A bit of a content update that I probably should have specified from day one. You may have realized it already, but there won't be a full complement of full-post freeform Gothic Ginboili team previews this season. After all, we're T-Minus three days from the season. The only teams with the coveted full-post previews so far are the Dallas Mavericks, Los Angeles Clippers, New York Knicks, the OKC Thunder (below) and the Miami Heat. The Heat preview (good eye) isn't there yet, but it'll be dropping tomorrow. Instead of reviewing every team in full, I'm building a win prediction model that will form the underlying prior distribution on our full season team ranking algorithm. If it sounds complicated, just trust me: it isn't. Promise. We'll be dropping this prediction model later this weekend / early next week, and some blurbs talking about what we expect from each of the non-full-coverage teams.

Without further ado, please join me in welcoming the new prohibitive favorite for the 2012 Western Conference title, both playoffs and regular season. Your 2012 Seattle Supersonics!

• • •

I promise I won't make that joke again.

The Thunder, last season, were a very good team. Not a great team, but a very good one all the same. They ended the season the slightest bit short of the 2 and 3 seeds held by the Lakers and Mavs -- two wins, to be exact. OKC was a conventional team, but one that was devastatingly effective after the Jeff Green trade. It's actually slightly shocking that they ended the season as well as they did. The importance and lopsidedness of the trade obscured it, but they essentially traded Green for nothing, as incoming Kendrick Perkins spent the entire rest of the year injured and hobbling. With Perkins as hobbled as he was for much of the late season (and essentially offensively useless without an understanding of the Thunder playbook), it was actually a pretty impressive feat for the Thunder nevertheless to roar to the WCF and win a game on the future Champs' home court. The general shape Perkins was in -- one that made him essentially a nonfactor on the floor for most of his time -- didn't stop the Thunder from slicing the good vibes post-trade Nuggets in the jugular and breaking the Grizzlies' backs in a tough, hard-fought seven.

Given all this, I wonder if perhaps we're beginning to underrate the Thunder by proxy. Armchair analysts can cling to the idea that the Thunder have a lessened chance at winning the west because they're simply too young. Or, on the other end, they simply take it as a given that the Thunder will win the west and refuse to talk about it -- something I was in danger of doing before realizing there was no discernable reason to NOT cover the Thunder in a big post, and at a minimum, worth a post verbally chastising myself and wondering why I even considered not looking at them. After all, there may not be a single team in the league that deserves more credit right now. Seriously, Sam Presti has made all the right moves. It's one thing to build a contender: Danny Ferry built a contender brilliantly in Cleveland (overlooked by widespread myths like "they're 20-win teams without LeBron!" and "Mike Brown is so awful!"). And Otis Smith built a contender in Orlando until mid-2010 when he went insane, pulled an infinitely recursive series of panic trades, and began blowing up the hard work he'd done for absolutely no discernable reason.

But Sam Presti? He didn't just build a contender, he built a dynasty. Durant + Westbrook + Harden + Perkins may be the single most high-upside four man core in the league. And not only that, but Presti has surrounded them with high-impact low-usage roleplayers on smart rookie deals that teams crave in cap-clearing trades. Absolutely incredible job with this team. Especially with the roleplayers. If you want to distill the Thunder's advantages down to a single reason as to why the Thunder will be the best team in the west this year, you really don't really have to look any farther than the well-rounded depth of their young roster. There's not a single position where any western contender can approach the Thunder's depth and well-built versatility.

At point guard, they have Westbrook and Maynor -- Westbrook is an all-star caliber guard despite his occasional bursts of iffy black-hole type offense, and Maynor is a pro's pro. His per-36 averages are 10-4-7 to a minuscule 2 turnovers -- coupled with his 38.5% three point shooting and his 73% free throw shooting, you have the best backup point guard among all western contenders, and one of the top 3 starting point guards. So you can check off the point guard box as an advantage 5 nights out of 6.

What about the shooting guard slot? The Thunder are, on paper, weak there -- they have the slightly disappointing James Harden backing up the eternally offensively worthless Sefalosha. The weakness is ridiculous once you get to brass tacks, though -- Harden's game is, without question, nasty. To expound on this: last season Harden's play made me finally typecast his game. Now, whenever someone tells me something about James Harden, my mind flips to a stock photo of a heavily bearded franciscan friar with a bit of a paunch masquerading as Manu Ginobili. Really. The whole season seemed to emulate Manu's pre-breakout sophomore season in 2004, and he completed the deal with two excellent games in the Lakers series that year -- referring, of course, to Manu's nasty 15-5-6 game that helped the Spurs take near-decisive 2-0 advantage in a series that came down to a single shot. This was followed by his 21-8-5-1 outing in a close loss where he was without question the best player on the team. To Harden's credit, he had two such performances against Dallas (and his fouling out in Game 4 cut off the potential for a third and changed that game completely). First in the Thunder's only win, he put up 23-7-4-1 and put the team on his back with clutch threes and excellent defense. Second in the series clincher for Dallas, he put up 23-5-6 and made Terry's defense look absolutely silly (though it wasn't quite enough to flip the series). Harden is a baller. He probably won't start, because he needs to get his shots to be effective and having Durant/Westbrook on the floor necessarily cuts down the shots available for perfect sixth men stars like Harden to be effective. But he's currently one of the top 5 shooting guards in the West, and Thabo is a good defender. That's a solid rotation. I'm not really sure of any western defender that can beat it other than the Spurs, and even then, that's assuming a healthy Manu and Anderson's continued development. Still, 1 out of 15 teams with a better rotation. What's weak at a glance turns out to be a huge advantage for the Thunder.

As for everywhere else, you'll find the same general trend. The Thunder have Durant playing 38 per game at the small forward position and Daequan Cook as his pace-changing spot-up backup (a type of player contenders don't necessarily NEED, but one that serves as an effective pivot piece to open the offense for their scrubs when one or two of the stars are on the bench). There's not a single small forward in the West that's in Durant's zip code (seriously; LeBron, Iggy, Melo, Deng, Pierce? All in the East -- Sure, Rudy Gay and Danilo Gallinari are good, but they're no Durant, and neither team has suitable backups for either after the departures of Wilson Chandler and Shane Battier).

Then you get to the big man rotation, which used to be a serious weakness for the Thunder as soon as one year ago. Now? Relative strength They've rid themselves of the collapsed black hole formerly known as PF-miscast Jeff Green, and are left with a three man primary rotation of Nick Collison (great defender, slightly dirty, funny guy), the puzzle-clicked-into-place-when-he-switched-down-to-the-four Serge Ibaka (decent weakside D with negative isolation and post contributions, developing into a good catch-and-shoot midrange guy, amazing rebounding talent), and Kendrick Perkins (top five defensive C when healthy, really the only player in the league who can consistently bottle up star post players, best screen setter and among the best PnR defenders in the league). Tell me, please -- what Western contender has a better big man rotation than that? I'd have said Lakers, but then they traded Odom away for a bag of peanuts and a signed Tiger Woods golf ball. No other contender in the West has a big rotation that's as altogether solid as the Thunder, and they still have room for improvement. Cole Aldrich has impressed in workouts and the preseason, and has the potential to be a bruising backup that keeps Perkins' legs fresh. Nazr Mohammed is a decent backup stopgap at this point in his career. And even if you ignore all of this, they have three quality big men whose games fit together well enough to be put in almost any permutation.

Take it together and tell me if you can disagree: the Thunder have -- top to bottom -- a top 2 roster at every single position in the West. Odd, but the truth.

• • •

About the only real problem facing the Thunder right now? The stratospheric expectations the entire basketball world has for this team. It's become an unstated fact among anyone paying attention that the Thunder are a lock to win the West this season, at least in the regular season. They're easily the least questionable contender in the West, and more than in any other season, they enter the 2012 season in a conference with no clear number two, three, or four. To quantify it -- these numbers are completely off the top of my head, but the Thunder are essentially a 50-50 shot to win regular season. At worst. Which isn't an overwhelming number, until you realize there's really nobody under the Thunder who has a decent chance of winning the West in the first place unless a lot of pieces fall into place. The other day, our friend Andrew Lynch had a novel idea -- he decided to crowdsource through twitter the percentage chance that various teams win the West. The Thunder had 36%. A decent showing, but look at the teams directly behind them. It's probably an understatement.

• Dallas Mavericks (20%): Not going to lie, a bit shocked the Mavs rated this highly. As I said in my full Mavericks preview, I don't think they'll be bad. But they're going to need a hell of a lot to go right to actually have a legitimate one-in-five shot of winning the West. Crazy lineups, insane play calls, et cetera. Just read the preview for more.
• Los Angeles Lakers (14%): This is a bit more reasonable. Full disclosure: my ballot was OKC 45%, DAL/LAL/SAS/MEM 12%, Other 7%. I don't think a sub-15% chance is too off base for the Lakers -- Kobe is battered, Bynum is a ticking time bomb, and Gasol may only have one more elite season left in him before he's too physically fatigued and brittle to contribute in the same way he used to. Ron Artest is horrifyingly out of shape and the Lakers have yet to upgrade from the Blake/Fisher duo at the point. There are an insane number of questions about this team. You can't put them higher than this.
• Memphis Grizzlies (13%): The other fringe contender whose general stock is being overrated by the commentariat for their lights out performance late last season and through the playoffs. Reminder, though -- the Grizzlies big rotation is completely broken now that Darrell Arthur is out for the season. Their 3rd best big man -- I kid you not -- is HAMED HADDADI. Unless they intend to play Gasol (coming off 32 MPG) and Z-Bo (coming off 36 MPG) for 40 minutes per game their big man backup rotation is 100% busted. They're also harmed by their owner -- Heisley has said in the past that he'd refuse to pay the luxury tax even if his team is contending. He repeated this assertion to a Yahoo News reporter earlier this week. They only have $3 million dollars of salary before they hit the tax line. The Grizz being a title contender essentially will now rely on Gasol/Z-Bo playing insane minutes totals while putting the franchise hopes on Hamed Haddadi becoming a servicable big man. Good luck with that.
• Other (9%): I'd assume this is primarily this high from Portland fans who hope beyond hope that this is the year they get lucky, Clippers fans who love dunks while hating defense, and Jazz fans who will forever be the most insanely committed fanbase in the league. I have a friend who is 100% convinced that Gordon Hayward will someday pass Manu Ginobili. I've met a Jazz fan who thinks Karl Malone is the best power forward of all time, with second place being reserved for Carlos Boozer. Jazz fans are a special kind of crazy. Love them, though.
• San Antonio Spurs (8%): Probably the non-OKC bet I'd short if I was given these odds and for some reason couldn't short the Thunder. The Spurs -- despite coming off of 61 wins -- have more avenues for improvement of any member on this list. Kawhi, Anderson, and Tiago should bolster the defense a bit. A midseason acquisition of a big -- something that I believe will happen -- will help as well. Pop will have the big three sit games to get the young guns minutes and keep them fresh. I could see this Spurs team surprising. Perhaps that's just the homer glasses, though.

Really, what teams on this list should scare the Thunder? The Mavs beat them last year, but lost their best perimeter defender to the Nets and their best overall defender to the Knicks. They're going to be older than any title winning team in the last 20 years. Success will require insane things from Coach Carlisle. The Lakers are a mess right now and Kobe's injured already. The Grizzlies are banking on 36-40 MPG from two bigs that can't play that much without wearing down. The Spurs need all their young talent to go right to have a real title shot. What should scare them, if anything, is that at least one of these teams is probably going to buck the worst case scenario and end up as a solid second option to the Thunder -- but with their underlying weaknesses, I don't really see how any of these teams pass them.

And thus we arrive at the general point. The Thunder, warts and all, have arrived at the pinnacle of their development stage. Rising challah no longer. The Thunder have been removed from the oven -- whether they like it or not -- and placed upon the table. They're hot, steaming, and cut for consumption. There's no "well, they just need to develop more" or "they need to learn to play together" -- they have that. They're ready. From this point forward, the Thunder are the West's best hope for a dynasty. And with that comes expectations. They now need to win, dominate, and make this league their own. Every year they don't, they chip away at the aura of inevitability. They begin to look a lot more like the 90s Sonics than the 00s Spurs. The 90s Jazz than the 00s Lakers. The 90s Suns than the 00s Mavericks. Et cetera. And that sort of disappointment really has a nasty way of infecting a legacy -- just ask pre-Heat LeBron James about that one.

In short, the Thunder are a superpower, now. It's time to deliver. And this season will, more than any before it, give us a true read on what the Thunder are made of. Is the togetherness, the talent, the on-court love for each other for real, and if so, can it bring them to the promised land? Is Durant really a generation-defining star? Will we ever stop having reasons to unfairly criticize Westbrook? There are more than enough storylines to follow with this entertaining bunch. But the biggest one is the simplest one. How do they respond to being the odds-on, bet your bottom dollar favorite?

We don't know yet. But I'm excited as hell to find out.

"The Italians have a phrase, inventa la partita. Translated, it means to “invent the game.” A phrase often used by soccer coaches and journalists, it is now, more often than not, used as a lament. For in watching modern players with polished but plastic skills, they wonder at the passing of soccer genius—Pele, di Stefano, Puskas—players whose minds and bodies in not so rare moments created something unfound in coaching manuals, a new and continuously changing game for others to aspire to."

--Ken Dryden, "The Game"

A couple weeks ago, Aaron wrote this must-read piece about tenacious Spurs rookie Kawhi Leonard that got a lot of traction. The money quote is probably this take on Duncan:

"Never mind that Duncan on defense has always been one of the most beautiful things the league has to offer. The defensive structure of the Spurs as a whole, really, but Duncan especially: Tim’s defense has always inhabited a brave world oscillating between the bounds of reactive and impressionistic fluidity on one end to a prescriptive and predictive rigidity on the other. Duncan’s defense has always been equal parts shutting down what the offense gives him and preventing the offense from giving him anything he can’t handle in the first place, through reputation and savvy alone."

This quote hints at what makes a player great or interesting, as opposed to merely good or simply lacking. When we're making projections and figuring out which team will hold the trophy in June, we sometimes talk about where in the rotation the D-league players come up. We also like to talk about the black holes on offense, the players that make terrible rotations on defense, the players that can't buy a rebound, and so on. And this makes sense: Often when a team gets eliminated you can point to a single thing that went wrong, a single matchup or difference in depth at a position that got exploited over and over. But this is only half the story.

Basketball is not just a game of mistakes, of - you might say - mere violations in the fabric of a designated right way. We all know about players that defend a star perfectly and have to live with a mismatch or an offensive clinic. It's that Dirk triple-move on poor Nick Collison and more generally it's Dirk's greatness in creating space. It's Chris Paul slowing the game to a halt or bringing it to its true, blistering speed. Skills and creativity determine far more than mistakes and holes at the highest level of play. There's a affirmative, creative, impressionistic, reactive part of basketball that brooks no law and finds no need of patterns, and it's where the soul of a great basketball player is found. It's the oscillation between the reactive/impressionistic and prescriptive/prepared - and the total, competitively-motivated embrace of both tendencies - that seems to me the essence of a baller and the poverty of a scrub.

• • •

What do I mean? Well, take Manu Ginobili. Or Kobe. Or Wade. They are all students of the game, all with relatively great vision. All of them are fundamentally solid and laden with substance and knowledge in every facet of the game. They know when to set screens, they all can play in the marginal inches of space enough that tiny rules changes actually mean something big to them, and (most tellingly) they all troll for free throws and any cheap, marginal advantages they can get without being dirty. They all seem to love contact, and besides a nasty tendency towards the heat-check three, each of them is about as efficient on offense as you could imagine shooting guards of their respective builds to be. Opponents regard the trio well, or, at the very least, begrudgingly regard them as great competitors. They are about as solid and as substantive as possible for players whose job is to hurl a ball 30 feet at a rim with roughly 38% accuracy. They all understand the game and have - through practice and dedication - simply plugged all the holes. They don't often make mental mistakes because the rulebook and the playbook are burnt into their brains.

And yet, if that was all these players did, well, they wouldn't be so familiar to us. It's not just that their minds and actions are one dull stream of hit-your-free-throws-and-pass-to-get-a-better-shot-and-set-a-screen-to-get-open straight out of Hoosiers. No, they live in the moment and see the floor in its totality and use their intelligence, the perceived "flow" of the game and how they can change it, the observed behavior of their opponents, and their creativity: all of it they use to react to the situation at hand and create plays and strategies that no one has ever seen before, and possibly that no one ever will see again. They put their individual (and in the case of great tandems, their collective) stamps on the game and in doing so embody both the letter and the spirit of the game. That's what it means to be a baller. If you could take out the outcome, the possibility of injury, and all the exogenous factors, these guys would still be appointment viewing in a 5v5 scrimmage, because they can still make goals for themselves and plans for the team and then execute them with frightening intelligence, efficiency, tenacity, and creativity.

A scrub, on the other hand, lacks some great deal of either the improvisational or the prescriptive. There are a lot of endogenous and exogenous reasons for a player to be a scrub: Maybe it's because they're cynically jacking up threes for the stats and a big payday. Maybe they lack the fundamentals or a strong grasp of the flow of the game. Maybe their style (especially in the short term) clashes with that of their teammates or the officiating crew. Maybe they just don't live too much in the moment and have drilled a lot of shots in practice and in college without thinking about say, the inefficiency of a contested 20-footer. There are a lot of solid reasons, yes, but in the end tally (almost without exception) all the discerning viewer will note is a note of disgust or boredom, perhaps with a side of vexed confusion. Examples: "Why did you screen that random player on the weakside after passing to the wing, Mike Bibby? What possible purpose could that serve?" or "Why did you jack up that three, Antawn Jamison? Don't you realize there are much better shots your All-Star-level point could have helped you with?" or "Why are you in the game, Roger Mason Jr.? Is this the end of days?"

When I was bouncing previous drafts of the post off Aaron, he brought up the "teaching example" of Kevin Martin, who qualifies as a scrub despite being a legitimately above-average player. Every single one of his games he pulls out the same three tricks on offense built on a good mid/long-range shot with a high release point and an ability to get to the line. There's hardly any creative force behind it, and any narrative you try to project into his will as a competitor is probably false. He knows what to do with a pass and an open shot, and he can get open. Is Martin a bad player? Of course not, but he's not the force behind the points he gets. His highlight films are random sequences of mostly-assisted jump shots and lateral fades along with apologetic dunks. As Aaron puts it, "When Kevin Martin scores 10 points in the 4th quarter, he scores them. When Manu scores points in the 4th quarter, he causes them. They each are great shooters and may be equally assisted. But the way they score, the way they improvise, the way they read defenses? Drastically different. When Manu scores, you remember it. When Kevin Martin scores, the recap notes it." Extrapolating, I'll add that Kevin Martin is like shopping at K-Mart to buy one item, while watching Manu is like an eclectic imports store that has the same item. You'll remember to mention the imports store when you tell your friends where you got it.

P.S. In video-game circles, there's a pretty famous "Playing to Win" article which also designates "scrubs" by their approach. I mention it only because it's a similar, but mostly orthogonal take. The nearest analogous concepts in basketball would be Hack-a-Shaq, flopping, and other strategies on the margins of the rules or that conflict with the social conventions of basketball, and the "scrubs" there would be players with objections to these strategies. It's an interesting article, at least.

• • •

Okay, I think I've explored this dichotomy of ballers and scrubs enough, and I'd like to set the stage for a conclusion that actually uses the title. After all, I can hear your questions: "What's with that title? Do you think you're FreeDarko or something? Who the hell do you think you are? Are you just trying to drive traffic by using a popular athlete in your title? Come off it: it's not clever. Die or retire." Whoa, ouch. That's very painful, Internal Voice of Doubt. Let me explain the title: Steve Nash has led dozens of inexplicably awesome random regular season games in the last decade, more than any other player. And Nash is unquestionably a baller. Sure, his defense is hilarious sometimes, but on offense, and in terms of the general flow of a game, Nash is the consummate intelligent, fierce, grinding competitor, making scrubs legit, making already legit players into ballers, and taking ballers into another sphere entirely. When you have enough ballers like Nash, Ginobili, Kobe, Duncan, KG, CP3, and so on in a game, and their talents are allowed to flourish, and the talents involved on both sides are close enough in skill level, then you have the potential for a game to reach the highest emotional, logical, and spiritual heights that basketball has to offer.

John Nash's famous "Nash Equilibrium" is a concept from mathematical game theory. John Nash's games (and forgive the glossing-over) often involve developing strategies in the presence of perfect knowledge; that is, "knowing that your opponent knows that you know that he knows..." out to infinity, reaching an stable equilibrium in a surprising number of cases. Basketball (unlike John Nash's often simple, stark games) isn't a sport of perfect knowledge, but a sport where a discerning player's mind can create a gigantic space of possibilities at any moment that his willful body can navigate efficiently. When a game has 10 such discerning players, each pulling and tugging and pushing at the fulcrum points of a game with screens, cuts, switches, and flares, the game moves asymptotically towards a sort of equilibrium that is absurd and singular and revelatory and transcendent. That's the Steve Nash Equilibrium to me. And given all the incredible games he's given us (and given the sad possibility he might retire without an NBA title), I thought it'd be only fair to give Steve Nash the title of this concept. Call it a consolation prize if you must, but at worst it's a special, important consolation prize that captures what is great about Nash.

Of course, despite all this talk of transcendence, perfection, and stability, the element of chance is still present, even when you have 10 ballers at their peak abilities. There are always going to be factors the players can't control, like imperfect calculations and straight-up missing information in every player's literal blind spots (not to mention physical limitations), and chance is the natural outcome of such imperfect knowledge and control. And even the best game can hinge on the inches of chance. But the forces of chance present in the best games are not quite the same as the forces of chance present in those awful games filled with two teams full of scrubs jacking up threes. The mathematical probabilities might be identical, but the whole tenor and aspect and casual chains are different. Almost by definition, these scrubs rob these forces of chance of its connection to human intelligence and animal spirit, making chance into nothing but inelegant, dismal, impersonal luck, no different from a crap shoot or a hand of blackjack. By contrast, the type of chance that dominates a game of 10 ballers - in its look and its reach to the heights - aspires to the will of the gods.

A BRIEF ORAL HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK KNICKERBOCKERS

When Ewing left, the rebuild began. It was slow, a process. But the free agents did come. In twos, in threes, in all sorts. Stephon, Eddy, more and more. It was then that the media -- the Beast -- cried. "The Knicks are back," they said. But it was Isiah Thomas, the false prophet, moves all for naught. The Knicks rebuilt, for a time. They were not back. They were not front. They were merely there; the New York Knicks, the NBA's resident big market stooge. The team that lets Kobe score 60, LeBron score 50, et cetera, et cetera. Career highs in the holiest of holies, Madison Square Garden nothing more than a mystical place for faraway stars to style on a terrible, terrible team. And it was not good. And it was not right. The Knicks proceeded on, and atoned for the sins of their forefathers. They traded their contracts, forged space, and waited. And thus did the Apostrophic King take his leave of the Phoenician Point God for good, departing with a nod and a wave as he fled to the greener pastures of New York. And so they were back. But the new Knicks struggled. They were not back. For they could not defend. They had naught but scraps around the King, such as it were, and the Media was not happy.

The Beast demanded a star, at any cost. And thus the Knicks traded their scraps, realizing upon departure their intrinsic value. And thus did they acquire the Rounded One. The Rounded One scoured upon the NBA tales of his scoring, his shooting, his post ups; signed, sealed, delivered. But the team was not complete. For they still could not defend, and they still could not contend. And thus did the summer come early, in an ignomious sweep to a wizened team. It brought with it a deathly fast, peppered with tales of a new Point God or a gentle giant come to the land of King. But not for one year. Knicks fans must be patient. The Knicks must still build. But in the 11th hour, the land of King realized its folly -- for the scorers and coach and team they'd assembled, they would not be Back until they engaged in the careful art of Defense. And thus did the Knicks add the Erstwhile, Fragile Champion. And thus did the tale conclude. The Beast who cried wolf was appeased. And finally, it was correct.

Indeed, the Knicks were back.

• • •

A NOT-SO-BRIEF TEAM PREVIEW

... Uh, not without its own risks, mind you. Ahem. The Knicks, for all their glamour and glory, are about two missteps away from a first round exit every year for the next three. While I don't think that Amare's knees are nearly as bad as advertised, that's simply a fact. His injuries the last few years have been the epitome of flukish. There was the freak retina injury, the freak back injury in the playoffs last year, et cetera. In the main, Amare's knees have been (knock on wood) very healthy since his surgery. But he's an aging star big man, and that essentially is a free pass to one or two injury-tarnished seasons sometime in the next few. And Chandler? He's a different story, and injury prone doesn't even begin to cover him. Chandler's knees and feet are bad enough that he failed a physical about two and a half years back in a trade that would've sent him to Oklahoma City. The reason OKC rejected him was his toe, which their doctors said could shatter with one misstep. Hasn't happened yet, but it's a sort of ominous raincloud that casts darkness over all he passes -- teams that take on Chandler expecting big things are playing Russian Roulette with their money, and Chandler's toe is the loaded gun.

Amazingly - given his previously failed routine physicals and his generally lacking play in all but two seasons of his career - I still like this signing for New York a lot. I really don't mean to harp on his health and his spotty history to make it sound like I'm low on the Knicks -- provided Tyson stays healthy, the Knicks have put together a team that will contend. Tyson Chandler adds a little bit of everything to the Knicks roster, and will provide New York with the perfect litmus test in his final season under contract to see whether Mike D'Antoni is really going to be the man leading New York's core boldly into the future. I expected them to wait until next summer in a somewhat misguided ploy to angle for CP3 or Howard, but blowing their cap space on Chandler now is honestly one of the smartest (and, I might add, most unexpected) moves the Dolan Knicks have ever pulled. It's risky, of course. But smart all the same, and a proper risk to take for a team as win-now as the Knicks are.

The Knicks weren't the worst defensive team ever last year, so Chandler and their other additions make me hopeful that New York will finally combine a blistering offense with at least a league-average defense. Not much better than that, but league average all the same. The 2011 Knicks were actually a top 5 team in defending shots made 3-9 feet from the basket -- in essence, bankers and runners, and short shots where the Knicks contested. At the rim, they were slightly subpar -- they allowed about 65% at the rim to an NBA-average 64%, and (most importantly) teams shot more of these efficient at-rim shots (26.5 a game) against the Knicks than all but 3 other teams in the league. The addition of Chandler ensures that won't happen this season. Chandler is a defensive presence that commands respect in the league -- teams avoid the paint when he's in the game. Teams attempted only 22.9 shots at the rim against the Mavs. That's a number the Knicks won't match (but should approach) over the course of 2012.

To figure out Chandler's total impact, let's break down and compare the individual components of the New York defense and the Dallas defense under Chandler. To wit, a table -- because I love tables -- comparing the 2011 Knicks and the 2011 Mavs on their team-total Synergy stats.

===================== KNICKS ============= MAVS ==========
------------------- PPP   Rank -------- PPP   Rank -------
Overall             0.92    21          0.88     7     -14
Isolation           0.87    21          0.81     6     -15
P&R Ball Handler    0.83    14          0.82    11     - 3
Post-Up             0.89    20          0.84     5     -15
P&R Roll Man        1.07    26          1.10    28     + 2
Spot-Up             1.07    29          0.94     5     -24
Off Screen          0.92    19          0.78     1     -18
Hand Off            0.94    20          0.78     3     -17
Cut                 1.21     9          1.21     9     - 0
Offensive Rebound   1.09    18          1.10    20     + 2
Transition          1.14    13          1.20    24     +11
==========================================================

The number at the end is the gap between the Mavs leaguewide ranking and the Knicks leaguewide ranking. As expected, the league's #7 defense was better than the league's #21 defense in a lot of ways. For the Knicks defense, which of these types of plays will Chandler's addition most help? Isolation is the obvious start: it's not a big-man-dependent stat, but given that the Knicks allowed so many shots at the rim, adding a lock-down isolation big will keep teams from pounding the Knicks down low like Dwight Howard did throughout the season. Bigs that went one on one and isolated against Amare were more likely than not going to get a good shot. Bigs that iso against Chandler won't. Chandler should also help on post-up defense: The Knicks were atrocious at defending post-ups last season, mostly from the time Turiaf wasn't on the court. Whenever Amare or Mozgov defaulted as their Knicks' primary post defender, skilled and unskilled bigs alike could easily juke them and needle enough free space to put up an easy layup or close jumper. With Chandler's presence in the middle, not only will teams be dissuaded from trying the post-up plays in the first place, teams that do try it will find their post men unable to get the kind of space they used to get. Post men will be strongly challenged. The post man.... never rings twice.

(By the way, I've completely avoided mentioning the largest gap between the Mavs and the Knicks: the 2011 Knicks were utterly and completely incompetent at defending spot-up shooters. It was a product of many things -- lazy rotations, a lack of individual impact players, Knicks players preferring to roam for blocks over staying with their man, et cetera. But the numbers at Hoopdata tend to point the blame at the Knicks' perimeter players. I don't want to rehash a great post by a great writer, though, so I direct all readers still checking this out to take a gander at Jared Dubin's fantastic Knicks preview piece where he discusses the Knicks' problems on perimeter defense. He puts the argument in far better terms than I could, and does it well.)

At the end of the day, the Knicks should be helped in three crucial ways by Chandler's acquisition:

1. The Defense. I already went through this, but just to recap -- Chandler will help their defense by himself, but his presence and the respect players have for him will allow the Knicks' perimeter players to gamble more efficiently knowing they're backed by a bruiser in the post (one of the oldest stories in basketball). His presence will also make teams take fewer great shots at the rim in favor of worse shots in the midrange and long range. This will, necessarily, mean the perimeter D will have a few more shots per game that fit the description of "bad shots that the team has to take." That will in and of itself make things a bit easier on the Knicks' perimeter D, and in the end, probably combine to make them a league average defense this season.
2. The Rebounding. An underrated facet of the game that the Knicks were abhorrent at last year was rebounding the basketball. The Knicks rated -- despite 1/3 of a season with the best rebounding small forward in the game and a full season with the best rebounding shooting guard in the game -- 28th in the league in total rebounding rate. 28th! The only teams worse were Phoenix and Golden State, both of whom were actually extremely close to the Knicks. A full season with Melo will help matters, but more than that, a full season of Tyson Chandler could very well erase the problem altogether and turn it into a strength. By any measure, Chandler is a great rebounder -- he was the 11th best rotation player C in the league at offensive rebound rate, and the 12th best rotation player C in the league at defensive rebound rate. He gets it done. Other than Kevin Love or Dwight Howard, there are few other players the Knicks could've gotten that could help their rebounding this much in a singular fashion.
3. The Burn. By the end of last season, Amare was essentially on his last legs. While Turiaf played about 20 MPG, he could only serve the Knicks for 60 games last season, and Amare ended up playing almost 37 MPG, tying his career high for MPG despite being a big man on the edge of his 30s. His game suffered from it, as well -- his averages gradually declined from their December peak of 30-10-3, culminating in a quite poor season finish. He averaged on the order of 23-6-3 his last 20 games, shooting 47% and wheezing to the finish line. Chandler? He averaged a cool 28 MPG, a good 5 minutes under his career averages in New Orleans. The Knicks having a big like Chandler to place on the court means they can, necessarily, scatter Amare's minutes a bit more and take him down to a more reasonable 32-33 MPG. In a season where teams are going to be scrambling to keep healthy, signing a big man that can help the team spell Amare was incredibly important -- not just for the improvement Chandler brings over their current rotation, but also in preventing Amare from burning out and ruining the Knicks' big investment in him. Signing Chandler doesn't just help the Now -- it may in a roundabout way save Amare from major injury this season, and keep the Knicks from losing the Amare investment altogether.

“Lord, thank you,” [12th-man Bell, the only senior on the team,] said, “Thank you for letting us be a part of this game and this season. Thank you for letting me be part of this team and for the people in this room. I know they’ll come back and win this tournament next year and no one will cheer harder for them than me. Thank you for making them part of my life.”

--Forever's Team, John Feinstein, after Duke lost to Kentucky in the 1978 NCAA championship game

But ask us after a game. After we’ve played the Bruins or the__Islanders; after a playoff game. If you don’t understand the excited__tumble of words, look at our gray-white faces, at eyes that glitter and__pop at you. Look at our sweaty smiles, at hands that won’t shut up. An__hour later, a day’s tension sucked away, look at our bodies. All gangly__and weak, so weak we laugh it feels so good. Look at our faces, at__smiles distant and content.

[...] Coaches like Vince Lombardi and George Allen have told us we must play for certain reasons. As children, our parents and coaches told us something else. But after the Bruins series, Chartraw came much closer, "I don't play for money," he laughed, "I play for the party after."

--The Game, Ken Dryden

So the other day, Aaron linked me to Craig Lyndall's fantastic article about chasing rings. I think a lot of it rang true and if you're into the experience of being a fan (quite a general category), it's a must-read. The piece is earnest, filled with credible self-doubt (who doesn't like Big Z?), and attacks a foundation of NBA culture, namely that the ring is king.

Lyndall successfully deconstructs the notion that a ring is meaningful in an absolute sense and in and of itself, which is a common premise used to justify ring chasing by players ranging from players with such diverse backgrounds as Wilt, Barkley, Chris Paul, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas. Essentially, Lyndall argues that a given ring is only meaningful in the context of the complex circumstances which produced it: The ownership, the fanbase, the locker room, the coaches, the games, and finally, the players themselves as individuals. This is a very clever and important point: A ring (especially for an older vet like Ilguaskas) only matters to the extent that that player is able to make meaningful relationships with the others (most importantly to Lyndall, the fans) involved in the title.

And Big Z, Lyndall argues, would have gotten something transient and ultimately meaningless in his ring if the Heat had beaten the Mavs this June. Without the total emotional involvement of the Cleveland fans that had stood by him for so many years in recovery, without a fanbase that had come to respect him as a great player cut down by injuries, and a class act and a franchise cornerstone at that, a title for Big Z would be a relatively hollow achievement. There was a deep and mutual respect between Ilgauskas and the city of Cleveland which would have made a ring with the Cavaliers as sweet as any title could ever be, at 5 mpg or 35.

On the other hand, the Heat fans, not having much of anything to do with Ilgauskas beforehand, would instead (by and large) see him only as a limiting factor at C that rode in on LeBron's coattails. They would see only the clumsy veteran that couldn't get it done anymore, and possibly never had gotten it done. Juwan Howard was and is in much the same boat. (Both these players, it should be noted, have apparently had a real and positive impact on team morale which has been widely reported. Still.) To all but the most careful of Heat fans, the emotional connection between Ilgauskas and the fans simply wouldn't have existed. That doesn't sound like a very special thing.

One reason I like Lyndall's approach is that it forces us to confront bare statements about certain players being better than others because they have more rings. The question then becomes: What rings? To what extent were they involved in producing them? Did their ring represent a culmination of their career and fan narratives, or was it just a vet-min, 15 mpg swan song in a different city? Bill Simmons' Alpha Dog-Everyone Else approach is problematic, but really, it's one step away from a much better question: Was this player directly responsible for their ring?

But look at the actual wording of a few crucial paragraphs of Lyndall's piece and see if the wording doesn't clash with your own experience (bold mine):

"Championships are complex things. It is a complex achievement in team sports because it relies on so many relationships. It encompasses relationships between players, teams, coaches, owners and most importantly fans. I hate to put fans first as some sort of cheap ploy to get everyone on my side, but it is true. Holding up a trophy is meaningless without a bunch of crazies in the seats screaming their heads off. You can’t get showered with praise in a parade if there aren’t a million fans lined up along the route. We can’t win the championships as fans, but we also shouldn’t sell ourselves short as a part of the equation. NBA players, almost as a rule in this day and age, sure are selling us short."

"Let’s pretend that the Miami Heat defeated the Dallas Mavericks last year. Zydrunas would have gotten a ring. He would have attended a parade. He would have held up a trophy. Then what? Professional athletes rely on their history and legacy and their relationships with fans usually far outlast their time playing the sport. Zydrunas Ilgauskas was never going to set up shop as a fixture in Miami. Some Cavs fans might have felt good for Zydrunas, I guess, but there’s no longevity to it. In the end it is a really fleeting feeling."

My problem with this is not that the stuff about fans is categorically false: All of the above holds true very often, but holds true in a highly contextual way. Sure the fan-athlete relationship outweighs the time spent playing the sport. But what about long-lasting athlete-athlete relationships? What about the brilliant coaches in college sports that have (in their own ways) changed the way we look at team basketball? It's telling that the neatest context for Lyndall's above statements comes from Cleveland sports. It's not a "cheap ploy" to invoke the fans; it's the very context from which Lyndall is writing: A Cleveland title would be inseparable from the long train of "almosts" and archetypal Four Horsemen that have conspired to push Cleveland to the edge of titletown, only to pull it away at the last second through fluke, opponent miracle, or dark, cynical work. The city hasn't won a title in something like 50 years, and yet they have followed their teams with tenacity and dedication. The team that finally wins a title will be heroic, enshrined inseparably from the fabric of the city. It will truly be one of the city's titles, not just that team's.

But in so many other cases (including the two accounts I started this piece with), the fans seem to be tertiary to a) the satisfaction of the players and coaches' intrinsic competitiveness and b) the relationships the team has among themselves as a collective. Bill Russell and Boston had a tenuous allegiance that easily veered into outright hostility at times (which had a lot to do with racism in that era). Russell and the city have patched up a great deal of their differences (albeit very slowly), and surely that must matter to Russell. But, if anything, doesn't Russell's jaw-dropping, undeniable success mean more in the context of the adverse hostility he faced? And, given that Boston wasn't behind Russell 100%, isn't it fair for Russell to look instead to the beautiful collective basketball he and coach Red Auerbach envisioned and implemented, to look instead to the relationships he made with his team and coach as far more than a consolation prize? What about Russell's legendary respect for the other greats of his era? Where does that fit into a fans-first narrative? Sure, the screaming fans may have added something to his enjoyment, and their gradual reconciliation with Russell must mean something big, but in the meantime doesn't Russell have a lot of history, legacy, and - in the end - a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic joy behind his rings to look back on? Wasn't he throwing up every night because winning mattered to him more than anything? Couldn't you say exactly the same thing for Jordan? What about Mo Malone, Julius Erving and the 1983 Sixers? Wasn't that mostly about a group of players (Malone included) that had made it right to the edge of the mountain so many times but couldn't quite clear the top? Of course the rabid fanbase matters. Of course the title is very special for the City of Brotherly Love. And of course I'm playing The Sound of Philly by MFSB right now (people all over the world!). But that title had its own narratives, its own relationships, and its own sense of special history, even without reference to the great fan base.

My point is not that fans don't matter, but that in nearly every single primary account I've ever read from athletes and coaches (no exceptions really come to mind for me), it's the internal obsession of the athletes and "the party after" the win that matter most, and the fans form a much smaller (though important) part of the equation. The fans pay the salaries, yes, the fans help us make sense of the greatness of an athlete, and, in the Cleveland perspective from which Lyndall is writing, the fans are an inseparable part of a team's success. But in general it's not the first well of feeling or justification for an athlete or a coach to drink from.

This season, Big Z could've won a title with one of his longtime friends and teammates who would get much of the credit, but who would gushingly praise Ilguaskas and his work ethic, character, and accomplishments. Despite playing for a completely indifferent fan base, Big Z could have provided a real and important consolation prize to the city that dislikes his new team but still loves him dearly, and he could have had a small vindication for his career by being a small basketball and a large spiritual presence on a team that would have been objectively the best for that moment in time.

The fans from the city that made him a man surely must matter. But regardless of this, or of how you feel about the Heat (or the Mavs), if the Heat had won, that locker room thousands of miles away still would have been special and the fond feelings for and from a gentle giant would have stayed with him for a lifetime. That vindication - that feeling of ultimate success - truly matters, and not just as a transient afterthought.

The Dallas Mavericks won the 2011 NBA Championship. It was a pretty big deal, you might've heard about it. They've also been one of the most active teams in the offseason -- they've lost the linchpin of their defense, Tyson Chandler, but gained the reigning sixth man of the year Lamar Odom. They lost the diminutive Barea (he of filleting the Lakers and getting killed by Bynum fame) but added the eternal wildcard Delonte West. They let DeShawn Stevenson and his shocking defense walk, but replaced him with Vince Carter -- half man, half... geriatric? That's not how that's supposed to go! Regardless. The Dallas Maverick team that takes the floor on Christmas day to receive their rings and raise the blue and white to the rafters will bear few similarities in style to the team that reigned supreme last June.

Missing a whole wealth of pieces, Rick Carlisle will find himself tasked with quite the challenge -- while the pieces may be there, alchemizing together a cohesive contending unit from this menagerie of mismatched parts is going to be a thing to see. But among their key losses and gains, Dallas is stirring together an odd, odd brew. The 2012 Mavs look to be a potent and unpredictable blend of heterodox rotational flaws and opportunistic lineup tinkering. It could blow up. It could be dominant. We don't really know. I've never been a Mavs fan, nor ever will I be. But I'm excited to see how this plays out, and you should be too.

• • •

Other than simply wanting to see them on the court and watch how Carlisle forms this team, I don't really know what to think about these Mavs. I could see them implode and I could see them take the league by storm. I'm comfortable saying that they're the most intriguing team-to-watch entering next season, but that's really about it. Last year's Mavericks won a title with a somewhat rare combination in the context of the last 20 years, but a generally traditional one historically -- superstar offensive player, superstar defensive player, great distributor, a fantastic coach, and a whole lot of strangely high-quality bench guys. This team? This team is confusion. The opposite of the orthodoxy. Mismatched players all over the place, and replacement parts that render traditional positions almost irrelevant.

If Carlisle really can repeat with this team, I feel pretty confident saying it will require the most innovative lineups Carlisle has employed during the entirety of his coaching career. As a teaching example, consider: there are going to be moments this year where Lamar Odom is the de-facto point guard on offense. The distributing center of the team. Kidd can't play more than 30 mpg in a compressed season like this one, and while the Mavs are flush with backup guard talent, none of their backup guards are particularly good distributors. Delonte West is the closest they have to a backup point guard, and as someone who's a huge fan of Delonte, everyone who knows his game knows just how much better he is as a two than as a one. He can make passes, and he can be a serviceable point, but his true value is as an off-the-ball bulldog defensive 2. Vince Carter's passing game long ago left to roam the ether. Beaubois is a promising scorer but he's shown minimal passing ability.

So where does that leave you? A short stint with a lineup where Lamar Odom is the primary ballhandler, employing Dirk and Marion as roll men with Delonte and Carter in the wings if the play goes sour? Does the team manage a point-by-committee sort of strategy? And who defends what? Dirk's defense has gotten better over the years, but at this point Odom is essentially the best defensive talent in the Mavs' big rotation. Do you cross-match Odom on the opposing center and hope he can draw them out of the paint? Do you keep Dirk at center and live with the terrifying defensive results? I really don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. And that's part of what makes this Mavs team so interesting. Try to wrap your head around how these prospective lineups could look, on both ends of the court, with my interpretation of why it could work and how it would be played.

• MAIHINMI, DIRK, ODOM, CARTER, WEST; Odom as primary ball handler, Dirk as the roll man. West move off the ball to get in position for threes. Maihinmi operates to get the opposing center out of the paint for Dirk and Odom to drive. If there's an opening, Carter slashes to the rim.
• DIRK, ODOM, TERRY, WEST, KIDD; Smallball with a twist -- Odom is a tall four, allowing for a Dirk-Odom frontcourt to switch off on defense and keep the post at least moderately covered. Every single player on the floor can shoot and make spot-up threes. Nightmare to cover.
• HAYWOOD, ODOM, DIRK, TERRY, WEST; Giganto-ball. Haywood can't do much of anything but camp the paint, but Odom and Dirk are limber enough to switch between the 4 and 3 on defense depending on who's the more quality player. Odom and West switch off as handlers. Terry slashes in concert with a Haywood screen and an Odom fake.

If I had to pick one word to describe my impression of these lineups, it'd be chaotic. Unpredictable. Every one of these lineups could be an absolute disaster, but they could also be fantastic. Dirk defending centers is going to be horrible. Odom is not a day-to-day player -- any Laker fan would tell you he has his off days, and on this team, his off-days could destroy them. I'd put money on seeing derivatives of these strategies used by Carlisle this year, and that's part of why this team is so hard to pick for or bet against. You simply can't say for certain how Carlisle is going to use these pieces or how effective they'll be. There's no other contender in the league right now juggling lineups as untested and experimental as the 2012 Dallas Mavericks. Not one.

And that's only about their new pieces. That's not to say there aren't questions about their old pieces. Those there are, and big ones too. If you weight their roster's ages by the number of minutes they played, the Mavs won last year's title with a weighted age of 31.0. You may be surprised to know that the 2011 Mavs were one of the top 10 oldest teams in the last decade, let alone last year. To wit, the list:

        YEAR  TM     WP%  WT-AGE
  1     2001  UTA  0.646    32.2
  2     2000  UTA  0.671    31.6
  3     2008  SAS  0.683    31.5
  4     2001  MIA  0.610    31.2
  5     2000  SAS  0.646    31.1
  6     2003  UTA  0.573    31.1
  7     2011  DAL  0.695    31.0 
  8     2010  DAL  0.695    30.9
  9     2009  SAS  0.659    30.7
 10     2007  SAS  0.707    30.6

So, yes. They were extremely old. This would be a problem in any case, but may be even more of a problem next year. The Mavs aren't getting younger -- they've gotten even older. The team lost the services of Tyson Chandler, J.J. Barea, and Deshawn Stevenson -- 28, 26, and 29 respectively. Not only will all their rotation players be older, they've added older talent. Carter is 34. Odom is 32. Delonte is 28. The Mavs stand a serious chance of shattering the 2001 Utah Jazz record for oldest rotation in the 2000s, and challenging the 90's record of the 1998 Houston Rockets (32.3). The only title team in the last 20 years that was older was the 1998 Chicago Bulls, at 32.0 weighted age -- a number the 2012 Mavs will easily match, and most likely rise far above. There are no remaining pieces on the Mavs' roster that were under 30 and got over 500 minutes over the course of the 2011 season. Zero. Barring a massive surprise from Mahinmi or Beaubois, Delonte West may be the only player under 31 to get over 20 mpg.

Putting it in those terms, you start to realize just how strange the 2012 Mavs experiment is going to be -- you have a roster that may very well shatter records for the oldest weighted age in the last two decades. You have a team with no positionally orthodox options for a coherent rotation. A team fielding a 38 year old point guard who can't shoot, a far-past-his-prime catch-all Shawn Marion as the best defensive player on the team, and depending on Lamar Odom for consistent contributions. You have all the storylines you can care to write -- Dirk as the reigning finals MVP trying to keep his game from falling off a cliff as he slowly succumbs to age, a team poised to blow itself up the minute 2012 free agency starts in an effort to snag either Deron Williams or Dwight Howard, Delonte West battling his bipolar demons, Lamar Odom angry at one of the Mavs' biggest western rivals because the Lakers management that would dare try and trade him, Vince Carter's ongoing quest to NOT sabotage every team he's ever played for... et cetera.

So many storylines. So little certainty. So much left to question. The 2012 Mavs are the most interesting team in the league. I don't mean that in a good way, but I don't mean it in a bad way either. Here then lies the grave of the 2011 Dallas Mavericks. Dead before they've even gotten their rings. In its place stands a noble experiment the likes of which we haven't seen in years. Because though Dallas fans wouldn't want to admit it, it's true. The champs are dead. But long live the 2012 Mavs, anyway.

• • •

"Review forthcoming. Not a joke."
__ -- Me, December 4, to I Go Hard Now.

Well, I wasn't joking, but I may as well have been! Starting today, I'll be giving points out for effort here at Juwan a Blog? (but only for me), and, in this new paradigm, I'm going to go ahead and award myself an "A" for this entry, despite having just 40 or so words so far. See, these 40 words were preceded by at minimum 10000 others, in dozens of edits. My eight-day quest to write this is nothing short of heroic: Since starting this review, I've read about 50 basketball drills, probably 200 other blog entries, the entirety of "A Season on the Brink," and about a quarter of that one hockey memoir. I also found time to save a lot of people from various fires. All of this in an attempt to understand this one neat NBA blog centered around the Cavs. (To that end, I read their last 5 months of content as well.) But all my heroism counts for practically nothing without results: Most of the people I saved died from smoke inhalation, and after 8 days I still only have about 200 words and an endless graveyard of GG drafts within and without this review.

Long story short, it's a tough world we're living in. A tough world... rather like the Cavaliers are living in right now!* And I Go Hard Now is a blog about this tough NBA world. Named after Christian Eyenga's terse summary of everything, I Go Hard Now is a slightly longer summary of slightly fewer things. Fewer things like...the NBA! The Cavs! The experience of sports fandom, especially towards a troubled small-market team like the Cavs! MSPaint drawings of Micky Arison doin' stuff with a steak! Really sad, important stuff!

* Transition brought to you by impromptu speeches from Alex, age 8.

• • •

So, that's a summary of IGHN. But is it any good?

Well, you'll have to work that one out for yourself. I can't tell you what to like. There's no accounting for taste. On my part, I liked most of what I read of IGHN, and I read quite a lot of it. It's usually pretty funny and well-written. There's little in the way of pretense, and while they have newsposts they don't seem to have much filler. During the lockout they had kind of a crunch for content, and they did suffer, but it's an NBA blog and you can't get blood from a stone, so this is kind of a quibble. Overall the blog is quite good in ways that I'm not always primed to appreciate in an Internet community that simultaneously moves very quickly and - apart from that - seems to take moving very quickly as a central goal and virtue. Personally, I can't keep up with any of that shit. I haven't moved any of my furniture in weeks. I haven't found a new band I really like in a long time, and I just heard dubstep for the first time last week (and downtempo is where it's really at). What I listen to is as likely to be from any year between '28 and '08. I've never mixed energy drink with a tasty alcohol. I barely leave my apartment. I'm not a man about town, so to speak. I'm just a fan that thinks a lot about the NBA and writes a lot about what I see and what I think about it. And in that sense, IGHN is right there with me. They do the fan experience well. I don't have to be an NBA blogger or junkie or focusing on what to write about next when I'm reading them. It is what it is.

Part of what I like about IGHN is just that they write with a voice that isn't generally "writerly", if you get me, and one that I can relate to in my own writing. It might sound like a backhanded compliment to say that, but for contrast I look at someone like Aaron or (even better) Kelly Dwyer and I realize that they write in a uniform, highly professional voice which is ready-made for expressing authoritative, highly well-thought-out opinions about...almost anything. I am convinced that when Aaron was three days old he already had a complex, well-formulated opinion about the fall of Communism and scribbled it out in 800-word position papers on spare menus in his parents' house. When he edits something I write, I can spot the edits immediately by the kinds of words and transitions he uses. It's in the dictionary for "distinctive" as far as I'm concerned.

Me? Shit, I'm still not convinced I have the qualifications to review this other blog. To my detriment, I don't fix on a writerly voice. I don't know if it's that I can't, or if I simply haven't read enough, or if my mind is just too cluttered or what. Usually I have to read a lot in the short-term before I can write anything worth reading, shamelessly and unconsciously appropriating my targets' style like some sort of Markovian Joe Posnanski Machine. My style is so improvisational, so new to me at any given time, that I feel that on any given sitting I could be the one to write the next "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" or find myself unable to describe an introduction to a blog entry about another blog. If I don't have the right amount of coffee, or time, or space uncluttered, my ceiling is mere banal competence. It's a sickness, I say, but just stick around here and I'll show you the ceiling, God willing. And then I'll talk some more about Richard Jefferson.

I think the difference - at its core - is that Aaron usually has things figured out before he writes or converses about them, and I'm constantly reacting to these things as if they were new and otherwise catching up. Aaron has more archetypes, domain knowledge, and contacts, and tailors his style and content to convey (asymptotically well) what he already knows and is trying to say. Thinking about unfamiliar players, he has a few workaday processes and memories to draw from to make them familiar and then he starts to draw on that familiarity to write something. On the other hand, thinking about unfamiliar things, I'm always like a kid thrust on stage at a jazz concert: I hear all these instruments bleating the truth loud and obviously to a well-listened ear, but I don't know the standards or the conventions or even the basic musical forms. But I have to say something, because I have no patience. And so I start out trying to sing my one little melody when the other instruments get quiet, and I end up either reinventing downtempo or pouring that acid from Breaking Bad into the piano in sheer frustration.

As a teaching example, both Aaron and I watched Eric Gordon last summer at FIBA, and both of us (thanks to League Pass Gravity's resident Black Hole, Blake Griffin) have seen him play a number of times. But Aaron was a little more tuned in, had a little more thought from FIBA to tune into this guy, had a little more of a takeaway from Gordon's defense. So now Aaron has a sophisticated opinion on Gordon and I'm just trying to keep up. This dichotomy is a bit stark, a bit unfair, even: A lot of the difference is probably just a gap in experience with subject matter. Hell, two of Aaron's best pieces on here (two of the best pieces on the Internet for my money) were improvisational and impressionistic, and weren't the same going in as they were starting out. Every tweak to the structure or content he made was out of the spirit of figuring out what it is he had to say. But there's something to this dichotomy. Just about everything I write has a highly open-ended (and cluttered) feel of process, of becoming, even when I know what I want to say about the topic. Book reviews, reflections on games, fiction: These things don't have any inherent structure going in, and I have to create structure and content at the same time that I'm reacting to the structure and content before me. What schema, what basic conclusion, what central conclusion could I have started with that would have produced this very piece?

The only possible answer is that I've thought about IGHN a lot, and I wanted to say something about them, and thought whatever it is had something to do with me. Everything follows from that. The endless drafts, the obsession with getting a good intro/context, the dozens of related dichotomies I thought up just to solve the problem of this piece. I wanted to say something, plain and simple, and looked for everything in my arsenal of experiences and prior reading to figure out how to place it. And almost everything about IGHN follows from that same impulse, that same line of thinking. They have something to say, but most of all, they've thought about the Cavs and the NBA a lot and their own place as fans, and they're trying to put it all together by starting conversations or putting arguments into words about their subjects, and at the end, hopefully, they have something worth sharing. Writing is the means for their understanding, not a bureaucratic afterthought of understanding. They don't know the answer going in, but they did know something needed to be said.

"When you get the blues in the night
Take my word, the mockingbird'll sing the saddest kind o' song
He knows things are wrong, and he's right"

Ella Fitzgerald's version of "Blues in the Night"

They see something Bill Simmons wrote and they know there's something wrong about it, something fundamentally and systematically rotten or short-sighted that is far more condescending and patronizing to their own status as fans than an ordinary reader could possibly have gleaned. And so they break it down, examine the underlying assumptions and find the rotten core. And then they tell us how they got there. They love to watch the way certain players play and they feel they have to say something about that, in and apart from context. They feel something is wrong with the occasional sentiment from and towards Cleveland, and they have to put the conversation into their own words for our perusal. And they're right on target pretty often with perspectives that few were in a position to see. My favorite time period from IGHN of what I read was when LeBron was in the Finals. IGHN produced a lot of introspective (though worldly) thought on Cleveland and their own fandom and really got at the meat of what was really happening with the "haters" that LeBron went so far as to address as his main takeaway quote from 2011. And in doing so IGHN really hit on something that I hadn't really realized.

To wit, the ESPN commentariat (as Aaron puts it) doesn't just do an injustice to post-July-2010 Cleveland by reducing them to haters doing little more reacting to economic decline, being spurned by LeBron, etc. It does an injustice to all of us by looking at the problem through traditional sports narrative as if the city were a "guy who is bitter about getting dumped that just needs to get over it". Maybe for the case of Dan Gilbert (who is actually a self-interested crazy person and everyone knows it), but in general? No. That's a narrative that implies that there will be new heroes, a new positive vibe, a new hope in the future. And that misses the whole point. The questions - the real questions - about sports fandom still remain for us to deal with.

My feeling (gleaned from Cavs fans mostly, and very little from the non-stop coverage on ESPN) is that LeBron tore at the fabric of sports fandom in the first place, and Cleveland was just in the meltdown radius (and "The Decision" was just a startling demystification that showed to the whole country what exactly he was doing). If you liked LeBron and any coherent thing he claimed to stand for, you didn't (just) have your heart broken, you questioned whether even your most generously basic and contextual respect for LeBron was ever real, and you suddenly doubted whether LeBron had reciprocated or understood any of that respect in the first place. And then you worried that LeBron was probably not a singular exception in the annals of sports, but rather an accidental look (like the MJ HOF induction) behind the ugly, heavy curtain of personal branding. Finally, you gained a sort of sociopathic distance from athletes, always in the back of your mind wondering if they weren't just cynically playing you for respect or Q rating. Cleveland was just a little closer, and feels the distance and the frustration a little more strongly. The media doesn't get that there's no getting over LeBron, there's no turning back the clock, and there's no active bitterness: There's just a fog of coldness, blunt feeling, and vague, inexpressible disgust that runs all through sports.*

*For my part, I know that Game 2 against the Magic really rekindled my love of the NBA and really got me highly invested in the Cavs in LeBron's final year. I watched as people that loved the Cavaliers felt hopeful apprehension as one of the best teams in basketball made grand statement after grand statement as the old standards seemed to be failing. And it just never happened, and the way it went down was not just crushing but disheartening. You have to think even the Celtics, on their way to the Finals, must've felt a little bit dirty those last 52 seconds. It was just surreal, the kind of game that makes you wonder if you're watching something in real time.

I don't know how true or justifiable any of that is, but I do know this: Reducing (as most of sports media seems to do) all of it to "haterade" (always the blind, unexplainable kind, almost as if they never tried to explain it) and confining it to a city that needs to "get over it" only serve to make rebuilding sports as a credible myth-maker and source of admiration more difficult. Having five-minute conversations with people who are actually living through these feelings or that actually have a history with the Cavs is infinitely better than listening to 100 hours of talking heads.

I Go Hard Now is a collection of those conversations, and it does it well. Go give them a try.

Aaron's fascinating look into the inherently deleterious effect of the compressed season on injuries (focused on effects wrought solely because more games fit into the same recuperation period) got me thinking. As stat posts are wont to do. What if it weren't the number of games that were compressed, but the games themselves? We've all heard the tired LeBron jokes. I tried to make change with LeBron, but he didn't have a fourth quarter. Well...what if nobody had a fourth quarter? How would we make change then?! What if that was the price of the lockout? What if Commissioner Stern, in a jaw-droppingly flamboyant abuse of power, declared that the cost of a lockout would be felt every night, for 12 missing minutes?

... well, I had some spare time and wanted to try my hand at these public Google Doc spreadsheet posts that Aaron has been using, guess we're going to find out. Follow me hither to the magical world of endless, tedious data entry, where Aaron and I frolic among the sparse statistical flowers of wisdom to be found there. This is kind of a curiosity, but there were a few interesting surprises.

• • •

Part I: the Data and the Damage Done

For this part, turn to Sheet "Game Data" in the spreadsheet.

Let me walk you through this sheet: As you will quickly notice, the results of each game in every 2011 playoff series (15 series, 81 games in all) are listed; Eastern Conference first, Western Conference second, Finals last. My source for this was the decent 2011 NBA Playoffs Wikipedia page. For each playoff game there are two rows: one row for each team, containing their performance in each of the four quarters and OTs if necessary. These seven columns (and then the "F" column denoting final score to the right) are straightforward. After that, NQ1, NQ2, NQ3, and NQ4 give the final score of each of the games if (respectively) one of the quarters had been unceremoniously lopped off the game (the latter naturally, by $tern, thereby protecting his most marketable player LeBron from his characteristic fourth-quarter meltdowns). The next four columns summarize which team (if any; there were 5 ties) won the game when the quarter in question got lopped off. For example, the first series listed is Bulls-Pacers. If you lop off the first quarter of Game 1 (which the Bulls actually won 104-99), the new final score is 81-72 Bulls.

Part II: Series Swing, via Django Reinhardt

For this part, turn to Sheet "Series Summary" in the spreadsheet.

"If only Stern had gotten rid of the fourth quarter like I've been saying for months, we might've beaten the Mavericks!"
--Heat, Thunder, Lakers, Celtics, Pacers, Bulls fans

This page concisely summarizes some of the data from the "Game Data" page. Here you see the 15 series from this year's playoffs, with 5 groups of columns: First the actual result (so, say, for Bulls-Pacers, the actual result was 4-1 Bulls). Then the four alternate results of the series if you remove one of the quarters from every game. If you remove the first quarter of each of the games in CHI-IND, the series is a less dramatic 3-1-1. It was a hilariously close series (not so much if you're a Bulls fan), wasn't it?

Anyway, a big takeaway is that a lot of series swung on individual quarters (full list below). If you take out the fourth quarters, the 4-1 Bulls-Pacers Series becomes 2-2-1. (You can see this in the Game Data page, but it's clearer and more concise on the "Series Summary" page). This 2-game swing was actually quite common for series: In fact, in 13 of 15 series, removing at least one of the quarters either swung or tied the series. Even the two sweeps (Celts-Knicks, Mavs-Lakers) had a quarter (3rd, 4th respectively) that, if removed from every game in the series, tied up the series at 2-2. Of course, the Thunder-Grizz series was 4-3 Thunder (as the series ended up) except for with the 2nd quarter removed, in which it's 4-3 Grizz. That sounds about right.

Strangely, the only two series that didn't hinge on any of the quarters were Bulls-Hawks and Lakers-Hornets. More on the Hornets series later (because it's a hilarious exception to everything here, as you'll see).

Here are the quarters without which various series swung victors or were tied up:

Eastern Series Swings:

• Bulls 2, Pacers 2, 1 Tie, Q4
• Heat 2, Sixers 2, 1 Tie, Q2
• Celtics 2, Knicks 2, Q3
• Magic 4, Hawks 2, Q1 (Magic take a decisive victory!)
• Heat 2, Celtics 3, Q4 (And the Celtics likely advance without the Heat's fourth quarters)
• Bulls 3, Heat 2, Q4 (And the Bulls likely advance without the Heat's fourth quarters)

Part III: the Most Exciting and Least Exciting Teams

For this part, turn to Sheet "Results by Team" in the spreadsheet.

If any of this seems "unmotivated" or "slipshod" to you, you're probably right. This is mostly a curiosity. I wanted to use the larger sample size of a regular season, but I couldn't find a database with readily available quarter data for each game. A spidering script would probably be necessary, and although Aaron is actually really good at writing those, he's busy right now and I don't have quite the experience he has. Even with the larger sample, the results simply wouldn't be very meaningful in all likelihood, at least not without lineup data and some (READ: any) degree of statistical sophistication.

That said, there's still an mathematical interpretation that motivates all of this: The number of quarters on which a game hinges approximates the probability that you're watching the decisive quarter at any given point in time in that game. If there's a game where removing the second or fourth quarters of a game can change the outcome, then if you pick a quarter at random to watch, you're 50-50 going to be watching a decisive quarter (and then at some point, very likely, a decisive run). This logic goes for series as well: Let's say you're watching the Spurs-Grizzlies series for one quarter, where 6.5 total quarters turned out to be decisive (that is, where removing the quarter changes the outcome of the game [I awarded .5 for ties]). That means if you're tuning in, there's about a 25% chance you're watching the quarter, the run, on which the whole game may swing. Granted, it might not be very exciting to watch a first quarter that the Grizzlies win by 8, even if the Spurs come back to lose by 2, but the point is, the quarter mattered directly to the outcome (and hence the narrative) of the game and of the series, and you had a relatively high chance to see it.

It's kind of silly to call any close game inherently exciting, but March Madness is so iconic for a good reason: A highly contested outcome can make decent games into great games and great games into transcendent games. And it's hard for a game in which two quarters are separately decisive to the outcome not to be incredibly close. With this slipshod and specious logic in mind, let's consider the most "exciting" series of the playoffs by the total number of decisive quarters:

I'm not going to trumpet these numbers. I do think it's telling that whenever a series seemed more interesting than these numbers establish, it's usually because the fourth quarter accounted for most of these swings (see, Mavs-Heat). Also, if you listed your most exciting 5 series from 2011 as the 3 Thunder series, Spurs-Grizz, and Mavs-Blazers, you wouldn't be too far off. There's at least some sort of strong correlation between excitement and total quarter swings. But yeah, the numbers seem just a bit off. So I made an adjustment: I did a weighted average of the first through fourth quarters, where the fourth quarter swings count (arbitrarily) 6 times as much as the first quarter swings. I also weighted the 2nd quarter swings twice as much as the first and the third quarter swings three times as much. Below is the new result:

Okay, well, that doesn't change all that much in terms of rankings, but every Heat series goes up, every Thunder series goes up (!), and every Dallas series except the Blazers went up. That sounds about right. Also, the Hornets-Lakers series goes down even further? This makes sense: It was by far the series with the fewest quarters that outcomes hinged on. In fact, there was only one quarter in the whole series that was decisive to the outcome of a game, and that decisive quarter was Q2 of Game 4. The Hornets actually hung on to win by 5 while winning the quarter by 7. Using quarter swings (with or without adjustment) just isn't a perfect measure of excitement, as the Hornets series tells us -- that series was exciting as hell.*

*An exciting series not in the "close game" way; it was more of a "Chris Paul may be tiny but he's also the most technically skilled, tenacious, creative player in the entire league and there's an outside chance he shocks the world in this series" way.

Anyway. The bottom table on this page of the spreadsheet is just a retread of the stats in "Series Summary." On the top table, we look at actual W-L records by team, and their alternate records if all of one of their quarters had been lopped off each of their games (by $tern; I can't $tre$$ thi$ enough).

Here's a summary chart:

For me, there are a few incredibly strange details here: ATL had a rather inexplicable 3 game net in the first quarters, and Chicago had a pretty surprisingly negative haul considering they went to the ECF. But really, look at Miami's: It's the one with the red/green bars above the line and nothing else. Apparently - even with the infamous Finals chokes - they overall netted 2 games in the fourth quarter (i.e. they would've lost or tied 2 more games without the 4th). And then they netted 3.5 games in the second quarter and then nothing in the first and third quarters. I guess... asking LeBron for change is actually a very strange proposition. Maybe you get two of those Kennedy half-dollar pieces or something?

Whatever coins you'd get, it's not as strange as asking Dirk. I'm kicking myself for not making the color scheme above out so that the Mavs (that gigantic pillar a bit right of center) would have a German flag in the three colors. Whatever the colors, they show us a marvel: Out of 21 games and just 16 wins, the Mavericks netted 5 games on decisive fourth quarters. I mean, many of us saw him claw back to dominance in Games 4 and 5 of the OKC series and Games 2 and 4 of the Heat, not to mention a couple Lakers games. Still, it's pretty amazing that despite that B-Roy throwback in which Dallas choked harder in the fourth than possibly any other team this playoffs... in the end tally, they still netted +5 wins in the fourth quarter. And then they netted 2 each in the second and third quarter. I think it's fair to say that Dallas was almost certainly not benefiting from sheer random chance alone in these numbers. You have to wonder what Mark Cuban's staff and crew is up to, and this is another piece of weird evidence in their favor. Also, check out Denver. Somehow, in 5 total games they managed to lose in 5.5 decisive quarters and win in 1 more. Again, mathematically this is possible. But it's spooky. That was a freaky series.

Anyway, using my definition of "excitement" from above, I created an "Objective Excitement Index" for each team. The meaning? Well, for every 100 points on a team's OEI, there's (on average) an extra decisive quarter per game on which the margin of victory hinges. For a 100 OEI team, there's a good chance that a random quarter you're watching of them is decisive to the game; for a 50 OEI team, there's only going to be (even one) decisive quarter about half the time. The highest theoretical value is 300, for a team that always wins (or loses) one quarter out of four, but manages to lose (win) the game in the other three quarters, in such a way that all three of the losing (winning) quarters are decisive. This happens, for example, if a team loses a game by 1 by losing each of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters by 7 (net: -21), even though it wins the first quarter by 20. This has to happen in every game, win or lose, for a team to have an OEI of 300. The average OEI for teams in the playoffs was about 80. In the 2011 playoffs, Denver had an OEI of 130, averaging 1.3 decisive quarters per game. This is really spooky. Possibly stranger is the Thunder having a 120 OEI in 17 games. I also did a "Clutch" version weighted as above (1,2,3,6 for each quarter). But enough talk; let's look at the chart:

Conclusions

Not too many bombshell surprises here. But definitely some nice charts. Especially unsurprising is how many games seemed to hinge on the clutch quarters (22.5 games actually hinged on the fourth quarter compared with 14, 18, and 7 for the other three). I think that's a major reason the playoffs seemed so good this season. For the most part, you never felt like a game was going to be bad going in (at least ignoring the two Hawks series), and even if your favorite team got killed by a transition masterpiece in the third quarter of Game 4, you still knew the execution in the fourth quarter was going to get better, and that your team would still have a chance next game. The end of regulation for the Spurs against the Grizzlies in Game 5 is one of the great sequences of offensive execution in the history of basketball (sorry, bias creeping in there, but really, 4 different San Antonio baskets in 40 seconds, damn!), and despite being brilliant and enigmatic, that type of execution was characteristic of the West playoffs.

It would really be nice to get a larger sample size for a real analysis of these numbers that couldn't be explained away by sheer random chance (except for Dallas and Miami, really, who both produced incredible, qualitatively clutch performances on their respective paths to the Finals before the Mavs took the decisive upper hand in Games 2 and 4), but this is mostly a curiosity anyway. A fun one, but a curiosity all the same.

Remember my post from less than a week ago, where I started with a misleading paragraph meant to make you think I was describing the Chris Paul to the Lakers trade? The one where I was actually talking about Albert Pujols in an attempt at some classical misdirection comedy? Well. I'd ask you to read that introduction again, and actually apply it to Chris Paul this time. Because virtually everything I said for the Lakers -- that they weren't really expected to land Paul, that they took a bigger risk than was being reported, that there's this sense where you wonder if you're dreaming -- effectively summarizes how I feel about Paul going to the Clippers. Countless words have already been spilled on it, but I feel that there's a lot that's being left out of the conversation right now. So, I'll be the contrarian folk hero who quixotically tries to add a bit to the discussion. Paul to the Clippers. Really. This actually happened. Let's discuss.

• • •

I have a lot of disparate thoughts floating around in my head regarding Chris Paul's move to the Clippers. But I'll start with something that's escaped major mention in the mainstream coverage of the trade. This is a great pairing, don't get me wrong, but regardless of how electric Griffin and Paul can be together? The 2012 Los Angeles Clippers really aren't going to be significantly better than the 2011 Hornets, when healthy. It's a fact. They'll be more fun to watch for the general public, and they've got a more engaging core. But they've only really accomplished the first step of becoming a contender -- they now have a stunning two-person core with a load of ill-fitting flotsam around them. The sensationalist ramblings of how the Clippers have immediately become the team to beat in the Pacific or among the class of the Western Conference strikes me as misguided at best and completely absurd at worst. They'll be good, but they're going to be 2011 Hornets type good, not 2011 Thunder type good. And the 2011 Hornets were a really good team. Chris Paul ran the offense as Chris Paul is wont to do, and Monty Williams built a brilliant defensive system around the pieces he had.

To wit: the 2010 Hornets were, defensively, one of the worst teams at utilizing their talent in the league. They ran man-to-man defense with poor man defenders and had no coherent system. Monty came in last season and not only changed the system, he completely threw out the old defensive playbook. Gone was the strand-your-man defensive stylings from late in Scott's tenure and Bowers' misguided reign. Instead, Monty instituted a new and somewhat revolutionary system. When they were in the game, he parked Chris Paul on the opponent's primary ball handler, Trevor Ariza on the opponent's primary perimeter scorer (dependent on who was hot as well as who was the "star"), and Emeka Okafor on the opponent's primary big man. Everyone else? Rotations. Lots of them. The Hornets defense was extremely fluid, leading to constant cross-matching and a wealth of strange but creative rotations. David West on a star shooting guard, Jarrett Jack on a big man, etc -- there were a lot of strange (and usually deathly poor) cross matches last year with the Hornets. The thing is? It worked. The Hornets were a top-10 defensive team in the 2011 season, despite starting David West and Marco Bellinelli, and despite CP3's defense falling off ever so slightly from his 2009 peak. But they were also -- despite CP3's best efforts -- a bottom 10 offensive team. And this is where I have to stop this and emphasize a few key facts about these Clippers compared to last year's Hornets, or anything close to the most successful Hornets team Paul ever had, the incredible 2008 Hornets from when Paul was at the height of his powers.

1. Chris Paul isn't quite what he used to be. Paul, when healthy, is the greatest point guard talent in the NBA. He's a complete package and there's really not a guard in the league that can even approach his level. But it's also true that Paul hasn't played consistently to his 2008 level since... well... 2009, ish. It's somewhat hard to find an aspect of his game that's been the same since his 2010 knee surgery. While the commentariat is generally reluctant to admit it, Paul has declined. He was healthy virtually all of last year, yet put up numbers generally paling in comparison to what he did in 2007-2009. He shot worse (eFG% lowest since 2007, despite the lowest usage% of his career), he wasn't nearly as proficient at distributing the ball (45.8% aRATE vs 54.2% at his peak -- and this is despite some ridiculous home bias present in his assist totals), and he set a career high in TOV% (13.9%, compared to a career low of 12.2%). All of these are marginal effects in and of themselves, but with Paul's game not improving in any way to offset them, they combine to make a player who's different -- in a bad way -- from the MVP candidate we witnessed in the late 2000s. And his excellent playoffs versus the Lakers doesn't erase that. Was he still the best PG in the league? Sure, but by a rather slim margin.
2. Blake Griffin is David West 2.0. While there are some big differences in the way they approach the game (one is a pick and pop guy, the other a dunk artist; one is timid on the boards, the other is a rebounding beast; one can rotate on defense, the other is apparently offended by the concept of defense altogether), Blake bears a startling similarity to the type of player West was at his best alongside Paul. The manner in which West gets his points is different than the manner Blake gets his, but you can pencil in either for about 20-25 ppg, a decent rebounding performance, and awful defense. Monty finally fixed West's defensive issues by forcing him to rotate more, the one defensive skill West really has. He's a good rotating defensive big even if he's essentially awful when placed on an island with his man. Blake was the same, except minus the "one defensive skill" -- Blake simply didn't have a defensive skill last year, and it showed in how easily his men scored on him. Unfortunately for the Clips. Anyway. Blake is a much better David West, with a lot of upside potential. But replacing an all-star caliber big man with a better one is sort of like upgrading from a 30" TV to a 33" -- it will help, it will be noticeable if you're looking for it, but in the long run your team isn't going to gain 5-10 wins solely from jumping up from an all-star reserve quality big man to an all-star starter.
3. DeAndre Jordan is worse than Emeka Okafor or Tyson Chandler. Alright. I know there's a big movement to essentially attribute all of Chandler/Okafor's success to Paul's oops and setups. And I agree that DeAndre's offense will improve this year with Paul setting him up. But DeAndre Jordan isn't half the defensive big man that either Okafor or Chandler is, I'm sorry. And both Chandler and Okafor have tertiary skills that destroy Jordan's tertiaries -- Okafor with his close-in bank shot and startlingly effective shot distribution chart, and Chandler with his (sometimes illegal) incredible screens. Jordan's tertiary skills are basically "he's best bros with Blake Griffin", and while that's cool and all, he's going to need to develop some part of his game other than his average to subpar rebounding and his block-heavy (not altogether effective) foul-heavy defense.
4. The supporting cast is terrible. This is a problem that dogged Paul in New Orleans, and honestly, the Clippers if anything make that worse. The team he's leaving had: a good catch-and-shoot three point shooter ready to make bombs (Bellinelli), a solid defensive three who can drive and finish (Ariza), and a shockingly effective bench mob type of guy who was never a good defender but always found a way to contribute around the court (Landry). This team? A lot of print has been shed about the Billups signing, but I don't really see that as all that relevant. Billups is not a good catch and shoot gunner -- he's more of a LeBron-type three shooter, where his best threes are off the dribble in the rhythm of his own offense. He's one of the players who is going to be helped least by playing with a setup man like Paul. Caron Butler would be great, if this was 2008. But it isn't. He misses half the season on average, he has balky knees, and he's far over the hill and fading fast. Beyond them? They have nothing. The rest of the roster is going to be composed of D-League call-ups, Foye, Gomes, and point guards they can't play. That's worse than even New Orleans had last year, and far worse than the motley crew Paul dragged to the seventh game versus the Spurs in 2008.
5. Vinny Del Negro. The number one reason this Clippers team is worse off than the Hornets teams of yore? Vinny Del Negro. I'm one to be hard on Byron Scott essentially 24-7, but if you had to let me choose between Monty Williams, Byron Scott, and Vinny Del Negro? I'd pick Monty, obviously, as he's one of the brightest young coaches in the league. But I'd also pick Byron Scott eons before I'd ever want Vinny Del Negro getting close to my team. Del Negro is one of the worst play calling coaches in all of basketball. He's not a good manager of minutes, nor is he good at developing coherent defensive schemes. Vinny was just under the season threshhold for me to count him as a "significant" coach in my previous look into coaching as it relates to team injuries, but if you look at the overall stats for all the coaches I looked at, Vinny was well above the mean in terms of games lost to injury per season -- it may not be statistically significant, but would you really put it past Vinny to play guys who are sloppy and unprepared for NBA action? I really wouldn't. And he's going to be coaching a player without a meniscus along with a PF that absolutely needs to learn how to defend? Good luck with that, Vinny. Monty helped the Hornets overachieve last year. If anything, Vinny is going to work his hardest to do the opposite.

They'll be good. 2011 Hornets good, that is. Not contender good, yet.

• • •

Having said all that, it's time to explain the title of the article. It's true that every team involved took a risk here. Stern risked his reputation to veto the Laker deal, then approved this knowing that the debacle has added a slightly skeevy tint he's never going to be able to wash out to his overall legacy. While the Hornets got back a rather amazing package (Gordon will probably be the best shooting guard in the league in two years, a top-10 pick in the most loaded draft since 2003, a promising prospect in Al Faroq Aminu, and an expiring contract to save future cap room in Kaman), don't think they aren't taking a pretty big risk here. Gordon is a star player and in two years he'll be up for free agency himself. His hometown team -- the Indiana Pacers -- has specifically angled to have max-deal cap room right when Gordon gets to free agency. This trade looks significantly worse for the Hornets in 2014 if Gordon spends two years leading them to middling sub-playoff performances that nevertheless keep the Hornets from getting the quality draft talent they need. It looks worse still if after leading them to that kind of a middle-tier hell, Gordon gets up and leaves for the Pacers. There's a big risk of that happening. The Clippers, on the other hand, essentially gutted their team to put together a two-man core starring a mileage-heavy point god with no meniscus in his left knee and a no-defense rookie phenom. What if Paul blows out his knee? What if they find they need more pieces, but DeAndre Jordan and Caron Butler's insane deals keep them from doing it? What if they peter out at a ceiling no better than the 2007 Hornets? Gigantic risks all around.

I'd argue, though, that if you look past the risks and go a bit deeper into each side's motivations this is a deal that is best summarized as "the easy way out" for essentially every party involved. For Paul, he gets his big market he wanted, even if it's not the franchise he wanted -- he gets to leave New Orleans, say some nice stuff about the city, and move on with his life. He gets the instant "it's the Clippers" excuse if Blake and him don't pan out as a dominating twosome, and he gets his free agency in two years if the situation simply doesn't work out. It's great for him. It's simple, it's easy, and there's no real penalty for failure. The Hornets took the easy deal, able to sell to their fans that they got the best package available and they're building for the future even if they just pulled a bush-league move with their season tickets. They've sold out their 2012 season tickets already, from what I've read -- this was sort of on the expectation they'd have Paul, or at least some kind of decent basketball to put on the court. Now? They're the consensus worst team in the league and they've harmed the franchise's ability to stay relevant in a market that wants them moved out. The original Laker deal was far, far worse than the Clips deal for the future of the Hornets franchise. That's impossible to argue.

But contextually, trading Paul for a decent roster that makes playoff revenue isn't the worst fate for the Hornets, and for a franchise on the verge of getting thrown out of their city, it might be the best-case scenario. Turning the team into an unwatchable horror show gives me shivers of the Seattle Supersonics back before Bennett moved them out. And ripping an already-moved franchise from the city of Katrina seems like a terrible, terrible move for the Hornets as a franchise. But it also seems like something virtually guaranteed by this deal. Was it the best deal? Sure, in the long term, and if you don't care if the Hornets stay in New Orleans. It was the easiest call you could possibly make if you're that front office, or the NBA people who vetoed the Laker deal. If you're the fans, though, you're in for a terrible hard slog and left feeling that New Orleans is far more likely to lose the franchise now than they were before this ordeal. And the Clippers? That's the easiest one to explain. They essentially have had the 2nd most bumbling offseason of any team yet, what with the massively overpaid Jordan deal, the awful Caron Butler signing, and the signing of Chauncey Billups to a team where he can't actually be of any use. But the price? The Clips gave up 4 of their top 5 trade assets and essentially got destroyed at the bargaining table -- if they'd held out and kept Gordon, they'd be the second best team in the Western Conference. Instead they went the easy route -- they gave in, shrugged it off, and now have a markedly worse team with pieces that don't make sense together. But they have Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, and you can sell that.

Which, in the end, is all that matters. Sterling can sell Los Angeles that, easily. And even if the pieces he gave up mean the team is hardly better than the Hornets team that probably was (with West on board) a second round team that push the defending champs to 5 or 6 games before bowing out, the Clips have two stars and Sterling doesn't really care what they do beyond that. He cares about his money. He cares about making the Clippers profitable. With Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, the Clippers are the most marketable team in the NBA. They'll thrill crowds with dunks and pretty passing, even if their defense is crap and their coach is arguably the worst in the league. Sterling doesn't really care how far they get in the playoffs, or if they'll ever be a champion -- his ultimate goal is to have a franchise that makes money. And thanks to this trade, he's now the owner of the single most marketable superstar combo in the league. Did he give up too much to get it, and leave the team (basketball-wise) relatively adrift? Yep. Does he care if the basketball isn't nearly as good as its potential? Does he care if CP3/Griffin is potentially a horrible and underachieving disappointment, if he makes his money? I don't think so.

And if you really think about it, you probably don't think he does either.

Season's back, everyone! And you all know how we like to celebrate. Excruciatingly long posts analyzing intricacies and untapped facts, ahoy! In this mini-feature, watch as Aaron shares his inexpert opinions on every amnesty, trade, and signing -- big and small -- that goes on before the season starts. We're going to cut it into several parts -- this is a to-be-updated post on the larger deals of this transaction period. In an amusing and somewhat unintentional twist, every player in this post isn't just one of the larger prizes from free agency, they're also all big men. So, big deals in more ways than one, I suppose. This post outlines my thoughts on the signings of David West, DeAndre Jordan, Marc Gasol, and Nene. Let's get to it.

• • •

THE BIG SIGNINGS

DAVID WEST TO INDIANA

David West to IND on a 2-year $20 mil contract.

Wow. Absolutely love this signing for Indiana. Really. This is one of the bigger signings of this free agency period, because in one fell swoop the Pacers did two huge (and connected) things. They started by shoring up the biggest hole in their roster going forward. They also kept David West from going to Boston, his second most-desired landing spot. In landing West and keeping the Celtics from getting their hands on him, Larry Legend essentially wrenched open the Pacers' window for contention while reaching his zombified hand up to slam the Celtics' window shut. This isn't to say the Celts won't be good this year -- they will, and they've got about as high a title shot as any team in the league that doesn't star LeBron and Wade. The Celtics certainly have one last run in them before Wyc Grousbeck brutally dismembers the team for cap space next summer. But in terms of comparing the Pacers and the Celtics directly?

Larry Bird's new team is poised to make a leap and supplant his old one as the tertiary fringe contender in the East as early as next season. It's that simple. The teams are not constructed the same way, at all, but in terms of quality relative to the very top margins of the east the 2011 & 2012 Celtics are about as far from the Heat as the Pacers are going to be going forward. The price here is the best part -- the Pacers have picked up an all-star caliber starting big man on a limited-risk 2-year deal that has them retaining cap space, staying under the tax, and giving their new star forward a contract that's barely more lucrative than the one J.J. Barea got from the Wolves. Does this sound borderline insane to you, too? Because it seems pretty insane to me. And make no mistake -- West was, last year, an all-star caliber forward. He's got one of the purest midrange shots of any big in the game, and his presence on the Pacers is going to drastically open the lane for Hibbert to start exercising his surprisingly refined post game more. And more importantly, perhaps, increase his confidence in using it.

Up until now, the Pacers have had to play Hibbert primarily with Foster, Hansbrough, and McRoberts -- in adding West's strong midrange game and generally good rebounding, Hibbert finally is going to have a big that as a general rule draws men far out of the paint instead of drawing them in. As last season went along, teams began to game plan for Hibbert's post game, and they found that in overcommitting on him in the post they could throw him off his game and generally force a bad shot or a turnover. With West waiting in the wings and Hibbert's generally adept passing to get him the ball, teams are going to lose their best way of game-planning for Hibbert's post game. In doing so, the Pacers big man rotation goes from a general weakness to a big point of strength, and one that the team can build on in the future. Although it's well worth noting that defensively, West-Hibbert is never going to be a rotation to tip your cap at. So the Pacers have a lot of work to do in transforming an excellent young team with serious assets into a star team with the defense and fundamentally sound play. Migrating there will take them a few steps from here. But unlike a few years ago, the Pacers now have essentially all the pieces they need to start contending. It's up to a quality coach and some quality minor pickups to hash it all out.

Underrated fringe positive, too? Now that Eric Gordon is stuck in a bad situation, he'll enter unrestricted free agency in two years. Exactly when West's contract runs out and the Pacers get a wealth of cap space back. Has there really been a better time to be a Pacers fan? After years of brawl-fueled irrelevance, the Pacers look like a well managed group that's on the fringe of putting together something really special. It's exciting. And I'm really happy to see it.

• • •

GASOL TO MEMPHIS

Marc Gasol to MEM on a 4-year $58 mil contract.

Good contract. As I outlined in my prior player capsule featuring Gasol, he's currently a bit overrated. Gasol spent the entirety of the 2011 playoffs facing big men whose games are tailored to his defense. The bruising defensive stylings of Marc Gasol were hard on a late-career Duncan that relies on his finesse -- or, really, any of the Spurs bigs he had to guard. Is he worth this contract, though? I'd say yeah, in spades. The new CBA hasn't eliminated the owners' tendency to overpay for players lacking in talent and potential, but by convenience of the chopped max years, the owners are making more reasonable deals every day. This is just one such example. There isn't really much to talk about related to Gasol himself (good center, deserves the money, that's it). So let me explain why this is an example of owners making better deals. Gasol is currently 26 years old -- a good age, but not a great age. Because max contract lengths have been cut a year, the most that the Rockets could offer him was a 4-year contract -- which Memphis proceeded to match. Done deal.

Under the old CBA, that 4-year contract becomes a 5-year contract, and takes him to the age of 31 -- Gasol will probably still be a reasonably productive player at the age of 31, and would then be up for a max extension that he'd most likely get. There's no shortage of teams willing to pay a premium for a good big man with absolutely no emphasis on the future. In THAT theoretical deal, a 5-6 year contract taking him to the age of 36 or 37, he'd most likely be a huge albatross by year 2 of the deal and completely worthless to his team by year 4. But with the new contract structure, this 4-year deal is going to take him to the age of 30 -- he'll then be up for a 4-5 year deal that takes him to 34-35, which may end up with a year or two of him not really producing up to his contract, but nowhere near the 3-4 year reign of terror a theoretical 31 year old $15 mil per year Marc Gasol would be making in an alternate reality where the old CBA was simply extended with no alterations.

This isn't good for the players, mind you. A ton of players in the NBA make the bulk of their lifetime income on the added benefit that those last two or three years of unproductive albatross status has for their checkbook. By reducing the size of contracts, GMs necessarily are making marginally better decisions, simply because they aren't able to sign those last few years. I don't really think it's particularly GOOD for the league that the only way they can curb stupid decisions is to hurt the players and altogether remove the option of making those last few years. It's more a sign of the batshit crazy management that some teams have in the first place, and the generally strange free agency market imposed by agents teetering on the brink of insanity. But it does lead to entertaining times, so I suppose we can deal with it.

• • •

JORDAN TO LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS

DeAndre Jordan to LAC on a 4-year $43 mil contract.

DeAndre Jordan isn't a $10 million dollar a year player yet. He isn't even a $7 million dollar a year player, if I'm honest -- the Warriors continued an offseason of insane decisions by offering him this ridiculous contract, while the Clips decided to continue their quixotic offseason pursuit of a continual one-upping of their worst decisions by taking them up on it. Look. It may turn out well. Jordan is young. He has a decent amount of promise, and like Mike Conley, it's entirely possible he lives up to this deal. It looks highly unlikely, but it's always possible. But this contract is simply ridiculous. His defense is somewhat overrated -- I'm currently working on a piece examining block value and trying to flexibly graph / measure the defensive aptitude of various NBA players, and I recently came to looking at his numbers. His results on the block are relatively good, but teams still pound the ball down low when Jordan's in the game because he has a nasty habit of fouling every time he plays on-the-ball defense.

This wouldn't be a problem if he was a backup, or if he was a spot defensive guy working on help beside a defensive mastermind. This becomes a big problem when he's playing alongside one of the worst defensive big men in the league (and I'm not going to get into this right now, but Blake Griffin was awful last season on the defensive end and somehow managed to get worse as the season went along -- he fully deserves that title) and needs to roam just to make sure teams don't have open hunting season on Griffin's lazy rotations and weak closeouts. This becomes a bigger problem when you realize that Jordan's entire offensive game is based on the dunk -- the man has never seen a jump shot he can make in his life, and his game has essentially stagnated since he came into the league. He's played more minutes, but without really increasing how effective he is. Now that the Clippers have CP3, this move is a bit more defensible -- in CP3/Blake/Jordan they have a big-ish three that can begin to build a contender. But with contracts like the inexplicable one they gave DeAndre, they're hardly going to have the room to augment that core.

Which is really the big problem here. It's one thing to overpay DeAndre Jordan in a vacuum -- just a normal everyday Clippers move. It's another when you're under a strongly restrictive CBA that's going to negatively impact the Clippers' ability to make moves to augment their contending core in the future. Now that they have CP3 and sent out every draft pick known to man, they need to build through free agency and trades. They have lost all their trade chips. So now it's all up to the Clippers to make the smart free agent signings you need to build a contender around their young superstar core. Yes. I just wrote "It's all up to the Clippers" seriously. It's a brave new world we're living in now, folks.

• • •

NENE TO DENVER
Nene to DEN on a 5-year $67 mil contract.

It may seem odd looking at the lofty total, but Nene actually took a slight pay cut to play with Denver -- something very few players would ever do. The Nets were offering $65 to $70 million over 4 years, a significantly larger scale of contract on a year-to-year basis than the relatively tidy 13.5 million a year he's getting from the Nuggets. I can't altogether endorse the contract as reasonable, although I admit that Nene may be a bit underrated. His contributions are obvious through neither his defensive chops (not great, but not bad) or his box score statistics (15-8-2) but rather in his generally incredible efficiency and his ability to fill in the gaps on an offense. He's essentially as good as the players you surround him with -- last season, for instance, he was assisted on 70% of his baskets, one of the highest numbers for a 14+ PPG scorer in the league last season.

So, perhaps that was his incentive in taking the 5-year contract for a bit less money to stay with the Nuggets -- playing for Karl and the Nuggets has worked out pretty well for Nene, and while he's never really been an integral part of an important or legendary team, he clearly has a good rapport with the guys he plays with and relies on them so strongly for his own offense that he didn't want to test the waters elsewhere. His defense, as I glanced over earlier, isn't bad but isn't good. Larger players bully him badly in the post and he isn't really instinctively skilled enough to stay on the rangey stretch four types, but when he's given the space to roam the court he can be an asset in help defense and helping your team keep the pick and roll on lockdown. Overall? The Nuggets have a good team entering the 2012 season, and Nene is going to be a big part of that. He turned down a relatively awful situation in New Jersey for it, which may have been a better move for his overall legacy and his general rapport. For a player that relies so much on the pieces around him, getting himself locked into a New Jersey team that may not have Deron Williams one year from now would be essentially setting himself up for abject failure if Deron was to leave.

I don't really know what else to say. It isn't a terrible signing, and it's cheaper than I suspected it would be. So I suppose, all in all, the Nuggets won. Nene remains in Denver. Fun times were had by all.

• • •

CURRY TO MIAMI

Eddy Curry to MIA on a 1-year veteran's minimum contract.

Did I title this post "big deals" and keep Curry out of the small deals posts just to make another Eddy Curry joke? The world may never know the answer to that. We do know one thing, though. There's really no bigger deal than Eddy Curry. And there never will be.

• • •

Chauncey Billups: the Memoirs of a Cancer

A story of Chauncey Billups' amnesty demands, told (almost) firsthand.

Chauncey Billups in George Karl's office, trying to convince Karl to pick up his option.

Chauncey Billups: You know, George, I once turned the Nuggets inside out, just to see if I could. I'm bad news. I'm a bad dude. Don't take me on waivers unless you're willing to deal with hell on Earth.

George Karl: No, Chauncey, that was Carmelo. You were the guiding force that we fucked over to make our trade balance work. On the one hand, we'd love to have you back. We have a starter-quality point in Andre Miller and a promising young guard in Ty Lawson, but with Miller aging, and the compressed season, it could work out quite well, actually...

CB: You know what, wow, that makes perfect sense. In that case, I would--

GK: It's too bad we're not even interested in you.

CB: Wait, but --

GK: Chauncey, I have to ask you to leave. We're really short on players, and I've been really busy getting everyone ready.

CB: Wait, I could be one of those players! That would be great!

GK: Do you really want it?

CB: Yes, actually. I'm a veteran presence, and my leadership would be perfe --

GK: Tell me what you want Chauncey, and I'll do my best.

CB: I just want a vet min contract, a stable place to stay and raise my family, and no hassles caused by goddamn superstars that think they're above the goddamn system. That's all I want.

GK: Absolutely not. Get out of my office. Try the Clippers. I'm sure they'll never trade you.

CB: Damnit!

• • •

CB: Hello, Robert Sarver.

Robert Sarver: Hello, Chauncey.

CB: So I was wondering... maybe you could NOT pick me up, if you had any such intentions.

RS: I did not, in fact, have any such intentions.

CB: Oh. Well, why not?

RS: Tell me what you earned last year.

CB: Well, it was right around $15 million.

RS: And are you, say, a tragically undertalented player of a D-League caliber that I will overpay heavily while passing on legitimately solid free agents despite a stated commitment to frugality?

CB: No.

RS: Aww...

CB: I mean, I'm a little bit older, but I play just fine. On the other hand, it would be tragic to acquire me for that kind of money when you already have Steve Nash to start, who is still a franchise player, even though you have no intentions of trading him. You'd make no one happy, and spend the same amount of money as your rivals.

RS: Oh. That's a good point. I'll think about it.

CB: Wait, what?

• • •

CB: Daryl... Daryl Morey?

Daryl Morey: Welcome to D.A.R.Y.L., the automated GM supercomputer.

CB: Man, that's some weird humor you have going on there. Every time I meet with you it's always this weird, isn't it?

DM: Humor, of course. Improves riditory capacity by 14% while diminishing AT Fields by 15%. I am familiar.

CB: Right. What's an AT Field?

DM: The barrier between souls that no one should cross, once merely but a thought experiment from psychology, now manifest in all our models. Have I shown you our models?

CB: I'm good, thanks. so I've heard you guys are into advanced statistics, and I wanted to tell you not to acquire me. I'm bad news.

DM: Want is, but an illusion... of weaker minds. So desu ne~

CB: ... Anyway I, uh, take a lot of bullshit contested threes, and I thought you might want to hear it from me before you think about signing me on waivers. Watch FIBA from last year. It's all in the tape.

DM: "Before"? Ha. Did you really think I hadn't calculated your utility using multiple metrics? Did you think I didn't see the amnesty provision months, nay, years before it happened? Do you really expect me to think that these contested threes were anything more than an elaborate (albeit wily) ruse hatched against my very interest in you?

CB (crying): I'm...just not a very good player, man. I'm sorry. I know you've done all your analytics and made your conclusions, and I respect your intelligence. But I have such a gimpy knee, and I'm not as tough as I like to project. I'm really a soft guy at heart, and I'm sick of competing every night and getting traded around. Please, just don't pick me up.

DM: Alright, gosh. I mean, don't lie to me but yeah, I was just kidding. I wasn't really interested in you in the first place. Some players I can absolutely slay with that mecha-Morey routine, though. Too bad.

CB: Like who?

DM: Actually, it's just Shane Battier. And Ron Artest. They love that shit. Anyway, do you want to know where you'll end up?

CB: No, in some ways, I don't want to know. Your all-seeing, all-knowing gift is one that such as I-

DM: You're going to the Clippers, Chauncey. Haha. Ha. ... Hah.

CB: You're a weird guy, Daryl.

• • •

Donald Sterling (smoking a gigantic cigar): Frankly, Chauncey, I don't think you can be a cancer. Not really. Relatively speaking, of course. But I'd like to see you try.

CB: I... what the hell?

DS: Chauncey, Chauncey, Chauncey, what's your last name?

CB: Sir, it's...

DS: I know what your last name is, Chauncey. But look at how destructive that is. "Sir?" Look at how easily I did that. Look at that. Do you think you're ever going to compete with me? I'm the O.C. -- original cancer. You've got nothing on me.

CB: I don't want to compete with you. I just don't want to go to the Clippers.

DS: I might just pick you up just for saying that.

CB: Oh, please God, no. I can be a cancer. Just watch.

DS: By the way, did you know that whole economic crisis? With the mortgages?

CB: Yeah, of course.

DS: Let's just say that was my idea.

CB: Please don't pick me up.

DS: Well, I guess your little "I'm a cancer" stunt backfired on you, didn't it?

CB: I've learned my lesson, that's for sure. Please don't pick me up, sir.

• • •

Chauncey Billups has ordered a pizza from a local chain. He receives a call.

David Kahn: Why hello, Chauncey.

CB: Uh... hi. Do you have my pizza? Where are you?

DK (in a childish cackle): Oh, Chauncey. I'm more of a state of mind than a person per se, Chauncey. Say, have you seen Ricky Rubio?

CB: Um... yes, I've seen him. Listen, who is this? Where are you?

DK: I've decided to invent a new form of the Triangle Offense called the Tiny Quintuple Post, and I think your talents might be germane. Get this: Five point guards, each of their skillsets mapped to the traditional five positions, playing the Triangle Offense. You will be our Center, facing off against giants such as Tim Duncan and Pau Gasol every night, speeding past the aging trunks with the wistfulness of an owl at night. I've seen microfilms of you at the local library and I think you're quite ready for a turning point in your career, as a Center.

CB: ... Jesus Christ, I ordered a pizza, not a fanfiction. Where are you? I'm hungry.

DK: Look up. That's it, look straight up. Come to Kahn.

Chauncey looks up. David Kahn is taped to his ceiling, tied down with microfilm.

CB: Ahh!!! How the fuck did you get in my house, David?

DK: Owls, Chauncey. Owls brought me here.

CB: Uh... the Clippers already got me. You can't sign me.

DK: Is that a lie? Are you intimidated by my owls and my stoop on your chandelier?

CB: Uh... no, it's just that they claimed me on waivers, and now no one else can.

DK: That sounds like a lie.

CB: Listen, I'm banking on you not understanding the waiver rules, here. And I also would prefer the Clippers to your team.

DK: Welp. I resent it, but I can't deny it.

CB: If it's any consolation, you could probably sign J.J. Barea as your power forward. He's agile.

DK: That's so dumb. You can't build a championship team around J.J. Barea at the 4. I thought you knew basketball, Chauncey.

CB: Small forward, then?

DK: Huh. Okay, what should I pay him?

CB: Uh... like, don't go any lower than six million a year. There's no way I would play there for less than six million dollars a year. I would be insulted. I'm practically insulted by this waivers thing to be honest. Pretty bush league, Kahn.

DK: Okay.

CB: Better make it seven with taxes. Make sure you have no more room to sign marquee points, either.

DK: Why would I do that?

CB: So J.J. doesn't get jealous! God! Look at what's going on with LeBron. Hell, look at Darko.

DK: He seemed displeased.

CB: Okay, here's the important part: Sign him for about 4 years.

DK: Why?

CB: Because that will guarantee that I'll never have to... watch you guys and know that you could have done better? Yeah.

DK: Okay.

CB: One more thing.

DK: Yeah?

CB: I want you to ask Kevin Garnett to request a trade to the Wolves. He can be your center for the foreseeable future, or rather, your double center for the Quintuple Post.

DK: Oh, but I had no idea he wanted back on the Wolves.

CB: Of course he does! Uh...he's a tough sell though, you know how people are, they don't know what it is they really want, so you have to show them that you have a commitment to their well being.

DK: Of course. That makes perfect sense to me.

CB: You have to ask him tonight though. Full moon and all, wolves, that whole thing.

DK: Oh, yeah, naturally. I better leave right now.

CB: Bring your owls, of course. And close the damn front door, please.

DK: Okay. David Kahn, exeunt left!

For the first time in years, Chauncey Billups smiles.

• • •

The next day, Billups arrives at Sterling's office in a Christmas sweater with a Clippers hat.

Donald Sterling: Well, there's the finishing touch, Chauncey. I guess you'll be competing against Mo Williams at the point. How does that make you feel?

CB: Alright, I guess. Not so bad.

DS: Excuse me? What's the matter with you? Don't you understand? I own you, Chauncey. Doesn't that stir some ancestral hatred in you? I own you, like I'm running some sort of a plant--

CB: Hey, you read the recent free agent signings?

DS: Of course, Chauncey. What about them?

CB: What did JJ Barea get with the Wolves?

DS: There's nothing about that in my reports. Why?

Assistant (from next room): Mister Sterling?

DS: Yes?

Assistant: Barea got signed just now with the T'Wolves.

CB: Nine o' clock on the dot.

DS: But how could you have possibly known that, Chauncey?

CB: Let me guess, 4 years, $20 million?

DS: What are the terms of Barea's contract, just out of curiosity, Jessica?

Assistant: Oh, I think it was 4 years, $19 million. It's pretty hilarious, I think. What agent could possibly have convinced Kahn to make a hilariously misguided move like that?

CB: Let's just say I won't be playing for the Wolves anytime soon, Donald.

DS: Huh... interesting. Good work, Billups. Say, I heard you were interested in front office work back in Denver...

CB: Yes, very much so, Mr. Sterling.

DS: How would you like to work... for me? We'll go through the country and cause mayhem wherever there is prosperity or fraternity... except against me and mine. We'll be villains in arms. A Mark Knopfler song from hell.

CB: Thanks, that sounds like fun, but for the time being can I just finish out my contract playing basketball?

DS: Ah...what the hell? Sure. Basketball. Whatever.

• • •

Weeks later, a ragged and furious Kevin Garnett is banging on Chauncey Billups' door. He is covered in owl bites.

Kevin Garnett: Chauncey, open up, man, I just want to shoot the breeze.

• • •

And so it came to pass that Sam Cassell didn't join the T'Wolves, Suns, Rockets, or Nuggets. Fin.