of our 1st quarter all-stars, click here.

A common refrain among those in my twitter feed, for anyone watching, has been that this season makes no sense whatsoever. I have to agree. The season has been unfathomably odd so far. I was going to do a freeform piece on the subject, but quickly realized there was a simpler way to go. Given that All-Star voting has begun, why not give you my first-quarter All-Stars? After all, we're already voting. And the game is in about a month. It's closer than you think, in other words. I'm not really doing statistical rankings here -- these are based on a combination of their stats (mostly documented here so we can look back later), what I've seen from watching them, and where the conference stands. It's a long look, so let's get to it. Keep in mind we'll be going with the infuriating All-Star positional designations; that is, guards, forwards, and centers. Four guards, four forwards, two centers, and two wildcard slots. Go.

• • •

WESTERN GUARDS

• STARTERS: Kyle Lowry, Kobe Bryant

The west is much more talent-rich than the east. Enough so that two or three of the definitive eastern all-stars to this point of the season -- namely Anderson, Jennings, and Lou Williams -- wouldn't even sniff the game if you traveled westbound. Trying to figure out who deserves to start and who's playing the best at the point out of all the western guards is immensely tricky, and I wouldn't really blame you if you threw up your hands and said "Alright! Fine! Give it to Chris!" I mean, really. Chris Paul is the league's best, by default -- he's one of the five best players in the league, surely he deserves to start, right? Well, yeah. Maybe. By the actual game, it's certainly possible that averages will descend to the mean and the superior talent between Paul and Lowry will even out. I'd argue it's even likely. But in the early going, although it's been close, I'd have to tip my hat to Lowry as the starting point for the West, even if this makes me a bit uncomfortable given the allegations swirling around him right now.

As for their play? Lowry has an edge on Paul in three key respects. First, I have to give Lowry a nod for his health -- Lowry has played in 16 of 18 games for the Rockets, while Paul has played in 10 of 15 for the Clippers. Assuming they're giving their teams roughly equally as much, a few extra games is a big deal. Second, his rebounding -- Lowry is averaging more rebounds per-36 minutes than any other point guard in the league right now, at roughly seven per game. On a team that starts Luis Scola, the extra rebounding is completely and utterly necessary, and Kyle's work on the boards helps make up for the team's current lack of big men. Third? His defense. Synergy lets me down, here, so I'm not really working off solid numbers -- I'm working off a feeling. I get the sense, when I watch Lowry, that his man works quite a bit harder for his points than Paul's man does. It doesn't hurt that I feel as though Paul gets dirty on defense a bit more often than Lowry, who (in my view) tends to run a pretty tight ship in terms of avoiding dirty defensive plays. Still, the Synergy stats do disagree -- CP3 allows 0.75 PPP to Lowry's 0.79 PPP. Both good, neither transcendent, and Lowry's ranked a tad lower. But I still can't shake the feeling he does a better job, and perhaps these are just confirmation biases at play. Now, these are only three things -- Paul is still a superior scorer, a superior passer, and an overall superior player to Lowry. But Lowry has played above his head and Paul has played a bit below his. Sometimes that's enough. For what it's worth, if Lowry doesn't break out of his current slump soon (he's shooting 32.3% in the past 5 games, and his numbers have tanked considerably from early season highs), there's a slim likelihood of him MAKING the all-star game, let alone deserving to start. There are simply too many qualified guards in the west. Really.

As for Kobe, I think we all know what we're getting from him. Relatively inefficient scoring, dependent on drawing a lot of free throws and taking a ton of shots. The thing is? He's been legitimately quite good this year. He ranks 35th in the league at isolation scoring with 0.8 PPP, 26th in P&R Ball Handler scoring (0.88 PPP), 18th in post-up efficiency (0.95 PPP), and 2nd in the entire league off screens with 1.15 PPP. The problem with Kobe is that he takes so many isolations that his overall scoring output -- 0.93 PPP -- ends up being 105th in the league when you account for the terrible distribution of his shots. Realistically, though, he's been about as good as a man can expect him to be at this stage of his career. Better, in fact. He's played the 5th most minutes per game of any player in the league, and at he time of posting, the most minutes to this date of any NBA player. His per-36 numbers of 28-5-5 are roughly at his career averages, and while you don't really want Kobe taking 23 shots a game, you can't deny that 28 points on 23 shots really isn't all that bad in the context of a Mike Brown offense. No, it isn't exactly MVP-caliber scoring -- but it's decent, and in a conference devoid of healthy star shooting guards, getting 38 minutes a night (every night) of production like that is a huge boon for a team.

• RESERVES: Chris Paul, James Harden

So, why not James Harden? Here are the facts, for James. He's averaging 17-4-3 in just 30 minutes per game, and on less than 10 shots per game. He's playing reasonably solid defense, to these eyes, and Synergy stats would tend to agree -- he's ranked 87th in the league, allowing his man 0.76 PPP. He doesn't guard the opponent's best player, no -- but he doesn't do a strictly poor job against the players he's given to stop, and he recovers very well on the pick and roll. And offensively? He's essentially lights out from every position on the floor -- he can shoot the three (extremely well), finish in traffic (expertly), pull up, spot-up, and manage the ball in transition. I'd stop short of calling him Manu-lite, because that's not really true -- his passing is about 200x worse than Manu's, and his defense is nowhere at Manu's pesky level. But this season, he's been the spark for the best team in the West, and he deserves at least some sort of nod for his excellent play. And with Westbrook playing poorly enough to not-really-deserve a spot? He's their second all-star, easily.

• • •

WESTERN FORWARDS

• STARTERS: Kevin Durant, LaMarcus Aldridge

Durant is definitely going to start in the game, and quite frankly, he completely deserves it. Durant is putting up an effortless 25 points on 18 shots a night, seven rebounds, three assists, a steal, a block, and leading his team well. His advanced stats are fantastic, leading his team with a TS% of 60.2% despite a usage rate of 31.7%. His defense this year has been much improved, partly because he's getting a whole season with Perkins, Collison, and Ibaka manning the middle and allowing him more leeway to play his man close. With his size, he's always had the ability to be a positive defensive contributor -- this season he's beginning to make that a reality, and that's a scary thought for the league. He excels in defending in isolation and in recovering on his spot-up shooters -- mostly because of his size and long arms, he simply covers distances quicker than most shooters expect and what they thought was to be a wide-open jumper turns into a brutally covered quick shot. The evolution of Durant into a star who can be counted on to keep his man from going crazy is one of the underrated developments that have pushed the Thunder from the plucky and intrinsically good team they've been for the last few years into the odds-on favorite to win the western conference. I mean, really -- if Durant was playing the same defense he has the last few years, I'm guessing the Thunder lose at least 2 or 3 of the close games they've won to date. It's that important.

And then we get to LaMarcus. You can argue that Love or Millsap deserves this spot. You won't be wrong, strictly -- Kevin Love and Paul Millsap have both played some amazing basketball this season and certainly deserve the all-star spots I assign them in a paragraph or two. But Aldridge has been the rock for a surprisingly good Blazers team. They've lost games they shouldn't have lost, but this Blazer team really does look like it has a fringe shot of coming out of the West, and that's something you couldn't really say about the last few years without Roy. The ascendency of LaMarcus is one of the nicer stories of recent years -- always a disappointing not-quite-good-enough player, last year LaMarcus' offense finally decided to match his defense (which had been elite for a year or two before that) -- this year, he's continuing the hot streak and as we enter play for tonight's games LaMarcus has hit a lot of key career highs. He's maintained a TS% above his career average despite the highest usage rate of his career, and is demolishing his career highs in assist percentage and steal percentage. He's rated as the 14th best isolation defender in the league by Synergy, and although his spot-up numbers are relatively awful (and drag down his overall Synergy stats), he spends a lot of the game helping on defense to try and keep to Nate's system and he's one of the key cogs that makes it work. He's got an unguardable bank shot and has one of the best pick and roll games in the entire league. He's fantastic, a superstar, and deserves an entire boatload of superlatives for what he's doing in Portland right now. So he takes my starting spot. Tenuously.

• RESERVES: Kevin Love, Paul Millsap

The only reason LaMarcus is in here tenuously is because the West's depth at the forward position is absolutely insane. Any of LMA, Love, or Millsap would be starting for the East's team -- instead, two of them have to be reserves. Sad. But Kevin Love is quietly having an even better season than last year, at least as a complete player. Adelman isn't crazy enough to really match Love on players on the defensive end, but he has Love playing a floating post defense that he's actually not all that bad at. Not to say he's really a defensive asset, mind you -- his help has been as awful as we've come to expect from Love, but his voracious rebounding and his bulk really do wonders to help him effectively defend players who try to post him up. Which isn't to say he's really a shutdown post defender, because he isn't -- fundamentally, his defensive game is as lacking in polish as Dwight's offensive game was 3 years ago (which, by the way, it isn't anymore -- the "Dwight has no post game" meme needs to die a painful death, and should've died a painful death back during the Magic's 2009 playoff run) and while it's effective, it seems like it's primarily the system that did it. Is that bad? Not really. Now that he's no longer quite the sieve he used to be, Love's numbers mean a bit more to me. And they're absolutely insane numbers -- 40% from three on five threes a game, a rebound rate of 19% (fifth in the league, behind Dwight, Varejao, Bynum, and Humphries) translating to 13 boards a game, atop 23 points a night? That's some crazy stuff. Love is a great player, and now that Adelman has found an effective way to hide him on defense, there's nothing really tangible separating the words "all-star" and Kevin Love's name.

As for Millsap, this is another crazy small-season selection, but it's a strong one. Although he plays fewer minutes than Love, Aldridge, or Durant, he's putting up similarly impressive per-36 numbers -- 20-10-2-2 for Millsap to LMA's 22-9-3 and Love's 23-13-1. He's shooting 55% from the floor and finds himself far less involved in the Utah offense than LMA or Love -- he's sitting at a usage rate of 24%, quite a bit less than Love and LMA's 28% apiece. And the way he's scoring has been somewhat impressive. He's been absolute garbage spotting up and isolating, as you'd reasonably expect -- he is not a good shooter. He's been a bullish beast in the post, though, ranking 24th in the league at 0.92 PPP generated from the painted area. And he's been the league's top cutter at this point in the season, generating a completely absurd 1.65 PPP on cutting plays despite the Utah lack of a good passer. And he's been similarly excellent off the boards, having scored 1.42 PPP on offensive rebound attempts with 20 FGM and 3 And-1s on the year. Millsap has been completely beasting it this year, and while 20-10 may not look strictly wondrous, take a look at the Utah roster. Look at the pace they play at (markedly slower than the Blazers or Wolves, I might note). Look at their personnel. And tell me why that's not incredibly impressive. If you're coming up blank, that's sort of the point -- Millsap has been wonderful this season, and if we were choosing the team today, he'd be a must-pick.

• • •

WESTERN CENTERS

• STARTER: Marc Gasol

Marc Gasol got off to a relatively poor start this year, which is what makes my choosing him as a starter so insane to me. I'd essentially pencilled Bynum into this spot from the first day of the season, and didn't really expect it to change. The reality? Bynum has been good -- very good, even -- but in terms of overall value, Gasol has been the player I'd take nine times out of ten, this year. Gasol has been virtually unguardable in the post this year, not really by talent but sheer bulk -- watching footage of him in the post is like watching a tank run over a hobbit village populated by baby Koalas. It's brutal. And defensively? Good luck getting any space whatsoever when you're trying to post him up, and good luck swarming the rim when you know you have Marc there to erase your shot. He's been Memphis' rock this year, and has been better than anyone had any right to expect coming into this season. He's doing to everyone in the league what he did to Tim Duncan last year. And it isn't pretty, if you aren't a fan of his.

• RESERVE: Marcin Gortat

I really oscillated on this one a lot. The way I look at it is this -- in a fair world, the Suns would be an Eastern team and it'd be an easy call to put both Gortat and Nash on the team. They're equally as important to the success of their team. Nash makes the offense run, and Gortat makes the defense -- insofar as it exists at all -- function like an actual NBA defense. Gortat is also an excellent roll man, a great teammate, and one of the best cutting bigs in the league. He's a classical big man's center, and he's probably the best offensive weapon besides Amare that Nash has ever had backing him up. Nash is certainly helping Gortat out quite a bit, when they're on the court together. They have an exquisite two-man game that has the same qualities of the Nash-Amare game that enhanced both their talents.

In this case, though, I have to give the nod to Gortat above Nash. Not because he's a better player, per se, but because he simply means a little bit more to the Suns right now than Nash does. Not much, just a tiny bit -- when Gortat is on his game, though, the Suns defense looks positively average. His offensive game helps keep Nash's passing alive, as Nash symbiotically improves his offensive game with his passing. But the Suns offense looks to me to be about the same as their defense (and ratings hear me out -- they're 19th in the league on offense, and 19th in the league on defense) and Gortat gets criminally too few minutes. He's been great for them, absolutely all-star level, and (after a short period of disappointing games) Nash has been too. But on a team that's 6-11, in the west? You can't get two all-stars on that team. You just can't. So I'd pick Gortat, knowing full well that Nash deserves it just as much. It's a tough life out here for a blog, guys.

• • •

WILDCARDS

• ANDREW BYNUM: Given the incoherent ESPN debate about whether Bynum or Howard are better players, it probably isn't much of a surprise that Bynum's on this list. It probably is a bit of a surprise that I'd wildcard him, though, instead of letting him hash it out as a starter or a reserve. I may be alone in this (and I probably am!), but I really think Gortat and Gasol (Marc, of course) have played significantly better ball than Bynum, on both ends of the floor this year. Bynum is dominant and effective, but he often takes an extremely conciliatary role in the Laker offense -- gets the ball in the post, glances, then passes up an almost-open post shot in favor of another Kobe two. I'd like to see Bynum get a bit more aggressive in calling his own plays, and a bit more defensively active -- lost in the Laker's great defense this year is that Bynum hasn't exactly been playing the soul-crushing defense he played last year and the year before. He's been really, really good -- shutdown for the most part -- but he hasn't been the same kind of "system in a box" (as I like to call them) defender in Brown's system, yet. My guess? He figures out the system around halfway through this season, beasts it for the rest of the season, and leads the Lakers to a nice long playoff run that validates the incoherency of the ESPN commentariat that seems to think he's as good as Dwight. As of yet, though, I feel he's been less valuable to his team than Gortat and Gasol are to theirs. And the Lakers have been a bit disappointing so far, both because of it and because of the elder Gasol's heretofore poor season.

• TY LAWSON: This last spot was probably the absolute hardest pick out of all of these. I ended up going with Ty Lawson for two reasons. First, I feel like he's Denver's most important player. Best? No, that'd probably be Nene or Gallo, but in terms of the player that defines the team, I think Lawson's never-say-die spirit and flawless command of his teammates' offensive execution has to win out in the end. The creative ways he creates for himself, his ball-handling might, his prowess at killing all comers in transition -- at some point, that has to be worth something, and on a Denver team that is absolutely crushing most people's expectations (and is currently in pole position for a #2 overall seed in, again, a tough Western Conference) that's worth a hell of a lot. Second, and probably most importantly? It gives me a prime opportunity to re-link an incredibly old GG piece that virtually nobody has ever read, detailing how much of a hilarious badass Ty Lawson is through a story from my years at Duke. READ IT.

SNUBS

Where the hell do I start? How about at center, where Samuel Dalembert and Nene are both out of my chosen all-star game despite playing at a level that's usually all it'd take to get an all-star selection at their position? Or at forward, where Blake Griffin, Gerald Wallace, Danilo Gallinari, James Doakes, and Dirkus Circus all would merit serious consideration (or an automatic pick) in the east and make few bones about making the game in the west, to date? A list of all-star snubs in the west is less a list of snubs and more a list of "yeah, you could probably swap a few of these with my picks and I'd have no way to argue against it" type of list. Really.

I mean, point guard is a great example. At the point you have Russell Westbrook (having a disappointing season, but could turn it on at any time), Mo Williams (a serious 6MotY candidate who -- if not deserving of an all-star spot -- would at least merit consideration), Ricky Rubio (a rookie phenom who is certainly on the fringe and would occupy the same space as Kyrie in the East), Andre Miller (technically eliminated by Ty making the team, I suppose, but he's never had an all-star selection and he damn well still deserves one) and (finally) Tony Parker, who's putting up better numbers than virtually any of the non-starting Eastern picks I offered in my Eastern post a few days ago, and who has recouped from an awful start to posting a career high in assists per game despite below-average minutes per game, and back to a solid 18 points a game besides. Look. Name a random Western star. He was probably snubbed.

Except Derek Fisher, who was not snubbed. Sorry, Derek, you're just not that good anymore.

• • •

Well, that was an excruciating process. Getting posts like this right is virtually impossible. There's always going to be room to criticize. I hope, regardless, you found fewer things to criticize than you could've. I more thoroughly understand how hard it is for KD to be consistently getting things right, and keeping it proper. I endeavor to do the same, but damn, it's hard out here for a man straight keeping it real. I'm white. Sorry. Thanks for reading anyway.

Hey, everybody! This is the fourth edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple -- STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams' SRS projections before the season. So -- during the season -- we've been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week's results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE's projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Wizards fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 25th.

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

Instead of our customary thoughts, here's a chart, and some other related words.

Click the chart for a larger view.

If you look at this and wonder what it means, well, good on you, because that's a good question. Essentially, from here on out, I'll be collecting data daily and running NASH updates on my computer. With this will come updated playoff percentages, estimated win totals, et cetera. The end goal (one that we aren't quite near, yet, but will be at eventually) is to automate the process and give you -- our readers -- an interactive graphic that allows you to see the NASH projected wins at any date of the season (as you can see, I haven't back-filled in the data for the first three weeks of the season -- I may not be able to do so easily, so I might punt on that). This is about as readable as I can make the chart going from excel directly. A few notes on format -- Western conference teams get a diamond as their bullet, Eastern teams get a square. Western teams get a dashed line, Eastern teams get a solid.

So, yeah. End state architecture here (can you tell I've been putting in long hours at work?) would be a chart that lets you track either playoff percentages, projected wins, or projected end-season SRS in a convenient, easy-to-navigate interface -- allows user gaming, sorting, team-by-team views, et cetera. I'm still searching for an online interfaced stats package that gives me the flexibility I need to put this up. Current idea is to use SciViews-R and try my luck at that, but lord knows if I can really get that to do what I want. My hope is that something perfect will reveal itself to me soon, and I'll be able to use that. Worst case scenario, I probably drop a fully updated framework for presenting the NASH model output during the all-star break. Best case, probably in the next two weeks. Get excited! Maybe! If you like this sort of thing! But regardless. There aren't many takeaways from this past week, but I can point to a few interesting tidbits.

The Southwest Division -- excepting the Spurs and Hornets -- is collectively on a ridiculous streak right now. The Mavs went from a 58.8% chance at making the playoffs one week ago to a 73.5% chance now. The Grizzlies went from 56.5% to 77.7%. The Rockets went from 51% to 66% -- and collectively, they've gone from a predicted 106 wins over the season to 112. A pretty huge swing. The West is looking about as wide open as it did last week, and it's become a real possibility that the winner of the Pacific Division won't actually get homecourt in a 4-5 matchup -- currently, the Lakers project out as the 4th seed in the West despite having the 6th best record. (And, yes, the Clippers project to miss the playoffs -- partly an artifact of their soft schedule, partly an artifact of the massive amount of games they have left to play -- as we enter play tonight, the Clippers and Jazz have played markedly fewer games than the average NBA team. This will obviously round itself out as the season comes to a close, but something to think about when considering the decreased rest time and the fact that the Clippers have already had some trouble with injuries.

As for personal thoughts, I can't really fault any of NASH's current predictions, though I think the Spurs may continue their slow descent from their peak back in preseason at #1 in the West. They're currently at #3, but it's not exactly #3 with a bullet (i.e., a solid third) -- only two wins separate them from the 8 seed, and only three wins separate them from being out of the playoffs entirely. The Spurs have played well, so far, and the model is adjusting for their currently putrid road record. Which has taken them down a tad from the last few weeks. Regardless, though, with Manu gone and one of the most hellish stretches of games the Spurs have seen in years coming up, I see them underperforming these projections by a win or two -- enough to be the difference, this season, from a 2-3 seed and a 7-8 seed. It's going to be a crazy playoffs, guys. For real.

• • •

I'd write more, but I need to get to sleep because I had dental surgery today and I have a splitting headache. Join us tomorrow for my western all-stars, and Friday for a freeform post starring... well, not really sure yet, but it's going to be pretty awesome (whatever it is). Sorry for the short post. Hope you're having a great week, y'all.

"First off I hope I make the Olympic team," Durant said recently, humorously humble as ever. "But if I do make it, I won't worry about that, man. I think I do a good job of taking care of my body. So if I'm there, hopefully I can push through it and make it a good season and a good summer."

--ESPN's Weekend Dime, Marc Stein, 1/20/12

Gee, reading that quote really brought back some memories! See, I know Kevin Durant from back in D.C. During the lockout he and a couple of his NBA friends would play on a neat pavement court. Being an intrepid, ruthless basketball journalist disguised as a baby-faced 16-year-old, I seized the moment and asked to join the game, right when they were shooting hoops early in the morning.

"Hey, Kevin," I said, casually as possible.

"Hey, kid. What's your name?" Kevin Durant had a really jumpy, curious voice.

"I'm John."

"Hi, John. Are you by any chance a point guard on the Minnesota Timberwolves?" Kevin and his friends kind of chuckled at that. As did I. Kevin Durant had jokes.

"Nah, they waived me right before the lockout ended. The Spurs signed me, at a reduced salary, as a mop-boy," This last part was true. Only mopping afforded me the insider journalistic access I sought.

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah, seriously. I'm from San Antone. We be chillin'," I said, briefly putting on my aviator's shades before removing them, slowly, while glaring at Kevin.

"What brings you to D.C., then, John?" Kevin asked, a bit on edge now.

"To mop up the streets. With my intense basketball skills. Game on," Alea iacta est. The die is cast.

"What position do you play?"

"Well, I'll play point guard here, KD. But back in school, I'm the starting center. I take the tip and every play after that I anchor my team on both ends," I said, gaining confidence with every word.

"You can't be more than 5'9'', John!" Kevin laughed.

"I'm by far the second-tallest person in my entire school," I countered.

"What about the tallest?"

"Oh, she blew a calf out in the sand in beach volleyball."

Kevin Durant made a shocked expression.

"I'm sorry to hear that!" he said with such enthusiastic sympathy that I nearly cracked up right there. His eyebrows arched intensely, like he was a character in a cheaply-drawn anime.

"Ah, it's not a big deal. She'll get better in a couple of months. And besides, it doesn't matter all that much because I crash the boards like Rodman."

This line sealed the deal, and with some laughter Kevin told me to wait for a few more players (from nearby colleges, I gathered) to join in his pick-up games.

• • •

When everyone had arrived, we all drew lots to see who would be the first captains. There were only 12 of us, so the players that didn't get picked for one game would be captains in the next game. Simple as anything. Kevin Durant actually drew one of the captains' lots and picked me with the tenth choice, obviously out of sympathy. One of the two that didn't get picked was NBA player T.J. Ford.

Now, T.J. Ford was a gangly, awkward experiment with wireframes that had seemingly tumbled out of a graphical computer at the University of Texas and stumbled to the gym where the coaches realized he was a fully-formed college point guard and a future lottery pick. I knew a bit about him from his college days, and he would actually sign with the Spurs after the lockout, but now he just looked... eerily foreign in person. I felt like a scout discovering Nyarlathotep at a Nike camp or something. He also seemed kind of pissed Kevin hadn't picked him. He brooded on the sidelines and leaned against a chain fence, sitting on the ground.

But now I had bigger concerns: Because of the logic of the matchups, I was guarding a 6'10'' PF from a Division I school. Now, honestly, I'm not sure if this was truly the logic of the matchups or just an excuse for physical comedy, but I'm a big fan of physical comedy anyway, so I went with it. It was pretty entertaining, and - as a journalist - I was discovering empirically why Tim Duncan wasn't quite as fast as he was in 2003, and it wasn't just age. Have you ever been in a (playful but physical) fight where you hadn't been eating but where you had been drinking, and had also been running? Do you get what I'm saying? Well, if you haven't, here's the summary: you feel a little bit sick, but more than that, you feel like you're 70% of the way to unconsciousness, and 110% of the way to fainting. And that's exactly what playing the post on both ends was like. Despite the intensity and height difference, after our 12-minute game I had torched my counterpart for 5 points and 7 rebounds. I mean, my counterpart got 15 points and 20 boards, sure, but... it was progress. I had scored, legitimately, and I held my head up. By the end, I really felt like I could play him to a draw. Then they untied his shooting arm, money was exchanged, and the captains started the second draft.

For the second draft, the captains were still sitting against the chain fence, and so those of us that had just played were just talking among ourselves:

"I hope I get picked. If I do, I think I can do better this time. I think my team will win, if we just put the work in." Kevin Durant said. Everyone just looked at him, some concealing smiles, some rolling their eyes. I was astonished.

"Kevin, you're a marginal MVP candidate in the NBA. T.J. Ford is the second-best player here, and he's nowhere near as good as you. I'm an undersized, underage point guard here that plays small forward in a high school for tiny white people. I am in the 80th percentile, height-wise, in my school. We found out in math class. That's why I'm on the basketball team. Because I am relatively tall at my school. I have played literally one-thousandth the basketball that you have and I'm a foot shorter. You're going to get drafted, Kevin."

"Hmm, I don't know. Wait, did you say small forward? I thought you said you were a center!"

"Nah, that was a joke."

"Was the volleyball girl a joke? With her calf?"

"No, that really happened. She's hurtin' in the calf, definitely."

"Oh."

"Dude, my point is, you're being too humble. You're easily the best player out of the twelve of us! No one here would dispute this! Who among you would dispute this? Why wouldn't he get picked, for real?" I addressed the others. No one answered. I was astonished. Kevin Durant was honestly this humble. He honestly thought he had to earn a starting spot where you just had to be the 8th best out of 10 to get one.

"Listen, I just have to do my best and prove that I can make the team. That's all there is to it. Just go out there and compete, and if I get picked, all the better."

"Alright, just, uh, just don't sell yourself short," I could hear the faint echoes of commentators complimenting Kevin's humility, oblivious to how deep it apparently went. I could only smile and make my eyes wide as the others had done. "Is this guy for real?" I asked rhetorically.

T.J. Ford spoke, "Alright, the red team is ready to select. With our first pick, Red Team picks..."

I heard Kevin Durant whispering, "Please, please, please, please."

T.J. Ford finished, "...John!"

Kevin was incredibly disappointed by this turn of events. I had no words, and the other captain immediately chose Kevin Durant.

Despite his disappointment, Kevin delivered a monologue thanking his captain for the confidence he'd shown in selecting Kevin. "...and team blue shirts are going to win the championship this game if we can just execute and act like a team, from the top to the bottom of the lineup," Kevin pointed at Royal Ivey as his captain chose Ivey with the last pick. "Don't get me wrong: Team red shirts are great. We know they're great. They're tough on both ends. We all know this. But we think that we're better."

• • •

T.J. Ford took me aside after the draft. "I hate that guy."

"Who?"

"You know, that tall guy. Long arms. Anime eyes."

"... Kevin Durant?"

"Yeah, exactly. I hate that guy, kid."

"How can you hate Kevin Durant, TJ?" I said, genuinely curious.

"Ah, I mean, it's not hate. You know, I just don't think he's as humble as he acts. I think it's, like, an act, you know? I'm pretty suspicious."

"An act?"

"Like, a put-on for the media and his team. I know it don't make much difference if it is, but I'm curious. And we're, you know, going to test that, right now. In this very game."

"... What in God's name?"

"Why do you think I came here, kid?"

"To play basketball when your league of professionals is locked-out?"

"Well, yeah. I guess. But also to test Kevin Durant's humility. That's a close second, in terms of goals."

"Come on you guys, we're playing in a couple minutes!" Kevin called to us from afar.

"Listen, kid."

"Yeah?"

"I want you to play against Kevin Durant... Then..."

"Uh... okay, T.J. But that's a nightmare match-up..."

"Kid."

"Yeah?"

"Shut the hell up and let me finish."

"Oka-..."

"First I want to deliver an impromptu press conference, as coach and captain of red shirt team."

"What?"

"Do you have a microphone handy, kid?"

"Yes. But I don't s--..."

T.J. at this point started talking loudly enough so that Kevin could hear him as he fed me questions from index cards hidden under his giant white headband.

"Mr. Ford, how do you feel about Kevin Durant? How do you plan to match him up with your defense?"

"Well, John," calling me by my first name for the first time in 10 minutes, "I don't think he's a very good player at all, so I will be matching him up with my worst player... John. I have contempt for Kevin's playing ability. Utter contempt. A child could beat him, if that child had ever been in a fight, because that fight alone would make that child tougher than Kevin Durant."

"Is that why you didn't draft KD in the first place for your team, Mr. Ford?"

"No, I didn't draft him because I didn't think he DESERVED to be on a team, John."

• • •

"Well, KD, I guess you learned that you aren't as humble as you thought! You know you're the best player here, and you were just putting on a show of humility."

"T.J., I'm surprised at you," Kevin said, "The difference came down to front office acumen. Blue shirt team knew what it would take to build a contender, and realized that I could be a valuable contributor to that contender."

Ford just shook his head at the insult. I was laughing.

"Well, T.J., if it makes you feel better, that was the best game of my life! I got 8 whole assists."

"Aw, shaddup. You're not even a real point guard, kid."

"Well, to be fair, neither are you, T.J. But you have some good games."

"That's... that's kind of true, actually. Thanks, kid."

Kevin Durant shrugged and untied his right arm. It was time for the third draft.

A common refrain among those in my twitter feed, for anyone watching, has been that this season makes no sense whatsoever. I have to agree. The season has been unfathomably odd so far. I was going to do a freeform piece on the subject, but quickly realized there was a simpler way to go. Given that All-Star voting has begun, why not give you my first-quarter All-Stars? After all, we're already voting. And the game is in about a month. It's closer than you think, in other words. I'm not really doing statistical rankings here -- these are based on a combination of their stats (mostly documented here so we can look back later), what I've seen from watching them, and where the conference stands. It's a long look, so let's get to it. Keep in mind we'll be going with the infuriating All-Star positional designations; that is, guards, forwards, and centers. Four guards, four forwards, two centers, and two wildcard slots. Go.

• • •

EASTERN GUARDS

• STARTERS: Derrick Rose, Rajon Rondo

The starters are relatively obvious. Rose hasn't been having his best season -- inefficient, 31% from three, injured, etc. -- but he's still played like one of the best players in the East. Not MVP ball, but certainly ASG starter quality ball. The stats back me up on this -- Rose has the 3rd best PER among guards right now, the second most win shares (despite missing five games), and is 8th in the NBA at wins above replacement. He belongs here, and he belongs starting. Rondo, as well, has been a bit disappointing this season but still ranks as an ASG starter compared to his closest competition -- despite turning the ball over way the hell too much, he's been the Celtics' MVP so far this year. He's 17th overall in wins above replacement to Derrick Rose's 8th, has the highest PER on his team by a mile, and he's their most invaluable player right now -- the one thing that gives me any pause about him is how atrocious the Celtics are. They've played like the 7th worst team in the East, and while he's their best player, poor teams don't tend to get starting All-Stars. Then again, the East has been incredibly thin on guards this year, and Rondo qualifies.

• RESERVES: Brandon Jennings, Dwyane Wade

I have Wade backing up Rose and Rondo for two reasons. First, he's simply played worse than either -- he's sporting a poor look this season. He's putting up an incredibly underwhelming <0.500 TS% (for the first time in his entire career, mind you), and it's not an empty number -- he's ranked 206th in the league in points per possession according to Synergy numbers (scoring at an abysmal 0.85 PPP rate). That offensive horror show is backed up by solid defense (currently 90th in the league via Synergy, though that's below his usual rank), but when you're playing offense as poorly as Wade has been this season while using up as many possessions as he has been, you have some issues. (To their credit: Rose's defense has been above average but not to last season's high, ranked 126th in the league -- Rondo's however has been sterling, 35th overall and as far as I can tell the best among all Eastern guards.) Due to the fact that he's the only shooting guard playing anywhere near ASG-level ball in the East (other than perhaps Lou Williams, who's going to get his own look in the wildcard section), he deserves the nod.

And then... Brandon Jennings. Wait, what? This is one of those "are you kidding me" moments where you'll need to see the stats before you're convinced, especially if you haven't seen 4 or 5 Bucks games. Or maybe even if you've seen them. I get that. So here are the facts. Jennings currently has the 12th highest PER recorded by a guard this season, and has played the 11th most MPG of any guard in the league to get there. For all the mentions of him as a chucker (which I normally would find valid), via Synergy, Jennings is sporting the 77th highest PPP in the league (0.96) and currently ranks out as the 9th best isolation scorer in the NBA (1.00 PPP). He has a higher true shooting percentage than Rondo, Rose, or Wade -- and every guard in the East playing 25+ MPG outside of the fearsome fivesome of Kyrie Irving, J.J. Redick, Jodie Meeks, George Hill, and Mario Chalmers. We'll get to Kyrie later. He has the lowest turnover percentage of every point guard in the Eastern conference, and he's the only player on the Bucks who's doing much of anything on offense right now. The Bucks have been dismal this year, and they look like a long shot for a playoff bid, but Jennings has been one of the 3 best guards in the East this year (better than Wade, in my estimation, quite frankly). Based on his play up to now, he's a deserving All-Star. And now that I've written this paragraph, he'll proceed to have a catastrophic late-season swing to completely erase my perception that he's getting everything together. I can just taste it.

• • •

EASTERN FORWARDS

• STARTERS: LeBron James, Ryan Anderson

Remember how I said it's been a weird season? Well, it has been. LeBron James has been the presumptive MVP of this first quarter of the season -- he's been good for 30-8-7 a night on a human video game-esque true shooting percentage of 63% (and, again, 33% usage). He's been Miami's rock and he's been absolutely phenomenal this year. He's scoring 1.07 PPP at this point in the season, and that's actually understating how offensively valuable he is. If he wasn't a 75% free throw shooter, teams might very well be better off fouling him every time up the court. That's how potent he's been on offense. On defense, though? I may be the first and only person to say it, but I think he's been pretty disappointing this season. Perhaps I've simply been watching the wrong games, but as I've seen it, LeBron's been cherry picking more this season than he has in the last few seasons. He was a shutdown perimeter defender last year -- this year, he's playing off his man and slow to close out, and overly aggressive in pursuit of the steals and blocks in lieu of pure defensive stoppage.

Synergy backs up this assertion WAY more than I expected when I first typed it, as he's gone from 21st overall in PPP allowed in 2011 to his current spot of 267th overall in PPP allowed in 2012 -- primarily off of, as I was expecting, a dramatically worse performance on sticking to spot up shooters. He's been shiftless on defense, and that's hurting his game. Still, even despite the poor defensive game, LeBron has been on a godly streak on offense enough so that he's still the most deserving All-Star in the East, and the best player besides. As for the other starter? Ryan Anderson has been playing absolutely insane ball this year. Seriously. Among forwards, he's 2nd in the league in Win Shares, 4th in PER, and putting up some crazy pills level averages of 18-7-1 in 31 minutes per game. Does he defend? Not particularly well, no -- though he's doing marginally better than LeBron is in my eyes. And Synergy again backs me up, rating him as the 206th best defender -- pretty poor, but at least he's not in the bottom 25%, right? Like LeBron, his offense is fantastic enough to make up for his awful defense -- he's scoring 1.19 PPP, highlighted with a very high 41.1% from three.

• RESERVES: Carmelo Anthony, Andre Iguodala

Melo is going to be a starter. Let's get that straight now -- we've pretty much got our ASG starters picked out, as there isn't really a competitive race left with the voting. And Melo has roughly a 500,000 vote lead on the 3rd place forward (Amare Stoudemire). He'll be starting. And he does, honestly, deserve to make the game. If barely. He's shooting atrociously so far this year, at 40% from the field and 32% from three (on a criminal 21 shots per game). His defense is as bad as ever. But on the plus side? He's drawing a ton of free throws (hence his 26 points per game), fifth overall in wins above replacement (at 3.22), and the 8th overall ezPM100 score in the league (at 7.58). He's playing well, even if it's for a terrible, horrible Knicks team so far. He's deserving of the spot, even if his team is pretty heavily letting him and Tyson down right now. And Andre? Well... he deserves it, probably more than Melo.

Andre is rated the 7th most valuable player in the league in wins above replacement, currently sitting at 3.01 wins above replacement for a team that has won 11. His defense is only rated 94th overall by Synergy, but please, don't let that fool you. For the last several years, Andre has gotten the toughest perimeter assignment of any Sixers. Night in, night out. And he shuts them down. Last year was his coming out party -- he was the best shutdown defender in the league. And frankly, in 2011, there wasn't another player I'd rather have out there guarding the other team's best. Look at the numbers. They'll make you weep. This year, he's kept his momentum going -- not once this year has Iggy let his man put up gaudy numbers, and the "worst" defensive performance he's had (to these eyes) was when he allowed Carmelo to drop 27 points on 26 shots in a close loss to the Knicks. That's a stopper. And while he rarely has gotten All-Star dap for his All-World D? He deserves it this year. His offense is just fine, right now -- he's in the top 100 in PPP, a place he hasn't been in a while. He's playing fewer minutes but still putting up the customary Iguodala line -- 15 points, 6 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals, and the best defense that money can buy. Iguodala is an All-Star, right now. Take it how you will.

• • •

EASTERN CENTERS

• STARTER: Dwight Howard

He's the best big man in the league.

... Christ, sometimes things are just that simple.

• RESERVE: Tyson Chandler

It's kind of funny -- so far, 4 of the 10 players we've highlighted are from losing teams. Really. That's a strange number, because generally, very few players make the team from losing squads. This year, though, the East finds itself sort of screwed. There are only 6 winning teams in the entire conference, and two of them (Atlanta and Indiana) are winning in a rather team-centric effort that doesn't really lend itself to any easy ASG picks. On the other hand, you have your Knicks and Celtics and Bucks, where most of the team is playing like trash but one or two guys are absolutely killing it. In that kind of a landscape, who's an All-Star? Do you take the perfunctory Pacer or Hawk over the players who are beasting it on bad, low-tier playoff teams? Good question. It's a definition that becomes ever-more nebulous as time goes on. And you can have many opinions on it -- most people do.

I think it's a mix. And with the Knicks, as bad as they've been, I think they have two players who are putting up AS-caliber numbers. Carmelo is one, and Tyson is the other. He's doing his best on defense, and he's changed the culture on defense in New York to the extent he can. He's been efficient when he touches the ball (1.21 PPP, 4th in the league -- mainly off his 76.2% true shooting percentage) and his defense has been superb. The Knicks have been playing him strangely on the defensive end, with D'Antoni commonly forcing him to close out on spot-up shooters and defend sweet-shooting stretch fours instead of locking down the paint. He's doing relatively well, though his spot-up defense has been predictably bad -- that's not his game, and D'Antoni should probably figure that out at some point. Maybe. Regardless, for a team that's pretty damn bad this year, Chandler has done everything expected of him and then some. And he wasn't really a deserving All-Star last year, despite the Dallas protestations that he was. But this year, he should have his spot.

• • •

WILDCARDS

1. LOU WILLIAMS: This may seem kind of odd, but Lou Williams is probably my pick for the one-quarter 6MoY. It's him, James Harden, Mo Williams, or Al Harrington -- nobody in the league has been as impactful off the bench on a great team as those four have been to this point of the season. Lou is currently sporting a PER of 22.6, which puts him at 14th on Hollinger's PER leaderboard. He's got one of the lowest turnover percentages in the league this season, and if he keeps it up, he's going to end up with one of the 50 best seasons -- historically -- in preventing turnovers. He's currently turning it over on 7.4% of his possessions -- that's 38th all-time among guards that played 20+ MPG in a season. Amazingly, there are only two players above him on that leaderboard with a higher usage percentage than Lou has this season. Jeff Malone and Michael Jordan. Just insane numbers. He's scoring rather efficiently -- 16 points a game on 12 shots, which doesn't sound wonderful, but he's scored more points than any other Sixer this year. He's done it on 41% from three, along with a small-sounding two rebounds, three assists... but that's in 24 minutes a game! His per-36 numbers are a much more impressive 23-3-5 with a steal, on 17 shots. That's over 50% better than his per-24 numbers, and it suddenly makes his All-Star campaign a lot more reasonable. In a compressed season and a thoroughly disappointing East, there aren't a lot of truly deserving candidates. Out of the fringe guys, Lou stands out. He deserves it. (... You know. 16 games in. He may not -- and probably won't, as this turnover thing is kind of the definition of a fluke -- deserve it by the actual game, but right now, damn right he deserves it!)

2. ROY HIBBERT: I can't believe I'm honestly tabbing Hibbert as an All-Star caliber player right now. Really. I realize I just watched him completely take apart Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol, but dear God, an All-Star? If this was the West, I mean, damn: He wouldn't be considered. But that's the world we're living in: In the East, a center averaging 14-10 with a PER of 20 on a winning team is probably enough to get you in. Don't get me wrong, Hibbert's numbers aren't strictly poor. He's Synergy's 44th ranked defender, and while I think that may overrate him a bit, he's been far better on that end this year than I've tabbed him for in his career so far. Not a shutdown guy, but a good guy. He's been a bit hard to tab on offense as well -- not particularly good, nor efficient, nor someone you really want to give the ball to. But that's sort of how every Pacer has seemed this year -- nobody's really been automatic, everyone's been equal parts disappointing and promising, and they're managing to eke out the wins anyway. That's basketball for you. Sure, it may not last very long, but I'm liking this Pacer team and it deserves an All-Star.

SNUBS

Alright. Snub is an incredibly loose definition, because frankly, if you couldn't crack an ASG roster that includes Brandon Jennings, Lou Williams, and Roy Hibbert you really aren't an ASG-caliber player. In the West, there are at least 3 snubs that would've made this Eastern Conference list if they'd been in the East. So I have some real problems shedding crocodile tears for players who -- while among the best at their position in their conference -- couldn't crack this list. Regardless, there are a few who deserve mention as being right below Lou and Roy for those last two wildcard slots.

First up, a few solid players who are putting up good numbers and are the best player on their respectively horrible teams -- Kyrie Irving, Gerald Henderson, and Greg Monroe. Kyrie has been a super elite scorer (yes, he's a rookie, but he's also already flirting with the 50-40-90 club. Nor does it hurt that he's currently sporting the 4th best PER for a rookie guard of all time), Gerald is an elite defender (to these eyes there isn't a single non-Iguodala perimeter defender in the league that does a better job than Gerald -- impossibly feisty, and his offensive game has evolved from a horror show into a pretty blend of old-school basketball that's light on the free throws and heavy on the fundamentals), and Monroe is an elite do-it-all guy (he's currently leading the Pistons in PPG, RPG, and SPG... and he's 2nd in assists and blocks -- he may very well lead the team in all five categories if he ends the year hot, and I honestly can't think of the last time a player had a ghost of a chance of accomplishing that). If their teams were better, any of those three would probably pole-vault one of their counterparts on this list. They aren't, though, and those three aren't really putting up numbers good enough to throw any of the aforementioned folks out. So, sorry, guys.

And then the decent players who are playing above-average ball on above-average teams, but really, aren't having an individual year good enough to truly warrant a selection. Yet. All of these guys are basically on-call for the game assuming that someone on the list drops out. In this category, we have Josh Smith, Chris Bosh, Luol Deng, Carlos Boozer, and Joe Johnson. I'm not going to go over these guys point-by-point, because there's really no point. We all know what kind of players these guys are. Solid folks. Decent players. And not really a chance in hell that they'd sniff an ASG if they weren't having the seasons they're having right now on teams that aren't contending, or overachieving. In particular, Josh Smith is probably the most deserving of these five -- he's putting up excellent numbers and is without question the Hawks' best player with Horford benched. And they keep winning, which is mostly a credit on Smith and Larry Drew. Regardless -- as I said before, I don't really feel there's a serious "snub" on my list. Because the East is bone-bare of talent right now.

(And no, Deron fans. He is simply not an All-Star right now. I'm sorry.)

• • •

Our first quarter Western All-Stars will be posted on Tuesday. Thanks for reading.

For an explanation of what this is about and a full listing of the Pantheon thus far, go here.

We're updating The Pantheon today with eleven links. Fun times for all. An important note that we'd like to emphasize is that we are really, really open to suggestions (discovery-wise, the list is about 40% Aaron-40% Alex-20% later suggestions at the moment), even to your own pieces. Really, we don't mean to be biased or terribly exclusive: I mean, it *is* meant to be a textual highlight reel, yes, but as we're trying to exhaust the list of the very bets, we're realizing that it's essentially inexhaustible. When we want to include something on the basis of supreme quality, we can usually find room for it. Because of this, The Pantheon is becoming more and more of a library for great pieces than anything else. We're keeping the name, and the attitude of timelessness (because all the pieces are truly timeless, and the additions are no exceptions), but we recognize the subtle Borgesian shift from pantheon to great library. And we're cool with that.

I say this because we are quite aware that the additions are mostly Spurs pieces. We're called "The Gothic Ginobili" and this is what we're familiar with. Now, we're pretty confident that other fan bases are producing content every day as hilarious and brilliant as Popovich giving Vampire Beno Udrih a withering stare that causes Udrih to impale his own heart in shame while "Luke Walton's smile supernovas into escalating sobs". We just haven't seen it. Sorry. Tell us if you do see something great (especially one that speaks to you personally as a fan of one of the teams/players), preferably in the comments of The Pantheon. This is best because it saves us the trouble of adding it directly/filtering them/until an update while still allowing readers to check it out. If you'd prefer more privacy or a longer explanation than a post or a link dump? Then try droping us a line through our staff email. We'll read it, and probably even respond!

I realize there's something inherently normative about making a freaking Pantheon (and naming it that), and every time we update it I feel a certain (kind of obsessive) pressure against the normative, the biases, and the urge to promote based only on preference in subject matter. Why? Well, because sometimes that normative part is the ugly stuff of exclusion in selection of material and a cheap delineation of what is high art and what is not, and it's kind of endemic to the human mind to compartmentalize these sorts of things. But it's not our purpose, and we're aware of the problem. Note it. Thanks. New links after the jump.

• • •

TABLE OF CONTENTS (for pieces in 1/20 update only)

• • •

The Riverwalk Conspiracy by Rand - Maybe I'm revealing my bias for fiction here, but I just love a hilarious, well-characterized thought experiment. This piece (written in the midst of the 2010 playoffs) captures a strange, mystical caricature of Spurs' Coach Gregg Popovich and his methods, mid-flight. Owner Peter Holt acts as the perfect comic foil. [Note: Owes a lot to another PTR piece of fiction, the longer Ginobili vs. Dracula. I didn't include it here because it's mostly too contextual for a general NBA fan to enjoy, but I love this chapter which I think holds up pretty well without context.]

• • •

The Pathology of Manu Ginobili by sungo - This is one of those pieces where the sentences get better and better and the focus becomes clearer and clearer as the piece goes on. By the end it's something to behold, and to hold on to. You could change the tenses and adapt some stuff and it could be a HOF introduction or an epitaph, but it could never be changed to suit anyone else. Why? Well, because there will never be another Manu Ginobili. And I don't know if there's a better description of Manu out there.

• • •

David Robinson was a Fine Role Player by Timothy Varner - This is one of the most accurate explorations of the strange, unselfish culture of the San Antonio Spurs over the last two decades. Tim Varner (of 48 Minutes of Hell) traces the Spurs' culture directly to the contributions of one David Maurice Robinson. With every playoff exit by teams he had carried at an MVP level, Robinson saw all that was missing and tried again and again to be those things the next year. But Robinson found out that he just couldn't be all the that his team needed, not with Jordan there, not with Hakeem lurking in Jordan's shadow with a great supporting cast and an otherworldly 15-month stretch. So, when Tim Duncan came along, Robinson (with some early disdain and wounded pride) easily, unselfishly sacrificed his touches and his accolades in order to help the Spurs to win two championships and to create a great legacy and a long-lasting culture of character. And in doing so, the Admiral created the template for a different kind of legend: a different kind of star. Varner's title is ironic in the best sense and helms a piece that builds to an overarching narrative that anyone who has followed the Spurs to any degree will understand.

• • •

John Wooden and the Culture of Ought and On Johnny “Red” Kerr by Timothy Varner - You know, looking over the Pantheon so far, I notice that the criteria that seem to dominate our selections are depth of insight, passion, journalism, and imagination. But at the end of the day, it's probably Tim Duncan - along with his subtle virtues of integrity, intelligence, and competition for its own sake - that I'm tuned in to watch every night. It's our deep respect and admiration for Tim Duncan that motivated the existence of the Gothic Ginobili more than anything else (if you want to know second place, just look up at the banner/name). The same is true of sportswriting. We look first for writing that dazzles our imaginations, then for writing that expands our minds, then - without exception - we look for writing that stirs our souls and affirms our values. If you understand all of that, then the inclusion of Varner's pieces is obvious.

• • •

The City’s Advanced Stats Primer and EZPM: Yet Another Model for Player Evaluation by EvanZ - Math recognize math. I don't know enough about basketball statistics to really give you an unbiased, objective opinion on which stats and approaches are best. If ezPM is the best single-number statistical APBRmetric on the Internet I have no idea, and if it's hopelessly dated, well, I don't know that, either. I'm not a big stats guy. What I do know (from decades learning math and from reading about some of these statistics over the past few years) is that ezPM is a fine metric, and takes Dave Berri's already decent but flawed (no, really, it is) "Wins Produced" metric to yet another level of insight.

But more than anything pertaining to the ezPM stat itself, I'm mostly linking to this pair of pieces for the mental process behind them, the story told by EvanZ in the "Primer" of finding an abundance of these already-decent metrics like WP, building something a bit better in ezPM, and - in the scientist's dismal, grinding, purposeful way - in the end still not being totally satisfied with the outcome. After all, every scientist worth their salt understands intuitively and concretely that there are always more avenues for improvement, and there are always thoughts that can be re-thought, as history (and math especially!) suggests. It's a story that for the most part Berri frustratingly and oddly omits from his own work, and that we'd love to hear. Because (speaking not as a scientist but as a happy consumer of its products) the honest stories of science not only bring cultural exchange (as in the "Primer") but also tangible improvements in the science itself (as in ezPM).

• • •

Regarding Moses by Matt Moore - On the blogosphere, we talk so much about upsides, breakout stars, and devastating disappointments. Most of all, we talk about the nebulous, dynamic legacies of our stars, young and old. Our era has more upsides than it has downsides, and I'm not really complaining. But it was so refreshing when Matt Moore took an afternoon to do some research and reflect on Moses Malone. Moore comes away with a simple portrait of Malone, who knew he was great, had a lot of fun, and then got on with his life. Set against a modern pace of sports media constantly massaging and shaping legacies with each game, the article is well-done and neat. While the prospect of a book about Mo would be nice, this article is a fitting send-off in its own right - simple, enjoyable, important without being heavy. Strawberry soda pop.

• • •

Tracy McGrady, 'freakish' talent and the peril of ease by Dan Devine - When someone makes a good argument that carries with it the sketches for a much broader frontier of understanding, then they've "stretched the game out," quite literally. In Devine's piece, we get a stern deconstruction of the expectations that coaches, fans, and management place on their stars and the laments that follow when those expectations aren't met. And, as a result, we learn to undervalue what we have and overvalue what we could have but never might. On some level much of sports fandom is predicated on the hope that our teams and our players will do unreasonable things: Performance - even to the crustiest statistician or historian - is not the whole story. The missed shots, the skills that inexplicably don't take to a player, the rotations that could have been made: these expectations all matter, of course. But it's worth taking a step back, and that's exactly what Devine's thoughtful piece does.

• • •

Two last additions: to our description of Traveling West Finds Cleveland by David Campbell, we're adding the following two articles which give additional background and broader context about Delonte to Campbell's piece. They're The Real Mr. West by Tzvi Twersky and A Teachable Moment by Angelo Benedetti, and they're both fantastic and worth reading in their own right.