"I want to thank Paul Allen, Larry Miller, Coach McMillan, the entire Trail Blazers organization and our fans for all of their love and support during my time in Portland. It's been a great ride."

-- Brandon Roy

Lost amidst the turmoil over David Stern's erstwhile turn as owner of the Hornets and the wild free agency period we've been blessed with, Brandon Roy retired this weekend. I've spent a few days grappling with what this means for the league, and for me. To that end, I polled people on twitter today about their five favorite players. Explicitly left out Roy from my own list. Partly out of curiosity, partly to see if anyone would put Roy if I neglected to mention him. Much to my surprise, nobody did -- perhaps because to most people it seems he's been gone a long, long time. No longer Roy, there lies a ghostly crossover and the ever-fading image of the perfect fadeaway, an flickering image of the star once known as Brandon Roy. Maybe the real Brandon Roy died a long time ago. But it doesn't really matter whether you think Roy left his mortality behind long ago, or refused to believe his demise until he uttered the words I started the post with.

Let's take a few moments to reminisce over him, then.

• • •

Brandon Roy grew up in an extremely poor six person household. His father worked 12 hours a day, 7 to 7, and his mother worked as a cafeteria lady at his school. His older brothers worked too, though they all loved basketball more than their work. Despite their meager means, the Roy household was very supportive of Brandon's basketball talent. They'd work extra overtime to accure the $200 or so they needed to send their kin to the AAU sponsored trainings where they could one day get picked up by a scout. One of my fondest memories of Roy's is related to this -- I watched an interview (one I can't for the life of me remember the location of) where Roy shared a story about his youth. He described how, like most kids, he didn't quite appreciate the sacrifice his parents made to send him to the AAU training camps -- he used to take them for granted, when he was very young, and essentially treat them as glorified field trips. All until one day, when one of the kids at the training talked about how much money they cost. You could almost see the blood drain from his face all over again as he relived the moment, vowing from then on to make the most of his trips. As he did. Eventually.

You'd never think it from his generally squeaky-clean run as the face of the Blazers franchise (nor, if I'm honest, his somewhat absurd attempts to get Andre Miller traded so he could shoot the ball more), but Roy wasn't always particularly good at expressing himself or being any sort of leader. Nor was he always a lock to be a star at all. Roy and his brother Ed were born with substantial learning disabilities, which made it essentially impossible for the two of them to finish the SAT in the time allotted. I'm not sure how many of you have read Darcy Frey's "The Last Shot." It's a book about Stephon Marbury's legendary Lincoln high school teams, and the varied post-school lives of the members of it. Something you realize when reading the book that may not be immediately obvious is that the SAT can often be an incredibly hard thing to pass for quite a lot of people, especially athletes (who, for whatever reason, seem to lose the genetic lottery for learning disabilities as often as they win it for their athletic mastery).

Brandon Roy included -- it took him four tries to get through, and before his fourth attempt, he'd essentially given up hope that he'd pass it. Enough so that he'd gotten a job as a dock worker doing night shifts at $11 an hour, just in case he never made it to college. Failing the SAT one last time was hardly an idle threat. Marbury's brothers (some more talented than he), his high school team, and Roy's brothers could never quite get past the SAT. And their basketball careers were essentially DOA because of it. You can hardly expect to play basketball professionally if you can't qualify for a scholarship at an NCAA school and you haven't been suckled and raised as one of Dick Vitale's incorrigible "diaper dandies" from birth (a la LeBron James or Kevin Durant). Roy's brother Ed is a sad teaching example of the problem at hand -- unable to pass the SAT, Ed went to junior college and eventually lost interest in athletics after he realized he'd never make it to the NBA, and even if he did, he'd never get drafted and probably never get a guaranteed contract in his life. Such is the life of those who don't make it. As one who did make it, Brandon had an example of what could've been right there at home with him, day in and day out. But he passed that fourth try, and he got his well-deserved scholarship to Washington.

From then on, things were rather grand for the hard-working grinder from the north Pacific. Partly because of the work he put into his game, but partly because he managed to fine tune his game to be about as perfect as it could come. Roy has always been a master of the pass-before-the-pass type of distribution -- he's the setup man who sees plays two players ahead of him, who has always had a better sense than he has any right of which players just know to make the play he's seen. You watch his passes and you think they're nothing particularly special, until you realize the play frees LaMarcus off a screen to slam it home. Or frees Steve Blake from his man with a slip-screen pass just as it opens up the entire court for Roy to drive and rebound the miss. Roy's passing isn't technically advanced in a way that Chris Paul or Steve Nash pass the ball, but it's as quietly effective as a passer can get. His defense, in his heyday, was some of the most tenacious stuff you'd see this side of Manu Ginobili. Who is, by the way, a great comparison point for Roy -- at his peak, Roy was essentially a more athletic, stronger Manu. The same mastery over the Euro-step, the same skill at juking out whatever defenders opposing coaches would throw at him, and the same vocal leadership over his team's offense whenever he stepped on the court.

Not bad for a player who wasn't even a lock to be drafted in the second round his junior year in college, whose entire stock rose solely because of his lights-out senior year where he and his Huskies devoured all comers. And it was all behind Roy's own virtuoso NCAA performance that season, demonstrating for all to see the leadership and confidence he'd slowly developed over the course of his years at Washington. The success continued in the NBA, putting forth a fantastic rookie effort that had him handed one of the most well-deserved Rookie of the Year trophies in recent memory. Then in his sophomore year, Roy was forced to take full ownership over the Blazers upon Z-Bo's departure -- usually something of a challenge for a kid scarcely out of college ball, but not one Roy wasn't suited for. And in 2009? In what seemed like flashes of glory, Roy ascended to his seemingly rightful spot as the second best shooting guard in the league. A strong argument for the best, even. Elite scoring, elite passing, amazing rebounding, vocal leadership, and the best defensive guard this side of Manu Ginobili. A stupefyingly good first step, and the ability to put his team on his back at any time. The man who single-handedly erased the Jailblazer era and returned Portland to its deserved place as an elite team in the meat-grinding Western conference of the 2000s.

And then the degeneration began. Essentially the second he signed his max contract -- one that would have him pull in more money than his family or relatives had ever made in their lives -- Brandon Roy's body decided to betray him. Some incidental injuries to sap his quickness, to slowly remove bits and pieces from his game -- starting his nasty first step, of course. Continuing to his defense. The way he timed his passes. Little, incidental things that alone would mean little, but taken together were signs at a broader collapse that nobody really saw coming. Things came to a head with his torn meniscus about a month before the 2010 playoffs -- he got the surgery immediately, then went against doctor's orders to make sure he could play in the first round. Where, unfortunately, Steve Nash and the nearly finals-bound Suns to-be ran the Blazers to death and dispatched Roy in a depressing six game series that felt like two. Roy couldn't keep up with the Suns, and went home hurting. As someone who broke doctor's orders to help the team would tend to feel. Which led to last season's depressing and ghostly campaign -- Roy was a ghost of his former self. Except for the game against Dallas -- you know the one. Thank God for that, too. Because for one night only, Roy was... well, Roy. He was the star we'd been waiting since 2009 to see again, and he had his entire array on view for the masses gathered at the Rose Garden. His jab-step was rolling, the Mavs were playing off him (expecting him to shank the shot, as he'd done all year), and his offense only got better the more desperate the Mavs got to stop him. We've all seen Space Jam. For one night, Roy's talent was gifted back to him. His knees took the night off from betraying him, his hesitance left and his confidence returned. He was once again the man we knew he'd be.

And now? He's... gone. Just like that.

I've never been the best at dealing with loss. And in this case, there's very little I can think to say. Roy, to me, represents the loss of much more than the man I've spent this post describing -- though even if he just represented the loss of the man, he'd be a tough one to take. I touched on it when I discussed his childhood, but to me, Roy represents the purest form of the reluctant, emergent leader. A man among men emerging in the unlikeliest of straits from a challenged, reluctant youth. One doesn't need to be counterculture like Marbury or embody an otherworldly anger like Iverson to represent the constant struggle in one's soul for success and glory in an unfair and unjust world. But Roy isn't simply Brandon Roy, the NBA superstar struck down by his defective knees. He's much more.

Brandon is also Ed Roy, his talented older sibling who never made it in the NBA. He's Zach Marbury, the older brother who wandered astray and never made it to the league (despite talents arguably greater than those of Stephon's). He's every junior college D-League player or American transplant in the Euroleague, fighting off injury and a coach's lack of faith to try and make it in the world doing something they love with no promise of success and no safety net to catch them if they fall. Roy made it. He made it big. He worked hard, he did everything right, and he had a little bit of luck to help him along the way. But he could've just as easily been yet another cautionary tale, an apocryphal story whispered throughout the courts of Seattle about the high school phenom whose developmental disabilities sabotaged his basketball career before it even began. He could have just as easily been buried in the depth chart his senior year at Washington, a four year player who hadn't shown anything close to star potential and was a fringe NBA prospect at best. But he wasn't.

Roy could have given up at any point, as well. He could have stopped trying so hard to be the leader he felt he couldn't be, and he could've taken the job as a dock worker. But he didn't. Roy's career -- shortened as it may be -- represents, above all else, the triumph of an incredibly strong man. Roy looked the world in the eyes and told him he'd make it, and he did. It's easy to miss, as we mourn the loss of his career, how much he accomplished. Roy's family will never, ever miss a meal. Roy has made enough to send every one of his children to college, and to allow them to be whatever they want to be. He's made enough to bring his hard-working parents out of poverty, and made enough to keep him and his family secure for the rest of his natural life. The loss isn't his, really -- the loss is ours. The loss of a star who brightens the days of those who watch him, and a star who singlehandedly rebuilt a moribund, broken franchise from the depths of scandal. That's our loss. Roy? He shouldn't go out like this. He should be going out in a hall of fame speech, which he'd surely deliver in his own mild-mannered, soft-spoken way. But I think a family man like Roy (a man legendary for eschewing team parties for movies with his kids, or time alone with his loving wife) will appreciate the fact that, for all intents and purposes, his children (and their children) will never have to live through the same struggle that Roy lived through. At this point, though? I don't know what else to say.

Other than all I needed to say in the first place: I'm really, really going to miss Brandon Roy.

• • •

We will return to our trade coverage tomorrow. For now, let's just take a little bit of time to appreciate the loss of someone truly special to me and those who watched him. Here's looking at you, Trouble B-Roy. The Blazers should be hanging your jersey from the rafters at the Rose Garden soon enough, and I don't know about you, but I can't wait to cheer you on one last time when they raise it.

This post -- which doubles as Player Capsule #33 -- is dedicated to Caleb, the biggest Roy fan I know. Happy birthday, bud.

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 smaller deals and amnesties. There will be another post later tomorrow with the big deals, then a few posts to individually examine the monstrous deals. Watch out for it.

• • •

THE SMALL SIGNINGS: PART 2

BIG BABY TO ORLANDO

Glen Davis to ORL on a 4-year $26 mil contract, Brandon Bass to BOS, Von Wafer to ORL.

This ranks as one of the most absurd and confusing trades made during this compressed offseason so far. Really. I easily see why Boston did it -- they got the best player in the trade on the shortest contract. Pretty much a no-brainer. Bass expires after this season, so they maintain the course to having monstrous cap space next summer. Davis was never ever going to sign a one-year deal. So, the Celtics maintain flexibility and keep their books clear for next summer while upgrading their backup forward position. Not too shabby. The Magic, though? Reports are that Dwight really likes Big Baby, and that's why they made this trade. Which would be at least understandable, if Dwight hadn't already requested a trade. Really. What is Otis Smith doing? Does he think spending a season with Big Baby is going to make Dwight decide to re-sign with the Magic? The other big irony to this trade: reports came out last night that Dwight's trade request came partially because he felt he didn't have enough pull in the organization. Really, Dwight? Really? You essentially played GM and traded for Big Baby, then bemoan not having enough organizational influence. Cry me a river. Cripes. Also: Von Wafer to Orlando, in a move that I assume must be paired with the acquisition of Michael Redd (Wine). Dwight's pious, right? This is going to help keep him, right???

HILL TO PHOENIX

Grant Hill to PHX on a 1-year $6.5 mil contract.

This one makes me sad, because one of my offseason hopes was that he'd sign with the Spurs. Not because he'd really improve our team, but just because I wanted to watch Grant Hill more this year and watching the gradual implosion of the Phoenix Suns is one of the saddest things you can watch in today's league. Hill was very solid last year for Phoenix, and while you've got to think he underperforms that contract (by quite a lot) he's still Grant Hill. One of the classiest players in the game and the only Duke grad that this Duke grad can say he legitimately enjoys watching. And on a one year deal, it doesn't really matter if you're overpaying him. Guess I'll have to carve out time to watch Grant, Nash, Gortat once again.

HAYES TO SACRAMENTO

Chuck Hayes to SAC on a 4-year $21.3 mil contract.

Short of the Jerebko move (which I like inordinately much due to my feelings on Jerebko's potential) this may be my favorite free-agent move of any team this free agency period. Yes, Hayes essentially is being signed as a backup center. I don't care. Paying $5.3 million a year for one of the best one-on-one big man defenders in the league is a bargain no matter how you shake it. Is Hayes undersized? Sure. But he's a tenacious defender who rebounds quite well for his size and defers offensively to the other options on the floor, which is exactly what you need next to the generally ball-hogging young pieces on the Kings right now. He's a great long-term replacement for Dalembert, and I'm still rather surprised they got him to agree to a deal for that pittance. Should pay off in spades in a few years when the Kings are knocking on the playoff door.

JONES TO MIAMI

James Jones to MIA on a 3-year $4.5 mil contract.

Essentially, Jones signed a three year deal to the vet minimum to remain with the Heat. It's not rare for vets to sign at a discount to play with a contender, but this still strikes me as a bit much. Yes, he's offensively limited -- over 80% of Jones' shots came behind the three point line last year, one of the highest marks in the league. The fourth highest, in fact. The comprehensive list: James Posey (88% from behind the 3-pt line), Brian Cardinal (87%), Daequan Cook (85%), and James Jones (83%). But he was good at it! Jones shot almost 43% from three last year -- that's absurd, and normally, would get you paid something more on the order of $2-3 million a year than a measly $1.5. Still, it's unlikely he's going to regret his choice too much -- he's probably going to win a ring in the duration of his contract, and those tend to make everything go down sweeter.

COOK TO OKLAHOMA CITY

Daequan Cook to OKC on a 2-year $6.4 mil contract.

This is, in my view, a better approximation of what Jones would've gotten had he chosen to sell his talents on the open market. Cook has a similarly limited game -- you may remember him from "the throwaway stat in the last trade paragraph." Takes 85% of his shots from three, makes 42% of them. That's Cook. He shoots, he doesn't turn the ball over much, and he does virtually nothing else on the court. The upside of Cook compared to, say, Jones or Posey? Cook is only 24 years old -- there's some upside potential with Cook. More likely? He stays as he is, a useful bench guy who takes absolutely nothing but three pointers and prospers on them. And at $3.2 mil a year, can't really say he's overpaid.

CHALMERS TO MIAMI
Mario Chalmers to MIA on a 3-year $12 mil contract.

I don't really mind this signing, though I think it may prove to be poor in a year or so after Norris Cole has proved himself to be a top-10 point guard in the NBA. Analysts like Hollinger tend to hate Chalmers, but I'm of the view his contributions go beyond the traditional box score. Not that his box score stats are really all that bad, but most of his value comes in his ability to get physical with most NBA guards. Chalmers is one of the more underrated defensive guards in the league -- easily top 15, and had he gotten all of Bibby's minutes in the 2011 finals, I think the Heat may have won the series. Really. I'll go into this more in my player capsule, but the long and short of it is that Barea scored something on the order of half the points per minute on Chalmers as he did on Bibby, and had they cut Barea's points from Bibby's time on him in half, you'd have a 3-3 series if not a 4-2 Heat series. Not that I really regret that they didn't, but still. Have to use your assets correctly, Spo. Decent contract. Miami should be glad it kept him. (P.S. No, Norris Cole will never be a top 10 PG in the league. I think he'll be well above average, though, and much better than Chalmers.)

GREEN TO BOSTON
Jeff Green to BOS on a 1-year $9 mil contract.

Want to know how you know this is an insane contract? The Celtics are a tax team. They're paying $18 million to keep Green around for one year. Want to know the number of players who make more than $18 million in the NBA today? Ten. Ten players make more than the Celtics are going to be paying just to keep Jeff Green on a one-year rental before he bounces for cap room. Granted, they explicitly offered him more than he was worth to ensure he'd accept a one-year deal and keep their 2012 cap room intact. I get that. But dear god, $9 million for a year? Just absurd. At least it's only one year -- here's hoping nobody overpays him next summer! (Spoiler Alert: Jeff Green will be horrifyingly overpaid next summer.)

THORNTON TO SACRAMENTO

Marcus Thornton to SAC on a 4-year $31 mil contract.

I'm not nearly as high on Thornton as most who watch him are. He's a no-defense gunner whose only other skill besides scoring is his generally decent rebounding from the guard position. At a shade under $8 mil per year, can't say I really like this deal at all for Sacramento. It's true that he's shown a lot of promise as a Terry-type scorer, but my god, his defense is atrocious and burst scorers from the two are a dime a dozen in the league today. He's a really talented scorer, don't get me wrong, but my lord. $8 mil per year? Don't think he's that kind of good. Still. There is some upside, so he may grow into the deal -- I suppose we'll have to see.

FOSTER TO INDIANA

Jeff Foster to IND on a 1-year $5 mil contract.

Fair value. Foster is a good backup big, though he's old enough that you wouldn't want to dump more than 2 years into the deal. They didn't. So it's fine. Foster should play well behind Hibbert and West, though we'll have to see. Not much else to say. Good move to bolster the Indiana bench.

RICHARDSON TO ORLANDO

Jason Richardson to ORL on a 4-year $25 mil contract.

What? My first thought was "I honestly can't believe this signing." I looked it up. True facts. It happened. I could buy it if J-Rich was fresh off his virtuoso 2010 playoffs, but my lord, he looked absolutely finished last year. He was decent directly after coming to Orlando, but his legs essentially gave out from under him as the season went on and it culminated in one of the most toothless playoff performances of Richardson's short playoff career (10-4 on 33% shooting? Bad news.) I'd feel slightly better about this if it was a 2-year contract or something fewer, but Orlando essentially knotted J-Rich up for four years on a cap-eating $6.2 million a year contract. For what purpose? Does anyone really think a 34-year-old J-Rich is going to be worth $6.2 million, or anything close? It's exactly the same as those pre-CBA bloated MLE deals. Richardson has played 27,300 minutes in his career if you count the playoffs. My god. No idea what Otis is doing.

MBAH A MOUTE TO MILWAUKEE

Luc Richard Mbah a Moute to MIL on a 4-year $19 mil contract.

The contract seems a bit big for a player who has absolutely no ability to perform on offense, but really, it seems reasonable when you consider that Mbah a Moute is one of the league's best defenders at the three. Can't shoot worth a lick, but the Spurs have lusted after him for years because essentially as good as Bowen ever was and if a good shooting coach like Chip Engelland could get to him, he could learn the corner three and be a young Bowen for a new generation. As it stands, is he worth the deal? Maybe not, especially on the Bucks (whose shooting coach is so goddamn awful, I have my personal suspicions that it's Gilbert Arenas), but he's worth it to some teams and my guess is he'll be a valuable trade chip someday if nothing else. Such a great defender to watch.

CARTER, GRAY, BUTLER TO TORONTO
Anthony Carter, Aaron Gray, and Rasual Butler to TOR on 1-year vet-min deals.

I don't know how the rest of the league is going to deal with this three-man wrecking crew. In fact, I think we probably should just award the chip to the Raptors now and make this season a race to find out who's the 2nd best team in the league. Someone, make some Raptors championship rings right now. Use crystallized syrup to make the maple-leaf jewels on the top. Someone has to do this. Please. I'm begging you.

THOMAS TO PORTLAND

Kurt Thomas to POR on a 2-year vet-min contract.

Surprisingly, Big Sexy has been really good these last few years. He played a key role on the surprising 2010 Bucks and was a valuable defensive big for the 2011 62-win Chicago Bulls. Physical defender, solid pick and pop player, and for the vet-min you weren't getting a better center than this. He should be a good asset for a strong 2012 Blazers team that preps itself for life without Roy and Oden's last stand. Good pickup. Second year may not turn out well, but they can probably waive him if he's truly a catastrophe this year and -- again -- vet min for a productive backup center? Match made in heaven for a center-thin Trailblazers team.

BIBBY TO NEW YORK

Mike Bibby to NYK on a 1-year vet-min contract.

Mike Bibby is my least favorite player in the league. He is my least favorite player in the history of the league. There has never been another player I've hated more than Mike Bibby in the annals of history... past, present, or future. He turns all that he touches to dust. His gaze makes small children burst into flames. His saliva contains the root of all cancer, and it is my personal belief that cancer exists only because Mike Bibby's lips once sat upon the skin above the cancer, in the patient's sleep. This is Mike Bibby's legacy. ... Anyway, other than that, good move for New York.

JEFFRIES TO NEW YORK
Jared Jeffries to NYK on a 1-year vet-min contract.

This fine young lass may be kind of pissed off about it, but it's a good move for that kind of money. Jeffries is hardly a good player, but he's an OK defender and a warm body the Knicks can put in behind their two injury-prone big men. They need backups, and Jeffries fits the bill. Also: I misspelled his name as "Jeffires" two or three times -- I think someone needs to write a story about Jeffries devolving into a pyromaniac at Landry's behest and going crazy on the Occupy Wall Street movement in an attempt to spread the word about his mad "Jeffires." Keep spitting your Jeffires, Jeffries.

PAVLOVIC TO BOSTON

Sasha Pavlovic to BOS on a 1-year vet-min contract.

I don't get why teams still think Sasha can play professional basketball. He's been horrible since roughly 2007 and worse than any D-League call-up since about 2009. Why he keeps getting contracts (and then somehow parlaying these contracts into more playing time than most D-League guys) is a mystery to me. He must be really, really good at practice or something. And he must keep latching on to those coaches who hate rookies (see: Doc Rivers, Mike Brown). Really, tho? God only knows why he's still in this league and God only knows why I'm still writing about him. Next!

HAWES TO PHILADELPHIA
Spencer Hawes to PHI on a 1-year $4.5 mil contract.

Hawes is simply a terrible player, but at least it's a one year deal. Still not at all worth it, but Philly is thin on bigs so I can buy this as a semi-reasonable signing. Also, this signing allows me to post the following picture, which may very well be worth his price tag alone.

• • •

THE SMALL SIGNINGS: PART 3

BILLUPS TO LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS

Chauncey Billups to LAC for a 1-year $2 mil contract.

Like the move, though with some reservations. Chauncey warned the league that he didn't want to be taken off waivers, and that he'd essentially go psychotic on whatever team picked him up off waivers. He was given a personal warning by Stern, and all signs are that he's OK with getting picked up by the Clippers, but there's still some significant blow-up potential here. Honestly, though? This is a pretty good situation for him. The Clips have Mo Williams and Bledsoe at the guard, and when that's your only competition, even a rapidly aging Billups starts to look somewhat palatable. Not to mention the fact that they're a rising team that has a shot at a playoff berth and a possible title in coming years if Chris Paul makes it there. Honestly, in terms of under-cap situations, Billups couldn't have done much better. This was a good pickup for the Clips as long as Chauncey doesn't try and destroy the team, and if Chauncey is reasonable about it, he'll realize he shouldn't do that anyway.

PARKER TO CLEVELAND

Anthony Parker to CLE for a 1-year $2.25 mil contract.

This pickup honestly irritated me. Hollinger pointed out that the contract is contender-friendly and may very well be able to be moved for another first round pick at the deadline to a contender looking to shore up their bench. And that's true. But Parker is exactly the kind of player Cleveland should be running the other way from right now. He's a fading vet who was never particularly good to begin with, and at this stage of his career, is mainly known for indiscriminate chucking from three and the long two. We need to get possessions to Tristan Thompson, Kyrie Irving, Manny Harris, Christian Eyenga, and Anderson Varejao. We don't need to give possessions to Anthony Parker or Antawn Jamison. The Cavs need to rely on their young talent, sink or swim. I don't see where a 36-year-old fading chucker really fits in with that.

MCROBERTS TO LOS ANGELES LAKERS

Josh McRoberts to LAL for a 2-year $6.1 mil contract.

McRoberts isn't Odom, but he's a big improvement over the Derrick Caracter / Ater Majok frontcourt the Lakers had going behind Gasol and Bynum (both of whom are virtually guaranteed an injury at some point in the shortened season). He's also young -- at 24, he's younger than every key piece on the Lakers roster pre-McBobs but Bynum. He still has a bit of upside potential (though I'd emphasize IT IS VERY SMALL UPSIDE POTENTIAL), and overall, I see this as a pretty strong move for the Lakers. He came pretty cheap for a guy who could still get a bit better, and while (again) he's nowhere close to Odom, he's not nearly as bad as their alternative.

BROWN TO GOLDEN STATE

Kwame Brown to GSW for a 1-year $7 mil contract.

Brown was OK last year. Not good, but OK. Was he $7 million dollar OK? Hell no. The Warriors were looking pretty sparkling coming off of this season -- they had new ownership, Jerry West advising, a new coach to replace Don Nelson, a franchise star with Curry, and in general looked to have a bright future. Now? Not so sure. Yeah, they were "in the mix" for CP3, Tyson Chandler, and a variety of other big name free agents this season. Instead? They made the absolute stupidest amnesty decision they possibly could, they offered DeAndre Jordan a legitimately insane contract for no particularly good reason, and they just signed a fringe center for $7 million for one year. I know -- I've said it before, I'll say it again. One year deals aren't that bad. But my god, who were they bidding against? Why the hell did they give him that much? The fact is, as promising as things looked, the Warriors management has yet to prove anything -- if anything, they've made me worried they may very well be more incompetent than the buffoons they replaced. Here's hoping they prove us wrong. But right now, they've essentially clinched the title of "stupidest team of the offseason", and unfortunately for Warriors fans, the gap between them and the rest of the league isn't all that close right now. Well, sort of.

BAREA TO MINNESOTA

J.J. Barea to MIN for a 4-year $19 mil contract.

On the subject of "horrible, horrible" front offices, let's turn to Minnesota. Maybe it was a bit mean to say the Warriors have been the worst-managed team in this free agency period by a large margin. In fact, I'll remove the maybe. It was. Because much to the dismay of Minnesotans everywhere, the Timberwolves continued their season-to-season stab at being the most inexplicably dumb team in the league. The Warriors HAVE been worse than the T-Wolves this free agency period, but the T-Wolves are hardly a chasm away -- they're nipping at the Warriors heels. And it starts and ends with this abomination of a contract. When Alex said in his Chauncey story that Kahn is trying to create a 5-PG offense, it's not all that far from the truth -- Kahn has put together a ridiculous, mismatched roster with stupidly weird fits at every possible position and an impossible headache for coach Rick Adelman to try and unfold. I think he'll probably succeed, to some extent, but it's impossible to call this signing reasonable and further impossible to make any sense of the sort of team Kahn is trying to build. He's passed the level of "well, maybe he's just unique" -- he's putting together a roster that makes no sense with pieces that don't fit and calling himself a genius. May not be a genius, but you're sure something, David.

FERNANDEZ & BREWER TO DENVER

Rudy Fernandez and Corey Brewer to DEN from DAL for... a second round pick??

Not sure what the motivation was here by the Mavs. I don't dislike this deal for them, because with the West/Carter acquisitions they were a bit heavy in the wings, but you'd think they'd have been able to get more than what they got. Not to mention something Hollinger pointed out that I honestly hadn't remembered -- the Mavs acquired Rudy Fernandez after the Finals by trading their first round pick for him. So, the Mavs traded a first round pick (which turned into Jordan Hamilton, a decent upside late first rounder) for Rudy Fernandez only to trade Rudy for half of a second round pick. I... what? Really? Brewer, on the other hand, was the "prized" pickup around the trade deadline last season that was supposed to be the pickup that put the Mavs over the edge. It wasn't, at all. Since, you know, he barely played in the playoffs at all. But, well, it wasn't a bad pickup and I can't really blame them that it didn't turn out well. He should be fun on the Nuggets, as will Rudy (if he doesn't bolt for Real Madrid immediately after hearing of the deal), but on Dallas' end this trade simply makes no sense whatsoever. Sorry, Cuban.

• • •

Cheers, folks. More trades tomorrow -- this next post will cover the biggies, I think. Though I may eschew a formulaic post in favor of a series of big avant-garde dystopian fictions about teams that have made big acquisitions. (Scratch the dystopian fiction part, and you may approach an approximation of what's actually going to happen!) This post will most likely be continually updated with new small trades as they happen, or as I realize I've missed them. I'll update you as necessary. Stay frosty.

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 smaller deals and amnesties. There will be another post later today with more small deals, and a post tomorrow on big deals. Watch out for it.

• • •

THE SMALL SIGNINGS: PART 1

BATTIER TO MIAMI

Shane Battier to Miami on a 3-year $9 mil contract.

I like this move a lot more once I saw the money involved. $9 mil for 3 years of Battier? Even at his advanced age, it's a decent signing. Still, though, I have to cry foul that this is a good fit. The Heat have LeBron and Wade to play the wings -- Battier is a pure three, far too large and immobile to play the two at this stage of his career. I've heard rumblings he can play the four in Miami but I'm really not convinced -- he's not large enough to guard most good fours in the league, and his defense has been quietly getting worse the last few years. He's no longer quite the force he was in his prime on defense, and while his offense should fit nicely with the Heat (low usage, can shoot the three) I simply don't see any way you can play LeBron-Wade-Battier for long stretches to any real success. For that contract, though, he's a good asset and should improve the Heat. Not as much as a legitimate big man, but enough to make him worth it. I'll admit, though: I'm sad he didn't finish his career in Memphis. That would've been kind of amazing.

BUTLER TO LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS

Caron Butler to LAC on a 3-year $24 mil contract.

... what? Caron Butler has averaged 57 games per season the last 4 years. If he misses his "average" number of games next year, he'll miss 26 games if you use the calculation I made in my injury-projecting post. Even if you don't, my god, why make this signing? Butler's knees are a problem, he's already quite old, and you have no guarantee he's going to stay healthy for the duration of his contract. Also, you've made it so you can't sign Dwight Howard or any marquee free agent next summer. This is a classic "let's remind everyone that we're the Clippers, we're never going to amount to anything" type of signing that Sterling's brood is known for. I'm sorry Clips fans. But I do not see this working out very well for you.

DUNLEAVY TO MILWAUKEE

Mike Dunleavy to MIL on a 2-year $7.5 mil contract.

Holy crap, is this a good deal. I'd love to make this a paragraph on how much I dislike Dunleavy as a player, and it's true that he's a major injury risk, but for $3.75 million a year, who the hell cares? He shot 40% from three last year and came very, very close to having a true shooting percentage of 60%. He's going to the Bucks, a team with virtually no scorers last year. Jennings-to-Dunleavy is going to be hilarious and stupid, but he's a good get at that kind of money and should easily live up to that contract. Looking forward to see him in a Bucks jersey.

PRINCE TO DETROIT

Tayshaun Prince to DET on a 4-year $30 mil contract.

This may be the only legitimately awful move the Detroit Pistons have made this free agency period. I understand that $7.5 mil a year isn't the worst contract in the world, but my god, this contract takes Prince to the age of 35. His defense has fallen off quite a lot in recent years, and while he's one of the least injury-risk type players in the league, does anyone really think that's going to last? My best guess is they move this contract for picks to a contender sometime in the next year or two, but looking forward, I just don't know why they felt the need to make it.

JEREBKO TO DETROIT

Jonas Jerebko to DET on a 4-year $16 mil contract.

This is a stealthily good signing. While Jerebko lost a year to injury, he was a revelation his first year with the Pistons and he's a great piece to augment the growing youth movement in Detroit. I may make a post entirely dedicated to the Pistons some point soon -- I really, really like the way they're set up for the future and think they could be back to contention in one or two years. Jerebko is a big part of that. $4 mil a year is a good deal for a player who does as much as he can do when he's healthy, and as he was healthy in Europe, there are few concerns that his season-ending injury from last season will be the norm throughout his career. Good contract.

MCGRADY TO ATLANTA

Tracy McGrady to ATL on a 1-year vet minimum contract.

While T-Mac has been a disappointment ever since he got to Houston, on a vet min deal, I think he's actually a pretty good pickup for the Hawks. He's no outside shooter, but he's a good passer whose high spots are really, really high. Even last year for the Pistons, there was definitely some value in his play. He had games where he was suddenly old T-Mac again, bounding around the court and draining ridiculous shots and delivering the pocket passes that made him so fun to watch pre-injuries. He also had games where he looked like he had no idea how to play the game of basketball. As a min-paid first guard off the bench? There's value there. Good signing, I think.

BROWN TO PHOENIX

Shannon Brown to PHX on a 1-year $3.5 million contract.

I can't say I love this deal. Brown has been an incredibly overrated player in LA for years, and even at $3.5 million, I don't know if he'll offer any return to value. Brown can't play the point, and the Suns have Childress and Dudley ahead of him in the depth chart. Pietrus, too -- except he got traded (see below). Will Brown add anything to the Suns that those players don't have? Hardly. He can't shoot and he's somewhat of a headcase. The only redeeming factor here is the length on the deal. One year means that if it doesn't work out, he's out next year. Still a rather confusing signing to me, but on a one-year deal, I suppose it's sensible.

FORD TO SAN ANTONIO
T.J. Ford to SAS on a 1-year vet minimum contract.

COLLINS TO ATLANTA
Jason Collins to ATL on a 1-year vet minimum contract.

KAPONO TO LOS ANGELES LAKERS
Jason Kapono to LAL on a 1-year vet minimum contract.

These are all similarly useless signings, but bear mentioning just because they do have the potential to help slightly lessen potential weaknesses for the Spurs and the Lakers. On the Spurs end, Ford is a terrible workaday player but will be an improvement over Chris Quinn. On the Lakers end, Kapono is a completely worthless player inside the three point line but if Kobe scares him into doing nothing else but taking corner threes, he'll be worth it. And Collins is an awful player against almost everyone, but has a magical power where Dwight Howard suddenly plays horrible when Collins is on the court. In the long run, these three deals mean less than nothing, though. Thumbs down to every team for making me write about them!

DANIELS, WILCOX, & DOOLING TO BOSTON

Marquis Daniels & Chris Wilcox to BOS on 1-year vet min contracts, Keyon Dooling to BOS from MIL for a 2nd round pick.

Good moves for Boston. Daniels was injured all of last season and may be fully gone by this point, but the Celtics bench is absolute trash right now and Daniels has the upside of being a great defensive player when he's healthy. His offense is a horror scene, but the type of defense he gives you off the bench is absolutely fantastic for the money you're paying him. He's going to get injured, inevitably. Dooling was a serviceable backup point in Milwaukee who got forced to be a starter -- he's as much of a lost cause as Daniels is in terms of upside, but as a bench guy on a contender, he could be decent. Wilcox? He was actually decent for the Pistons, though he's extremely old and most likely will fall off significantly this year. None of these mean all that much in a vacuum. But in a season where guys are going to be out for injury, you can't have a bench as thin as the Celts had and expect to survive. Picking up these guys helps that. Not to mention that if nothing else, Daniels on the Celts just feels right at this point. He should retire a Celtic.

PIETRUS TO TORONTO
TOR receives Mikhael Pietrus & cash, PHO receives conditional second round pick.

It's a bit sad that all Phoenix could get for Pietrus was a conditional second round pick they'll never recieve, but they kind of torpedoed his trade value by barely playing him at all last season, so this probably is as fair a return as they can expect. On the Raptors side, they're being paid to take on a $5.3 million dollar expiring contract for a low upside three point shooter in a position they had no talent at last season. Pretty good haul for the Raptors, all things considered. Pretty sad move for the Suns. A Sarver-type move if there ever was one. If they're willing to spend, the trade does also give them a $5.3 million dollar trade exception, but does anyone on earth actually think the Suns are going to actually use it for frontcourt help? I'd hope they do, but I really doubt it.

PENDERGRAPH TO INDIANA

Jeff Pendergraph to IND on a two year minimum contract.

Not bad. Pendergraph has been a relatively useless player in the league so far, so it's doubtful that the move is going to be anything more than a move for bench filler. But the kid was drafted in 2009, and while he doesn't have a huge amount of upside, he doesn't need to -- on a min deal he gives you min production with the possibility for slightly more. Good move by the Pacers.

MORE MARGINAL ONE YEAR MINIMUM PLAYERS
Sebastien Telfair to PHO, Jamaal Tinsley to UTA, Jamaal Magloire to TOR, Roger Mason Jr. to WAS, Vladimir Radmonovic to ATL, Earl Watson to UTA, Juwan Howard to MIA, Derrick Brown to CHA, Tony Battie to PHI.

I don't think there's a single signing here that's of any consequence. One liners for each: Telfair is done, Tinsley is worse, Magloire (former All-Star! YEAH!!!) might as well not be on the court, Vlad Rad has been done for years, Earl Watson can't find the broad side of a barn with the rock (but defends decently well), Juwan is forty five and a half years old, Derrick Brown is a decent player who may develop into something (but probably won't), and Battie will continue to do absolutely nothing to solve the problem for a team with no big men. There. Gone over all of them. Wait... did I miss one?

... ROGER MASON JR GOT A NEW CONTRACT?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?! WHAT?!?!?

• • •

AMNESTIES & WAIVERS

DET: RIP HAMILTON

Waived -- $8 mil out of $21.5 mil left on his deal.

Kind of a no-brainer, but I'm absolutely shocked they got him to agree to take that much off his contract. My guess is they told him it was either a waiver or amnesty, and amnesty would make it impossible for the Bulls (Rip's preferred landing spot) to pick him up. The other good thing? The minimal size of the buyout suddenly makes the Pistons players in the 2012 free agency circus, if they amnesty Gordon or Villanueva and resist offering Stuckey too much to stick around. Still. Rip didn't want to be in Detroit, and they didn't want him either. Again: no brainer.

GSW: CHARLIE BELL
Amnestied -- $4 million over 1 year left on deal.

WELP! Never mind! This one occurred after the Billups amnesty, so even though it looks like I wrote this before the Billups paragraph, I didn't. I said that the Billups amnesty was going to be the worst one we'd see this cycle. I thought that was a fairly good bet, but my god, I didn't expect the Warriors to botch things up this thoroughly. Biedrins -- a terrible player at this point in his career, has $27 million over 3 years owed to him. Bell? He had $4 million on a 1 year deal. WHY IN GOD'S NAME DO YOU AMNESTY HIM? Okay, yeah. I know WHY they did it. Because they wanted to offer Deandre Jordan a bloated offer sheet in hopes that the Clips wouldn't match. Realistically? The Clips will match, and the Warriors will have utterly wasted their shot at having incredible cap space the next two years in order to throw money at a player they're never going to get. They also rescinded their rights to Reggie Williams, a valuable piece for the backcourt depth he provides, and cut Jeremy Lin. What the hell are they doing?

HOU: HASHEEM THABEET
Amnestied -- $5.1 million over 1 year left on deal.

While I'd initially expect Thabeet wouldn't be the worst contract on the Rockets' roster, I'd be wrong. Thabeet's $5.1 mil in 2012 is easily the worst contract on the Rockets' roster, and nobody else is really anywhere close. It's kind of amazing how a franchise can make as few big-time mistakes as Houston does and still miss the playoffs year-in and year-out. Still. Thabeet will get taken on a flyer by some under-cap team starved at center (Timberwolves, perhaps?) and will continue to be a marginal NBA talent who has dramatically underperformed even the most pessimistic views of how he'd perform in the league. Simply abominable.

NYK: CHAUNCEY BILLUPS

Amnestied -- $14.2 million over 1 year left on deal.

This is probably one of the worst amnesties we're going to see. People forget this, but the Knicks had an out option on Billups' contract -- the Knicks could've let his option expire and eschewed using amnesty altogether. They didn't. They picked up his option and amnestied him, which is fine for Chauncey (as he now gets all of the $14.2 million instead of just part of it) but bad for the Knicks, as they've wasted their amnesty. If Amare's knees go out, the franchise is screwed to high heaven now. Not like it matters much -- a Melo-Chandler-Shumpert core isn't going to be contending for much, Amare is a key part of the Knicks' puzzle. If he goes down, so too do the Knicks' dreams of contention. Regardless. I feel bad for Chauncey. You have to think he feels a lot of anger towards Melo, at this point. Melo's team trades him, taking him from a team he loved, then makes the WCF with him. Lets him get settled back into his hometown team, then wrests him from Denver to go to the shell of a contender in New York. Then... amnesties him, forcing him to go to some crummy under-cap team that bids the highest for his services? Awful luck. I don't like Billups much as a player at this point in his career, but I feel bad for the guy. I realize this would be impossibly silly given the Miller trade and Ty Lawson, but I hope Denver resigns him. He wanted to retire with the Nuggets, and he should get that opportunity.

ORL: GILBERT ARENAS

Amnestied -- $62 million over 3 years left on deal.

No-brainer for the Magic. They wanted the flexibility, and Arenas showed himself to be a completely worthless asset in his time in Orlando. I was partial to the idea that they keep him around for one last run with Dwight, but post-Bass trade, applying amnesty to the Arenas deal put them slightly under the tax and allowed them to use the full MLE and make a few runs at good players for the spot. Not bad. In his case, it looks like he's not going to get taken off waivers -- if so, he'll probably be picked up near the end of the year by a contender hoping for a piece to get them over the edge. He won't be that piece. But it'll be fun to watch.

PHO: VINCE CARTER, ZABIAN DOWDELL & GANI LAWAL
Waived -- $4 mil out of $18 for Carter, and none out of $788,000 for Lawal or Dowdell.

Interestingly enough, the Suns decided to waive Carter and Lawal outright instead of using their amnesty card -- given how little they had to actually pay, it wasn't a bad move for them. There was absolutely no reason for the Suns to keep Carter around after his horrific performance last year. Lawal has been terrible as an NBA player and during the lockout looked relatively overmatched in the Euroleague -- he needs time in the D-League and overseas to get his feet under him before he can come back to the NBA, if ever. Still. Good move for Phoenix. They'll miss you, Vince. New move, too -- they waived Zabian Dowdell, because although he's been promising so far he's got knee problems and the Suns wanted to go in a different direction. I really do hope Dowdell gets picked up by someone, tho -- he's a nice guy and his story was one of the better ones on the 2011 Suns, a team with a lot of good stories. Good luck, Zabian.

“Who’s going to pull the button on it? When Chris says he has to be traded, how’s that going to go? … Someone’s going to have to make a very nonjudgmental decision on that part that’s not going to irritate anyone else in the league.”

-- Phil Jackson. December 29th, 2010.

Los Angeles pulled off a coup, Thursday. Nobody thought they could do it. But they got him. Best player at his position. 2008 MVP (should've been, too, though LA fans don't like to admit it). There have been other suitors, mind you. There have been better offers, depending on what you think they're looking for. But the team bowled him over, took a bigger-than-reported risk, and expects it'll pay off. And really, when you're fresh off a new TV deal, fresh off a labor dispute, and fresh off a lot of bad PR for the city and sport? Why not, you know? Take the chance, roll the dice, and get the best player you can. When I saw the news, I was shocked. I sincerely wondered if I'd been dreaming. Was it an illusion? Don't think so, I'm starting to come around, but I'm still going to go check. ... Yep. Pujols is still a Los Angeles Angel of Anaheim. You thought I was talking about Paul? Maybe tonight, but not as I write this post.

That was your Thursday. The NBA opened today. Welcome to the madhouse on Madison Boulevard, folks.

• • •

I don't really want to be flip about this. But I'm going to start with some context. This year has starred sports scandals of unparalleled depravity. Sandusky/Fine, the Turkish football debacle, the Miami stuff earlier this year -- we've had a rough year. And the Lakers? It's arguable that this trade going down in flames is a very good thing for them. It wasn't a stellar trade for them. It may still happen. But if it doesn't, in the same way I will wake up tomorrow and return to my life of basketball bloggissista-ing, the Lakers will wake up tomorrow and return to laking. They've dominated this league since before I was born and they'll dominate it after I die. Don't get CP3? Fine. They'll corner the market on the next young star, win a few rings, and remind everyone who they are. This particular scandal isn't important in the grand scheme of the world, much like anything related to sports.

In the context of the NBA, though, it's big.

The trade-that-wasn't shines a whole lot of light on things that Stern would've rather kept in the dark. There's no more than two or three people I've talked to who actually approve of what happened -- how it went down or that it went down. Which is, frankly, the key distinction between this and the LeBron debacle or the Melo trade. The fundamental difference that makes this so much more important to the league. In each of those situations, you had a significant number of people who were angry -- furious, even -- and some significant disapproval of the thing that happened. But in both of those cases, even with those who disapproved, you could still extract the obvious "it's HOW it happened, not THAT it happened" caveat that makes the gripe so much more reasonable. It isn't that LeBron left in free agency. It's that he did it the way he did! It isn't that Melo got traded, it's that he did it in such a way that ruined the Nuggets' season. Never mind we don't really have a better alternative. It's still not a critique of the mechanisms that put the deal into place, or the trade itself. It's a critique of the manner it happened, the players involved, the externalities unaccounted for. But this? The outrage over this trade? This isn't outrage over the manner it went down (although, frankly, it went down worse than Melo or LeBron in terms of bad PR). This isn't outrage over the players that any of the franchises were going to get. Really, it's not. This isn't outrage over the external problems the deal itself would create, like the TPE tailored to fit Hedo.

The outrage is rooted in the blatant disregard for protocol that Stern showed by changing the rules mid-stream, I think. Look at it this way. Stern gave Demps the authority to wheel and deal. Demps did his job -- he saw the market, talked with his star, and got the best deal possible. There were things to quibble with, but overall, the Hornets got a decent haul and would be able to flip their new assets for picks relatively easily. There were always going to be teams in the league that wanted those assets, if the Hornets decided they were selling. But Stern didn't like that Demps had simply done his job and done what was best for the Hornets, and he didn't like the media explosion that went on as people realized what had happened. Just like that, Stern went and did something that would look bad even if he was a normal, everyday owner. See, at first I thought this was at least slightly reasonable -- I considered the fact that owners can, and sometimes do, refuse to go through with trades. Stern owned the team. Ipso facto, it was similar to those situations. Right?

Wrong. The thing is, it wasn't an owner straight refusing to go with a trade. It was the owner accepting the trade by granting his implicit OK, beginning the machinations, allowing the trade to come to completion and fruition... then immediately relenting when he realized what he'd done. Owners don't usually do that, because that would be completely ridiculous. It would show no confidence in your GM, your front office, and essentially make you the team's overlord. Not the team's owner. There are unwritten rules and mores that owners follow. Now, Stern didn't think things through when he allowed the Hornets to shop Paul, that's obvious now. He should have just told Demps they weren't trading him, and that was that. Perhaps Demps would've resigned then, instead of at the end of this mess. What Stern did was laugh at the trade proceedings, accept them on a theoretical level, then did a complete about face and shot everything down at the last second. He stretched the credulity of the mechanisms involved and broke protocol that was previously well-established -- the league's front office simply doesn't make this kind of a call. Did he own the team? Sure, under a sketchy definition of ownership. But an owner doesn't reject a trade after its happened. An owner makes sure the GM is aware that the trade will require his approval before the fact. A real owner does that, and that's the protocol of GMs in an average owner/GM relationship. But in the case of this trade, he led Demps and all parties involved to believe that Demps needed no final approval to make the trade. Demps was the Hornets. He represented them. Hence why it was reported a done deal. Then, out of nowhere, to strike it down?

That's where it simply gets absurd. It stretches the mechanisms that make the league work. It hurts the GM to league relationship between Demps and Stern, and whether intentionally or not, left everything so vague last night that nobody really had any idea of what capacity Stern had rejected the trade in. Did he reject the trade as the league's commissioner? As the Hornets' de facto owner? As simply David Stern, the all-time representative of the league's power? Nobody really knew, and in a case as strange and unprecedented as this, ambiguity begets assumptions. Assumptions that are unilaterally worse than the truth, but also completely understandable -- in a situation where someone does something so utterly absurd that you have no idea how to respond to it, all you can really do is make assumptions. Cut through the hazy ambiguous waters of the bloody sea nobody really knew even existed.

That's why this was so incredibly strange, concerning, and altogether disheartening. That's why, when I saw the trade had been cancelled, my confusion turned to sadness turned to anger. Even as someone who really, really doesn't like the Lakers. In erasing that which he'd already approved, he changed the game. He completely transcended the rules he had himself created, destroyed protocol, and created a monster drenched in ambiguity. The next time a big trade gets made, NBA fans aren't going to remember that the league owned the Hornets when they rejected the deal. They aren't going to remember all the reasons Stern technically wasn't as in the wrong as people say. They're going to remember the feelings of confusion, regret, and not-knowing. The feeling that nothing the NBA front office said could be taken at face value anymore. They're going to remember that Stern balled up his fist and had a tantrum, and destroyed a perfectly reasonable trade on his whims alone. May not be true, but it's perception and it's how it felt to all involved. That matters. It's dangerous, for a league trying to expand, to become less of a running joke among some. And yeah, I think the trade happens tonight. But even when and if it does, the feelings of confusion from last night are going to drench the league among the ones who saw it for years. It's singlehandedly upended "The Decision" as the hallmark moment of the NBA's followers in the last few years. And it's not a good thing. For anybody.

So, the answer to Phil Jackson's question one year ago? "No one knows." It's one year later. We still don't.

 

I wasn't planning to write another post about injuries this week, but I was talking with a friend of mine about Chris Paul and a thought came into my head that I didn't want to sit on. One of Chris Paul's most notable traits (unfortunately) is his somewhat sketchy injury history. While he only missed 2 games last season for a scary-but-minor concussion, thinking about all the dings and dents of an NBA season and the possible repercussions on Paul got me to thinking about how those will look this year. To start -- the season is compressed, and every game mathematically matters more. Andrew Bynum was suspended five games for his hit on J.J. Barea in last year's playoffs. In a full season, that's 6.0% of a player's possible games. In a compressed season? 7.5%. Not an insignificant difference, by any means. The effect of individual games being worth more in the overall picture is pretty straightforward. But as for that being the only effect? Not quite.

That's only true for suspensions, which are a designated number of games. What about injuries? When a player gets a hip strain or a sprained ankle, they aren't out some prescribed number of games. It isn't like the NFL, where a concussion means a designated number of games out of action. An injury to a basketball player simply means you're out until you're in playing shape again, whenever that may be. Usually, it takes some set number of days of sitting out and recuperating. Some medical treatment. Some downtime. Some coaches bring players back on less rest, some coaches use more -- my last post on injuries tries to get at the heart of the coaching side of NBA injuries by looking at raw numbers and assigning them to coaches. In this post, I'm more interested in simply translating some player-side numbers from 2011 to the compressed season. This is more like my previous analysis of compression trends, except instead of trends, this involves cold hard facts.

The guiding hypothetical to this post: if players were to go through the exact same injuries in the 2012 season as they went through in the 2011 season, how many more games would they miss? Good question, voice in my head. Let's go find that out. To the spreadsheet, once again.

• • •

METHODOLOGY

I'll start by describing the data methodology. I didn't do every injury from last season -- that would take a really, really long time. This still took a pretty long time, but not nearly as long as it could have. For this spreadsheet, I started about midway through page five of this topic, where an international NBA fan essentially kept a running tab on the NBA's injury reports. In another tab, I had SBNation's player profile feature up -- SBNation's player profiles have an incredibly useful feature where in the bottom corner of the right sidebar you can find a record of a player's injuries and transactions. Whenever I saw a player come up in the forum topic, I looked up the player on SBNation and ensured they missed time. I then put all instances of their missed time into the dataset. Which, again, can be found here.

In the interest of non-overweighted numbers, I ignored players that missed so much time that translating their injury would mean they miss all or most of the season -- single injuries that led to more than 35 games of missed time were excluded from the data. I also excluded injuries that occurred before December 25th, 2010 -- reason being that it would skew the relative weights. I excluded most injuries only spanning two days with one or fewer games missed -- I still have one or two one-game missed periods, but those are all at least 3 days. When I'd compiled the starting and ending dates of all 2011 injuries in my dataset, I then opened the NBA's official calendar (example here) for each team and, team by team, counted out how many games they would have missed if they'd suffered the injury they sustained in 2011 in the 2012 schedule. The results, while not surprising, are a bit eye opening, and put some actual numbers to the intuition.

OVERALL TREND ANALYSIS

The overall trend isn't staggering by any means, but it puts some hard numbers behind the general idea that the same injury is going to mean more to a team in 2012's compressed schedule than it would have in any normal season. Let's ignore, for the moment, that a single game is (percentage-wise) more impactful in 2012 than in 2011. We assume that 2011 was a normal season for injuries, a relatively safe assumption. The following chart gives a look at solely the incremental games missed if any of the 101 injuries in the dataset had occurred in the 2012 compressed schedule as opposed to a normal 82-game schedule. That is to say, how many extra games were missed solely on account of the compressed schedule? Click the graph to go to the chart in the spreadsheet.

Quite a few. Over the course of the whole season, 622 games were lost to injury according to my dataset. Were those games played under the compressed 2012 schedule, that 622 would balloon to 731 games lost to injury. A difference of 109 games over the entire league, a significant result in and of itself. Using per injury numbers, you find that simply changing the schedule from 2011 to 2012 leads to a total of 1.11 more games lost for each injury in the dataset. When you consider how many of the injuries in this dataset are actually relatively small-time injuries, that number starts to seem a little large. To wit, a scatterplot with the number of games missed to injury on the x-axis and the number of incremental games lost on the y-axis. Again, click for the spreadsheet.

This chart reveals the most deadly part of the incremental additions. They aren't really distributed in a predictable way. There's a slight upward trend if you do a simple trendline, but in general the added 1-2 games of loss you experience when translating injuries from the 2011 schedule to the 2012 schedule is going to happen essentially without regard for how many games your injury is. That's a big deal. You can expect an extra game or so for even the most minor injuries -- for example, the 2-game loss Chris Paul had last season for his minor concussion? That balloons to four in this dataset. Chris Bosh's short four game stint with a sprained ankle in late January last season? That's eight games in 2012. Dirk's nine game swoon during his ankle sprain? Eleven, meaning that the Mavericks would play a whole 16% of their 2012 schedule without Dirk if he had that injury this year. Tough cookies.

And that brings us back to the percentages -- raw games is a good way to look at the extra losses, but doesn't account for all the lost value inherent in the season simply being shorter. Taking the average numbers from before, the average injury in this dataset took up 7.74% of the player's season. (Notice I say average injury. Many players had multiple injuries -- it took up more of their seasons.) We've already established that on average, players missed more games for the same injury. If you compound that effect with the effect of the compression itself, you find that the average injury translated to 2012 takes up 11.3% of the player's season in the translated schedule. That's a big difference, and remember, we're talking about the exact same injuries. We aren't accounting for the time it takes for them to get back. We aren't accounting for the added stress of too-close for comfort travel. And we aren't accounting for added injuries at all, these are exactly the same injuries.

... anyone else concerned for the league's resident old folks? Juwan Howard, take a day off.

• • •

In short? Expect every injury to matter a lot more in the 2012 season than they did in 2011, for reasons of scaling and the compressed nature of the schedule itself. Injuries mattered, last year, but in 2012 they're going to be more influential. And if 1999 is our guide, there will probably be quite a few more of them. Which creates, in turn, a cascading effect -- each injury is more important, which makes coaches want to bring players back as quickly as possible, which leads to more injuries. It's a vicious cycle, and one the NBA probably should have thought about a bit before releasing this meat-grinder of a schedule. But it's one that we as fans will happily live with -- if we have to have a stupidly compressed schedule for the sides to agree to have a season, I don't know about you, but I'm good with it. Well. Maybe not good. But I can deal with it, you know?

So, I was thinking. A dangerous habit, I know. Last year's underrated Cavs story was just how hard Byron Scott pushed the team in practices and off-the-court training. I'm talking suicide sprints after every loss, players throwing up in training camp, etc. Now, the 2011 Cavs were an awful team. But Byron Scott's "bad cop, crazy cop" routine made no sense to me. If your child is bad at a school subject, screaming at them and forcing them to do thousands of extra homework problems isn't going to do much of anything. Besides leaving them with crippling psychological disorders, anger management problems, and Samardo Samuels.

Overall? This had me rather worried about Kyrie Irving and the 2011 Cavs. Kyrie, as everyone knows, is coming off a injury-torn season where he played only 11 games of college ball. Not very pleasant, but he performed lights out when he played. What if Byron Scott's insane practices hurt him? The whole tangent got me to thinking about ways I could, perhaps, poke at a measure of coach-centered effects on injuries. As with my last big statistical post, this isn't an advanced model or a particularly advanced concept -- essentially, I'll be taking data from our pals at Brewhoop and repackaging it to describe coaches. Current coaches only, and for the majority of this post, only a smaller subsample of those coaches. Ones with enough seasons that I feel we can start to make some conclusions. There will be three parts -- an intro, some analysis of the big outliers, and a short discussion.

For my spreadsheet, check out the Google Doc. Let's get to it.

• • •

Part I: Introduction

For this part, turn to Sheet "GAMES LOST (sig)" in the spreadsheet.

Here are the results of my labors. In this spreadsheet, there are two main sheets -- a summary of all active coaches (plus one or two recently-inactive ones for completeness), and a summary of those who coached more than 3 seasons in the time period of this analysis (2001-2011). The most important of the two is the second -- the one that culls out the small-sample-size coaches and leaves us with some we can begin to make actual conclusions about, slim though they may be. To start, here's quoting the excellent folks whose post provided the numbers to do this analysis, summarizing how they arrived at the numbers (and it's recommended reading in its own right):

For this, I used the data from the excellent Basketball Reference. I started with the first team alphabetically by city (Atlanta), starting with the 2000-2001 season. I opened three BR tabs (no, not Bleacher Report) for the roster/stats of that year's team, the player transactions they made during that year, and finally the schedule of the team. I first looked at the transactions to see if any player movement occurred throughout the season for that particular team. Then, I looked at the roster and only examined the players who played an average of over 20 minutes per game, and only the top nine players if there was more than nine 20 minute players (the numbers will be different than Pelton's piece because he looked at all players, not just the top nine). Obviously players don't miss games just because of injury--suspensions and DNPs also factor in--but by restricting the sample to a team's top nine I tried to only look at rotation players who would be expected to play in every game. I then subtracted the amount of games they played from total possible games they could have played. If a player moved during the season, I looked at the schedule and dates of when they were traded to find out how many possible games they could have played with their team before being traded/waived, and subtracted from there. The same goes for if a team signed a new player somewhere in the middle of a season. If a player wasn't moved at all, I kept their total possible games at 82.

While it's relatively ad hoc (and does necessarily ignore suspensions, though it looks like he accounted for the suspensions having to do with the Palace brawl), it's a systemic and relatively robust way to account for lost games. The alternative is to spider through this particularly good NBA injury database, but honestly, given the already dubious assumptions I'm making in essentially "assigning" to coaches all injuries that occurred under their watch, I'm not prepared to spend a 5-6 hour period spidering that database and going through the massive hassle of linking it with my personal database. So that goes by the wayside for now. I took the data he presented in that post, then connected it with coaches -- if a coach only coached for a partial season, I pro-rated the number of missed games based on the percentage they coached -- IE, George Karl coached 40 games in 2005, so he is assigned a pro-rated 40/82 (48%) of their 74 missed games that season, and his # of seasons coached is adjusted accordingly.

Some basic stats from the analysis, to start -- according to the data, we have a baseline of 70 missed games a season for an average long-tenured coach, and 69 missed games a season among all coaches in the dataset. That may seem odd, at first, but think of it this way -- the fact that the averages are so close is actually a really good thing. It provides some evidence that there is an actual population mean, and that there's a fair chance that we're looking at a long-tail normal distribution (i.e., despite a true population mean, the data range is wide, spanning from far below the mean to far above the mean). It also gives us an effective midpoint. The average number of seasons coached by a coach in the dataset is 6 seasons among all coaches, and 8 seasons among coaches with > 3 seasons.

• • •

Part II: the Outliers

For this part, turn to Sheet "GAMES LOST (sig)" in the spreadsheet.

Instead of doing the workaday sort of analysis, the data here is odd and foggy enough that I feel a specific examination of some coaches significantly beyond the threshold from the average is in order. As a general rule, I'm going to look at coaches that are clocking in at an average of either 20 more games missed than the average or 20 games fewer missed than the average. Let's get to it.

GREGG POPOVICH, SAS -- 40 per year (11.00 seasons)

This one seems reasonable to me. Pop has never had a particularly bad reputation in terms of practice conditions, and (as Sean Elliot describes) hops through pretty large hoops to make sure his players don't play injured (and risk more injury). An ounce of prevention is worth a liter of cure, I always say. It doesn't really shock me that he's the best at managing injuries, though the magnitude by which he takes the spot surprised me. As did his consistency. Not only does he have the lowest raw average, he also has a standard deviation among the lowest in the set. Partially this is a figment of the relatively larger sample size, but it's worth noting -- Pop is essentially everything you'd want if you bought these numbers. Low average games lost, and (relative to everyone else) low uncertainty about the estimate. Plausibility: High.

MIKE D'ANTONI, NYK/PHX -- 46 per year (7.74 seasons)

Now that's a bit of a surprise. The coach who oversaw Amare's microfracture is somehow among the lowest in missed games per season? Bonkers. Until you think about it a bit more. D'Antoni is a lot of things, and he does run his teams at a fast pace, but the correlation between pace and injury rate is shaky at best and fallacious at worst. D'Antoni spent years coaching for the Suns, an organization renowned for their best-in-class medical staff and their very own resident player-friendly health expert in Steve Nash. His loss numbers aren't actually up in New York yet, though, and that's what makes me wonder if (perhaps) D'Antoni didn't just take his offense from Phoenix -- he may also have taken their best-practices coaching and knows how to best keep his players from getting injured. Far be it from me to assert that the D'Antoni Knicks are going to be impervious from injury or anything like that. But might he have picked up some institutional knowledge from the Suns that he spread in the Knicks organization? Plausibility: High.

STAN VAN GUNDY, MIA/ORL -- 49 per year (6.25 seasons)

I actually was expecting this, even though I don't know if many people would. Three reasons. First, SVG is a loudmouth, but he isn't actually a mean coach -- his players love him, almost without exception. SVG doesn't leave his players out to dry, and more often than not, criticizes himself and his game plan above his players. When he complains about playing on Christmas day or about the number of back to back games the Magic play in a season, he's not doing it solely for his benefit, he's doing it for the players. Second, he's coached Dwight Howard. Big men are injured more than virtually any other position in the league -- if you cull through injury reports, you'll find proportionally more big men than you'd expect. Dwight, though? He puts in 36-40 MPG and has missed a grand total of 7 games in his career, many from suspensions. If you play Dwight, you've necessarily got fewer minutes available for big men, and that means less chances for your 7th man stiff of a big man to tear his ACL or shatter his knee. Third? He's an extremely good, underrated X's and O's coach who strikes me as one to make practices more about learning his system than simply running his guys to the ground. So it didn't really surprise me that he was low. Plausibility: High.

• • •

And now, for the other end of the spectrum -- coaches whose averages were 20 games HIGHER than the average. Two of them.

MIKE BROWN, LAL/CLE - 99 per year (5.00 seasons)

This is the only result that really shocked me. Why? I honestly thought Brown was going to turn up pretty well out of this analysis. I've never really heard anything rough about his practice schedule, and he got to coach LeBron at his prime, where he barely missed a thing year after year. Then again. Big Z, Ben Wallace, Antawn Jamison, Shaq, Delonte -- the Cavs had a lot of injuries and turmoil during his tenure, and while I think he's better suited as a teaching example for why this sort of analysis is inherently flawed (is it really his fault that these players got injured?) it makes sense that he's this high. He also has fewer seasons than anyone else 20 games outside the average, so you'd think if it isn't an accurate representation of his coaching talents, it'll even out by the time he has as many seasons under his belt as Pop, Sloan, or Scott. Plausibility: Low.

BYRON SCOTT, CLE/NJN/NOH - 99 per year (9.62 seasons)

Scott was the impetus for this post, sure, but even I didn't expect the numbers were going to work out this well for my case. Scott's system is a meat grinder for young players and especially guards -- I have a friend in New Orleans who honestly thinks Scott might've damaged CP3's knees permanently with how hard he played him, and while I don't know if you can blame him for 100% of that, you can certainly blame a system where he punishes losing with suicide sprints and snidely putting down his players to the press. Well, okay -- you can't blame that second part, that's just a dick move on his part. Regardless. Scott's teams don't actually play all that fast, and as I said earlier, the research I've seen seems relatively lukewarm on the idea that pace has a real impact on how injured your players get in the first place. But of all the coaches in the sample, there's not one coach's numbers I buy more than Scott's. A lot of seasons, a lot of variance, but nothing about it seems off to me. And everything about it seems depressing to me, knowing that he's going to be coaching a team chock-full of young talent. Someone get me a stiff drink. Plausibility: Through the Roof.

• • •

Part III: Conclusions

Honestly, having said all this, I think there's enough material here and in the spreadsheet for you all to draw your own conclusions. I would just like to offer a few big caveats to this post before you do. First is the most important one -- I wouldn't be comfortable presenting this to my boss. I'm a statistician, and these numbers (while honestly extremely interesting) aren't nearly rigorous enough to be anywhere close to, say, an academic paper or even a predictive model.

The fact is, injuries AREN'T endemic to the coach, and it could be very reasonably argued that all the findings of this post are a factor of luck more than anything else. I wouldn't necessarily argue against that, even. However, I do think that it's within the realm of possibility that certain coaches run their practices and their training camps in a way that makes their teams more injury prone. And I think it's within the realm of possibility that others do the opposite. I wouldn't claim that these numbers "prove" anything -- I just think examining the outliers in an analysis like this and seeing if they pass the smell test (which, I'll note, 4/5 of them did) is a valuable way to look at this sort of stuff.

In any event, I hope you found these injury trends interesting. I won't be using this data for my pre-season win prediction model I'm working on, because I don't think it's nearly robust enough for that, but I do appreciate the fact that the analysis challenged my preconceptions about Mike Brown's coaching and confirmed my darkest fears about Byron Scott's coaching. Well, no, I'm not ACTUALLY that appreciative about that, damnit. But at least I know what to expect. As always -- any questions, let me know. I'm a really busy person lately, but I'm always happy to spend a bit of time answering questions or clearing up inaccuracies. Best way to reach me is either through the comments here or through twitter, @docrostov. Stay frosty.

Hey. My name is Cesar, I’m a friend of Aaron's, and the same guy he was talking about in the Andrew Bynum player capsule. Short version: I’m a Hispanic Lakers fan, I made a religion based off of Bynum's elbow, and I carry with me a sincere hope that a fight breaks out in every sports game I watch. I was unironically opposed to trading Bynum for Melo last season (and not just for the sake of my religion). Aaron is letting me write an article, which is very nice of him. Classy stuff: just the type of behavior you’d expect from a fan of the most boring team in sports. I don’t know if I’ll stick around, but it’s always nice to try new things, so let's get started.

As you all know, the lockout sucked. Crazy as it may sound, though, there were actually people who thrived in the absence of basketball. These folks engaged in acts of schadenfreude over the season that wasn't, due to their irrational hatred of basketball and/or the NBA. Others, too, thrived -- people who enjoyed the game didn't quite approve of a cancelled season, but still managed to display an incredible, inexcusable degree of ignorance about the lockout. There's no way around it: These people deserve to be scorned and ridiculed for their terrible opinions. So, who are they? Really very easy to find, just go to your favorite sports site, and then find any article about the lockout! Then you can scroll down to the dark soulless abyss known colloquially as the comments section. To save you some time, I've undertaken this dark work myself and made a record of it. Click the jump as I take you on a tour through the worst of sports fandom at one of the lowest points of the lockout. Make yourselves comfortable.

• • •

First up we have a CBS Sports article. Let’s see what we can find. Pictures of the comment, then my response:

Eternal defending champs? Can’t argue with that! Mavs: 2011-2032 NBA champs.

The owners also have to worry about willingly giving shitty players huge contracts and finding a way to blame it on the players. Don't forget that part.

• • •

Essentially nobody goes to CBS Sports for sports news, though, since there were only like 15 comments. Most of them were boring, so let’s move on to a more high traffic site like ESPN.com:

We’re paying Derek Fisher HOW MUCH per hour again? ... maybe there WAS some merit to this lockout after all.

I have no sympathy for the thousands of workers who would be struggling to pay their bills after the lack of a season cost them their jobs either, Greg. Or the 400 people laid off from the lockout. High five man!

Hmm, pushing the player’s buttons more? Yes, this is a good idea. Has definitely worked well before.

Ahh, there it is. The “overpaid/unintelligent thugs” comment that you see so often when anything NBA related comes up. Say, Dave20190, when you say “thug” do you actually mean... (Editor's note: Redacted)

Now this is one Dave that really does know best.

Even the Celtics organization’s own fans were willing to skip a season. Ayo, 17titlesncounting, KEVIN GARNETT ISN’T GONNA GET ANY YOUNGER!

Yeah those kids really have a passion to jack up bad threes after wasting 33 seconds of shot clock and they NEVER dream of one day getting drafted by an organization that pays them for their work instead of exploiting them like the child slaves they are under the NCAA. Because that would be crazy. They'd rather be NCAA for life. Screw "fraudville."

A poverty sport? Does he think the players are on food stamps or something? Don't even know how to approach this one.

• • •

Fact: ESPN commenters are dumb. (Their columnists who link to this blog are the best though! And DDL is pretty ballin too.) Next on our tour of horrors is fark.com, these dudes REALLY love sports, so much that they have a dedicated section filled with only sports news links, surely the civil discourse here is better right?

These damn gangsters! All they care about is money! I won't stand for it! I hope they never play again! By the way, here's the exact negotiating position I feel they should stake out in order to maximize their wealth and continue to play as soon as possible!

Welp, there goes the economy…

Spoiler alert: buckeyebrain is racist.

AHAHAHAHA. Bird and Jordan being "fairly nice" guys? Good one tetsoushima, tell me another knee slapper!

• • •

What’s that? Can’t take it anymore? You'd like to get off this planet to live in isolation for the rest of your days on Mars, secluded from the human race? You know, you could just... close this article. I wouldn't blame you. But if you're sticking with me, thanks. I’ll let you get the paperwork ready for your move to Mars soon, but we still have one more stop. This is the big time right here folks, feast your eyes on the black hole of human decency known as the Yahoo! Sports comment page! NO HOPE, FINAL DESTINATION, LET GO YOUR NOTIONS OF HUMAN DECENCY AND SUCCUMB TO ABJECT CYNICISM.

Heh, LeBron 4^th quarters…THAT’S COMEDY GOLD LOUIE! GOLD! GIVE ME SOME SCRUBS PLAYING GOOD OL’ FUNDAMENTALS INSTEAD! And yeah those overpaid gangster MTV hip hop blingee rappers sure do hate playing for the love of the game that's why they played all those exhibition games frequently during the lockout.

Almost every "sentence" in this comment contains a reasonably coherent thought. But I've been starting at it for an hour and it doesn't make any sense when you put it all together. It's like everyone in Richard's hometown got together around a big round table at a town meeting to write a good old-fashioned collaborative angry letter, only they never stopped to differentiate where one person starts and the other stops.

“Off with their heads!”- Eternal Emperor-Dictator Obama circa 2020, giving his blessing to execute the Miami Big 3 for giving the gentlemen’s sweep to his beloved Bulls all those years ago.

Aaron is going to cry when he sees this one.

Next year’s story line will have Stone Cold Steve Austin kick David Stern’s candy ass and take over the NBA.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS ARTICLE I WANT TO DIE.

Seven people who claim to be sports fans liked this post and only one disliked it. That's very depressing.

Yeah you know what fuck this I’m done good riddance to you, Joseph.

• • •

So yeah, how about them sports “fans”? Between the apathy, irrational hate for pro basketball, criminally misinformed opinions and outright racism it’s pretty hard to feel good, right? I haven’t even dug through the basketball dedicated forums too, of course the most you get there are mildly bad opinions about the lockout and that isn’t as interesting as what you get in the news sites. Should you hate life now and wish you were never born? Of course not, because you exist, I exist, and millions of people who wanted an NBA season exist out there. And we easily outnumber these assholes.

Before we move on to trash talking all our rival teams, we should revel in this -- no matter what we do, no matter how rude we get, we'll never trash talk a fellow fan nearly as harshly as these people deserve to be trash talk. And there's a truth, here: we may have hated everyone involved in this lockout right now for being dumb about a lot of things, but at the end of the day we’ll never be like these guys above. Also, before I go, may I just suggest that the NBA give us League Pass for free this season as an attempt to win our loyalty back?

... No? Oh well, I tried. Until next time.

The lockout is over! As part of our coverage of the rapidly incoming season, Aaron is doing three-point previews (pre free agency) on every team in the NBA. We're splitting it up by divisions, in what will be the first and last time we look at NBA divisions this season. Seriously. Nobody really cares about divisions. Regardless, today's division is home to the Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers, Indiana Pacers, Milwaukee Bucks, and Detroit Pistons.

• • •

CLEVELAND CAVALIERS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.
The Cleveland Cavaliers, surprisingly, don't have much in the way of ever-present amnesty targets. Our worst contract is Baron Davis. Personally? I'd let him go, regardless of how "good" he made the team at the end of last year. He isn't a great influence, our backcourt is too crowded already, and with Byron Scott's track record? Keeping him on the team is kind of dangerous. Byron Scott has a mixed record of playing rookies -- only two rookies have ever averaged more than 25 MPG under Scott (Chris Paul and Kenyon Martin) and those were the only two rookies under Scott to start every game they played in their rookie years. He played J.R. Smith and Richard Jefferson just under 25 MPG, but held them out occasionally for practice scuff-ups. If he does the same with Kyrie and TT, I'd think that's a big mistake. Both of them should be getting around 27-30 minutes a game and starting, because frankly, the Cavs are going nowhere fast right now and it's in our best interest to give both of their star-potential rookies as much time as possible to figure out the NBA game. Regardless. Another subtraction SHOULD be Anthony Parker -- while we don't have any other SG prospects on the roster with the exception of The Great Skyenga, Parker is at his core a chucker with poor defensive instincts. Keeping him on the team means they're going to continue calling iso-Parker possessions, and gives fewer possessions to TT and Kyrie -- it's a lose-lose situation. As a Cavs fan, I hope to God they don't resign him. And if they do? It has to be a one year deal. Simply has to be.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Overall, relatively good. The Cavs are going to most likely be a large beneficiary of the revenue sharing system, whatever it ends up being. The CBA aspects meant to keep free agents from leaving (the new sign-and-trade and extend-and-trade rules, namely, but also the strengthening of Bird Rights) is mostly designed for the future, and may in turn help the Cavs when the time comes to re-sign Kyrie, TT, or the incoming lottery pick the Cavs will sign this season. Beyond the parts of the CBA that help prevent a LeBron situation, amnesty will most likely help the Cavs in the next two years by clearing a lot of cap space right around the time Gilbert will have the cash to try and attract a few small-time talents. Plus, if Chris Grant can keep the cap situation in good standing, the Cavs project to be rid of their current bad contracts in a few years -- making the Cavs a big trade destination if the core develops and Gilbert is still willing to spend to build a true winner. The lockout doesn't fix what happened to the franchise last summer, but the Cavs are well-set to weather the storms of the future with an owner that doesn't balk at spending and a relatively bare cupboard with a promising young core.

3: Overall season outlook.

Unfortunately for Cavs fans, while the future looks reasonably solid, the present is bleak. Even if Kyrie turns out to be the next incarnation of Chris Paul, chances are low that he'll have a revolutionary effect on the team in his first season, and Tristan Thompson is one of the most raw players taken in the top 5 in the last decade. He may be really good, but it's going to take him a while to do it. For the future of the team, it's probably best to have another bad season or two, accumulate lottery picks, and hope that the 2014 Cavs are finally ready to contend again. If the Cavs can swing Kidd-Gilchrist in the draft this year and a SG prospect in the 2013 draft, they'll have a strong roster entering the 2014 season. That's the plan the franchise has to be looking at right now, and the main reason you don't see Gilbert's name mentioned in any of the trade acquisition rumors that have been rolling around. Why angle for Iggy or Gasol if the team can't use either for two or three years, you know? Regardless. With Kyrie and TT in tow, the team shouldn't be quite as shiftless as last year, but it's still going to lead to some unentertaining, losing basketball. But they need the lottery pick, so I suppose we'll simply have to handle it. I'm going with 15-20 wins, right around what I pegged for the Raptors. Better than last year's horror show, but not by that much.

• • •

MILWAUKEE BUCKS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

Hey, a team with actual additions! The Bucks pulled a quasi-blockbuster three-team trade last year before the draft, giving up the horrifying contracts of John Salmons and Corey Maggette in exchange for moving down 9 picks in the draft (from #10 to #19, where they picked up Tobias Harris), Stephen Jackson, Beno Udrih, and Shaun Livingston. Livingston, while known primarily for his horrifying injury, was beginning to return to "serviceable NBA backup" level in Charlotte last year, so I don't think that was a particularly bad move -- not after Jennings missed virtually half a season to injury and the Bucks lose Boykins to free agency. Udrih has been at the serviceable backup level for years, now, so the Bucks went from having little talent behind Jennings to being four deep in serviceable points. Not too shabby. They also exchanged the massive albatross known as Corey Maggette for Stephen Jackson, a player who (while aging) is still one of the better defensive guards in the league and a large upgrade over the scoring "threat" posed by either Maggette and Salmons. Add Tobias Harris

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Can it be both? The lockout has a positive basketball impact on the Bucks -- if my findings in my recent report on the 1999 lockout's effects on the team hold for this season, the Bucks are one of the teams that would most benefit from a leaguewide pace slowdown. They've been a low-pace team for the last two seasons, bottom 5 in 2011 and bottom 10 in 2010. As Bogut has gotten better and better, the Bucks have been more and more defined by his limitations -- can't really run up the court, can only dominate on offense with Jennings to set him up, et cetera. But that's immaterial here -- the point is, if the 1999 trend holds, the Bucks are likely going to be one of the teams improving this year. And that's a positive lockout impact. Beyond that? The Bucks will be getting one of the largest shares of the revenue sharing revenue, and amnesty should let them scrub Gooden or Udrih from their books the next time they look to have the cap space to acquire new players in a trade. Or free agency, but, I mean... it's the Bucks. Herb Kohl wanted a full-on redesign of the NBA's system, and he didn't get it. So, realistically, THAT'S the main impact. The Bucks are one of the few teams who even with this massively owner-friendly deal will probably still remain completely unprofitable. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if Kohl voted against the deal, and while I don't blame him, I'm pretty glad the Bucks will be one of only a few franchises in that position post-deal.

3: Overall season outlook.

The Bucks look like a much improved team from last year's edition, even if you're just counting the additions of Harris and Jackson. Before last season, I was one of the few who gave the Bucks 50-50 odds to win the Central division -- I was extremely impressed by the Bucks in 2010, and figured they were on the way up. But Bogut's time off from injury proved way, way too much for that team to overcome. As well as their lack of offense. Adding Jackson and Harris (a standout freshman for the Tennessee Vols last season whose general lack of a consistent weapon led to him falling in the draft but whose stats project relatively well to adapt in the NBA) probably won't fix all the Bucks' problems on offense. But I'd expect it to improve their offense, and a team as defensively solid as the Bucks (Mbah a Moute + Bogut is one of the greatest two-man defensive duos in the league -- did you know that Bogut, in isolation, held his man to 0.60 PPP last season?) simply needs the offense to get to "borderline competent" if they want to be a playoff team in the East. And they may very well get there. I'd project them as a 0.500 or better team this season, so long as Bogut plays 55 or more games and Jennings continues to improve. Their core isn't lighting the world on fire, but Bogut is a transcendent enough defensive player that a nearly-full season from him combined with a Skiles defense should have the Bucks in the mix for one of the bottom three spots in the playoffs, and a trendy upset pick if they get a favorable draw and get hot at the right time.

• • •

DETROIT PISTONS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

Where do you start? The prevailing sentiment on Joe Dumars in the last few years has been that he's accomplished the heretofore impossible task of completely reversing every positive thing he did in the Pistons' title years through horrific mismanagement. Not quite accurate, because nothing really erases how brilliant he was in keeping the Pistons contender franchises well oiled, but not as far off as you'd perhaps think. Dumars has been an unmitigated DISASTER in the last few years, and he's pretty lucky amnesty is going to give him a chance to undo at least one of his big mistakes. My guess? Villanueva gets the cut -- he's been fully healthy the last few years and has still been one of the worst rotation players in the league. Gordon's been sieged by injury, and still has some upside if he can return to his Bulls form. Beyond that, the Pistons picked up Brandon Knight in the draft and he'll play with them immediately. They also drafted Kyle Singler, whose upside has gone up considerably since he was drafted but who won't be playing with them this season for the same reason he's better regarded -- he played star-level ball in the Euroleague and has chosen to defer joining the NBA for at least one season to allow him to finish out his term with Real Madrid. Stuckey may be gone, as well -- he's a restricted free agent but he's one of the better point guards on the market and my guess is someone signs him to a contract that's too rich for the Pistons to warrant spending when they have Knight waiting in the wings.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Decent. As they're miles from title contention right now, the Pistons will be building a contender for the future, and the restricted player rules that are going to make the Bulls serious favorites to keep Rose for the duration of his career will keep the Pistons in the drivers seat for keeping Monroe and Knight, the two key players in their core. Without details of how revenue sharing works it's hard to say, but it's a solid bet that the Pistons will make a bit of money from the system. The city of Detroit has been an awful place for most industry, but the Lions and the Pistons have been profitable when they contend, and assuming the Pistons can return to competence on Monroe's back, they'll be in a good spot to capitalize on it someday. They also have new ownership -- Dan Gilbert was unsuccessful in his attempts to own two teams, but wealthy private equity magnate Tom Gores is there to pick up the slack. A nice thing about Gores is that for all intensive purposes he's trying to modernize the Pistons organization -- he's already hired the first stat guy in organizational history, and is trying to beef up their scouting. I've heard nothing but good things about what Gores is doing for the team, and Pistons fans should be glad to have an owner like him.

3: Overall season outlook.

Far be it from me to suggest they'll be a contender, but I think the general consensus on the Pistons future is far bleaker than the reality. Greg Monroe was the second best rookie in the league last year, and improved exceptionally well as the year went on. They had to play all of last season without Jonas Jerebko, their surprising impact rookie from 2009's class, and have a quality lottery pick coming to replace Rodney Stuckey, the current free agent who never quite worked out in Detroit. Add in the fact that they'll have a coach who can cut it at an NBA level this time (R.I.P., John Kuester's coaching career), they play at one of the slowest paces in the league (again, see yesterday's post), and that they may be able to trade Rip Hamilton for some assets? I could easily see this Pistons team surprising and being in the running late for an eastern playoff spot. Which, you know, probably is only going to take 27-30 wins. So, not a huge improvement from last year's team, but enough to get people talking, and enough that adding one more lottery pick and an improved Euro-convert Kyle Singler could get this team back on the right track in the next few years. While I think they'll fall a bit short, I definitely see them closer to the playoffs than the absolute bottom of the east.

• • •

INDIANA PACERS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

One of the biggest additions of any team here, actually -- the Pacers traded their sub-lottery first rounder for George Hill, the artificial point guard. While I've never been as big a fan of George as most of my Spurs-loving comrades, I don't deny his talent -- he's a tenacious defender (though he took a step back on defense last year) and he's in the last few years he's learned how to imitate a point guard for stretches, making him a very versatile player. His shot could still use some work, but with Danny Granger to help him improve, I can see him making some pretty big leaps. Beyond that, the Pacers lose a lot of dead weight in Dunleavy, T.J. Ford, and Josh McRoberts. They'll also have Jeff Foster on the deck as a free agent, though smart money says that a team as thin up front as the Pacers is going to pull out all the stops to retain him. In the draft, the Pacers picked up... oh wait, George Hill, they traded their pick. Whoops. Oh well. In terms of amnesty? Posey or Dahntay Jones, both relatively poor contracts given their production, are two big targets. Pacers will probably use it, as they need the space.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Not great. The Pacers were in an enviable cap position before the lockout. They're still in a good position, but now they aren't alone. Let me explain. First major problem is that the Pacers had navigated the previous CBA like pros -- they have no particularly strong amnesty candidates (Jones and Posey are poor contracts relative to their production, but hardly cap killers) and they've spent years being frugal to keep costs down and ensure they'd be one of 3 or 4 teams with max room in 2012 and 2013. Now, though? The amnesty mulligan takes away that competitive advantage, and makes the Pacers one of 10-15 teams with max room. Hardly the most attractive of those 10-15, either. The revenue sharing will help, but the Pacers were in a perfect position before and the amnesty mulligan seriously damages their prospects of landing a top tier free agent. And, as with the Bucks, 50-50 may not be enough for the Pacers to make a profit this season. Sad trombone, for sure.

3: Overall season outlook.

I think the Central is definitively the second best division in the eastern conference right now -- and I think almost every single one of their teams is better than their counterpart in the Northeast. Celtics under Bulls, Raptors under Cavs, Nets under Pistons, Sixers under Bucks. Pacers over the Knicks, though? Don't see that. I see the Pacers falling back to earth a little bit this season, flirting with 0.500 and falling just short. I don't really want to go too in depth over this, though, because of all the teams in the league I think the Pacers are one of the few who are going to look a lot different come the season. Their cap space notwithstanding, the Pacers have a decent young core and are in a position to contend as their young guns get better. Picking up Tyson Chandler, Marc Gasol, or Nene isn't going to make them one of the four best teams in the East, but when Paul George and George Hill peak, they'll have a title shot. And in a place as starved for playoff action as Indiana, that's a good thing. So, baseline expectation? About 27-33 wins. But I expect that'll change significantly as we enter the season, post free agency.

• • •

CHICAGO BULLS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

Free agency is kind to the Bulls this year -- their only ones are Brian Scalabrine, Rasual Butler, and Kurt Thomas. While losing Big Sexy and the Irish Jordan may damage the entertainment value of garbage time for Bulls fans, the team that won 62 games despite injury troubles remains intact. In terms of amnesty candidates? I'd look for the Bulls to sit on it for a while. Amnesty provides them a way out later if Boozer continues to deteriorate and they need to get under the cap line, and much like the Knicks, none of their current contracts are really bad enough that they're worth blowing their amnesty on it now. In the draft, the Bulls picked up Malcolm Lee of UCLA and Nikola Mirotic of the Euroleague. Mirotic is a classic Spurs stash pick -- great player who isn't coming over to the NBA anytime soon, and sets the Bulls up to have a serious talent flux at big forward spot if he ever makes it over. If not, well, they have a contender right now. There are few minutes for giving minutes to forwards with inherent risk -- by stashing a good player who may not even come over, they eliminate the risk AND make sure they don't have to pay their pick for a few years (important for reasons I'll get into shortly). As for Butler, he was good at Marquette -- I liked him a lot as a college player, but I don't see him being a big contributor on this Bulls squad. He's one of the dreaded tweener-types -- not big enough to bang at the 4, not quick or athletic enough to hang with wings. Decent defender in college, though, so he could be a gritty roleplaying type. We'll see.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Relatively poor. Chicago is going to be a big giver into the revenue sharing system regardless of whether it's by profit or market. With an owner as generally stingy as Reinsdorf, I could see that coming back to bite them when Reinsdorf balks at spending more on a team that isn't making him as much as it used to. Chances are high the Bulls have to dip into the luxury tax starting in 2013, and chances are made even higher by the fact that the new "designated player" clause ensures that MVP-level players immediately are eligible for huge home team bonuses as a "designated player" for the team. Over the course of Derrick Rose's next contract, the clause is going to make him almost $15 million more, and cost the Bulls the same. Adding a huge Rose deal to Boozer, Noah, and Deng's big contracts was expected, but the fact that post-lockout the contract is actually going to be MORE than it would've been before the lockout? Unexpected to say the least, and a cripplingly bad lockout haul to say the worst. Few teams are more hurt by this CBA than Chicago. Plus side? Rose is definitely going to be a Bull for the next 5-6 years on account of the designated player clause that gets him his huge raise. And that's big. But he probably wasn't going anywhere anyway, and while he's making a fairer contract now, it's definitely going to hurt the team's bottom line and ability to compete going forward.

3: Overall season outlook.

Honestly? Very good, I think. The Bulls were a slowdown team with a strong system, and despite their gaudy win total, they played with a skeleton roster for much of the year. Of course, the fact that they have without question the two of the best backup big men in the league right now (Asik and Gibson) helps. But Boozer's absence and Noah's absence/injury-riddled play provides two key opportunities for this Bulls team to be even better than it was last year. Add in Rose improving (which, frankly, it's still reasonable to expect) and you have a crafty squad with an incredible defensive system playing it slow in a slow man's world. Will it lead to more playoff success? That, I'm dubious of. I'm of the view the Bulls are a far stronger regular season team than a playoff team, much like the late 2000s Cavs. When defenses key in on their scorers (see: Rose), the Bulls offense grinds to a halt and essentially gives up on getting good shots. Picking up a free agent like Afflalo or Redd should help their offense a bit, but it's really on Coach Thibs more than anyone else that they get so disorganized when the going gets tough. Still, don't want this to sound too down -- Thibs has proven to be a relatively amazing coach so far, and the offense can build with time. With a full season of Boozer and some offensive improvement from Taj Gibson, the Bulls will be one of about 5-6 teams with a legitimate title shot. And that's all you can really ask for, at the end of the day. Very interested to see what they do for their shooting guard position, and given all my dithering about Reinsdorf, I think the way he approaches it is going to be reflective of how he approaches the next few years. Does he go with some crummy bottom-feeding minimum guy? Or does he put in a serious offer for the Afflalos on the market? Should be fun. All that said, I'm really looking forward to watching this team this season, Asik and Gibson are essentially religion.

• • •

Given that we essentially took the weekend off, I've left myself having to do one of these per day. This could be problematic. We'll see if I can get all these off the table by the time free agency starts -- I'll try the good try, but dear god, these things clock in at almost 4,000 words apiece. I'm a writer, not a robot... wait, I don't know that. I might be a robot. Can someone link me to a quick Turing test? Thanks.

Til next time, folks.

About a week ago, Zach Lowe reached out to his followers on twitter to ask if we'd run some numbers for him. I decided to follow through on it -- he wanted to see some simple correlations between team win percentage and the offensive and defensive four factors. He used the numbers to back his main claim in a piece that dropped earlier this week where he came to the well-supported conclusion that we have no real idea what kinds of teams a compressed season helps or hurts, and at this point, we may as well assume the season proceeds as normal because we don't know what predicts performance in a shortened season. I essentially told him that, although there were some tertiary trends that seemed marginally predictive, the stats weren't telling us anything valuable. There weren't any jarringly common statistical differences between teams that did well in the lockout season and teams that did poorly.

Something about those specious, tertiary trends bugged me, though. I thought there might be more to it than the numbers were showing. So I expanded the amount of data I was working with, did some spreadsheet wrangling, and tried to tease out a few more predictive metrics for figuring out the win percentage in a lockout season versus the win percentage in a non-lockout season. This post walks through my analysis, shares the data, and comes to a few key conclusions that supplement Zach's excellent piece. So, dally no longer. Let's dig in. All sheet/cell references are in reference to the main spreadsheet I made for the analysis, which I've uploaded to Google Docs for your reading pleasure. You know. If you like that sort of thing.

• • •

Part I: Correlations within seasons.

For this part, turn to Sheet "C1" in the spreadsheet.

This was where it all started. Zach's initial request was for some within-season correlations, between a team's win percentage and the four factors, for the lockout-compressed 1999 season. He also wanted a few years around it, attempting to see if anything was more or less predictive in 1999 than it was for other years. A fair question. There are more years here than there were when I initially gave Zach the results (in my attempts to broaden the dataset for part two of this analysis), but the basic trend is the same. Nothing really stands out all that much. To wit, compare 1999 correlations with the average correlations among all other years in the sample:

               --------- OFFENSIVE ---------   --------- DEFENSIVE ---------
       Pace    eFG%    TOV%    ORB%    FT/FG   eFG%    TOV%    DRB%    FT/FG
 AVG  -0.151   0.689  -0.417   0.018   0.224  -0.685   0.093   0.440  -0.270
1999  -0.286   0.553   0.051   0.034   0.374  -0.738  -0.139   0.483  -0.448

See what I mean? Every one of 1999's values that falls two standard deviations or more outside the population average is highlighted in red. That's right -- offensive turnover percentage is the only one. And I admit, it's a bit strange -- in 1999, offensive turnover percentage was positively correlated with win percentage, which means that having a high turnover percentage actually led to more wins. A very odd result. But not really a notable one, without any further context. Probably worth looking into (as I eventually did), but not really worth calling the be-all and end-all of lockout impacts. At this point, I sent the analysis to Zach and he used it as support for his article.

Then, this week, I got a little bit deeper.

Part II: Comparing season averages.

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

I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the statistics. So I decided to ignore correlations to win percentage for a bit, and see if there are any key differences between season averages. This is a more customary analysis, and there are many people who have done quite well at it themselves. Here, though, I was just looking for some basic numbers. There was a little more to go on in terms of isolating 1999's differentiating factors here, though not much. To wit, let's again compare the averages for several key statistics between non-1999 seasons and 1999:

               --------- OFFENSIVE ---------   --------- DEFENSIVE ---------
       Pace    eFG%    TOV%    ORB%    FT/FG   eFG%    TOV%    DRB%    FT/FG
 AVG  91.683   0.488   0.140   0.291   0.236   0.488   0.140   0.709   0.236
1999  88.917   0.466   0.146   0.301   0.241   0.465   0.146   0.698   0.241

Same deal -- numbers outside two standard deviations of the population average are highlighted in red. While eFG% is the only "true" outlier here, pace should probably be highlighted too. If you remove the two outlier fast-paced years of 1992 and 1993 (96.6 and 96.7 respectively) from the analysis, pace is well beyond the 2 standard deviation threshhold. Which fits expectations: 1999 is without any real comparison in terms of how slow it was -- it's over a full possession slower than any other year in the dataset. I'd also turn your attention to turnover percentage, which is insignificantly above the average for the other years -- this isn't particularly important, but does sort of point to one of the reasons why basketball was so odd and nigh-unwatchable in 1999 (if the games I've seen from that season are any indication). Everyone, even good teams that weren't usually associated with doing so, was turning the ball over at a slightly larger rate than usual. Which wouldn't make basketball unwatchable on its face.

Usually, though, the majority of the high turnover teams were the singularly bad teams in the league. In 1999, that wasn't necessarily the case. You had the crummy ball control usually kept solely to the lower-tier teams being played by upper tier teams as well. I mean, hell -- the New York Knicks had the 3rd highest turnover rate in the league, and they made the finals. The Utah Jazz had the highest, and they won 70% of their games! Both odd in a normal season, but entirely par for the course in 1999. Hence, the difference in the average wasn't huge, but the distribution of what teams were turning the ball over more often was skewed far more towards teams that got TV air-time and playoff dap than in any other season. This contributes a lot to the general consensus that 1999 had the worst basketball ever played. And while it may not be entirely accurate on an aggregated leaguewide level, there's no doubting that the distribution of teams with the traits of crummy teams was skewed in such a way that the best teams in the league were sharing traits that the crummy teams usually kept to themselves.

This isn't really relevant to the broader analysis here at all, but I think it's interesting and worth noting. What is relevant to the analysis at this point is that even though pace was barely within the two standard deviation threshhold, I had some intuition here. I was curious if we could be seeing something of a joint effect between the relatively high (though within range) correlation between slow pace and winning in 1999 and the raw average pace being so incredibly low. So, I followed up on that.

Part III: Correlations between seasons.

For this part, turn to Sheet "C2" in the spreadsheet.

Here's the meat of the post -- the correlation structure that made me go "eureka" and start cleaning this up to post-quality levels. In this part, I realized that within-season correlations, while useful, aren't really what we're going for here. What we actually want? We're trying to get predictive analytics -- we want to find the key barometers of a successful or unsuccessful lockout team from the season before. So in this part, what I did was find the correlations between the four factors from the season before, and win percentage in the current season. I excluded 1996 and 2005 (expansion years for the Raptors, Grizzlies, and Bobcats) from the analysis because I didn't particularly want to bias the results towards the mean for those years, and I did all of this in excel where my usual missing data tricks are less easy to use. Anyway. As from before, here's a table comparing the average values among correlations for non-1999 seasons and the correlations in 1999. Lo and behold, we finally get something useful.

               --------- OFFENSIVE ---------   --------- DEFENSIVE ---------
       Pace    eFG%    TOV%    ORB%    FT/FG   eFG%    TOV%    DRB%    FT/FG
 AVG  -0.103   0.568  -0.348   0.015   0.163  -0.575   0.069   0.338  -0.248
1999  -0.455   0.413   0.127  -0.081   0.475  -0.584  -0.197   0.433  -0.173

And here's the big reveal. Two correlations were well outside the aggregate interval for 1999 -- pace, and turnover percentage. Meaning the effect that a team's performance in 1998 on the 1999 season was markedly different than in previous and future seasons -- in the case of pace, quite a bit more intense. And in the case of turnover percentage? Completely the opposite direction. Teams that were slow paced in 1998 were far better than expected in 1999, while teams that were fast paced were for the most part worse. Looking at the raw data confirms this and actually makes the correlation factor here look like an understatement. Because there's two big outliers (the 1999 Sacramento Kings and the 1999 Chicago Bulls) that have a lot of leverage on the results, here. Take those two out, and the correlation factor balloons beyond -0.6, which is pushing beyond eFG% range in terms of predictive value.

Even if you don't exclude those two outliers, though, the numbers look pretty stark. If you take one stat away from this post, make it this one: of the 14 teams that played at an above-average pace in 1998, a full 10 of them had a decreased winning percentage in the 1999 season. And of the 15 teams who played at a below-average pace in 1998? A_ full 12 of them___ had the same or better win percentage in 1999.

That's a big factor, and it points to (quite possibly) the defining effect of season compression: in 1999's compressed season, the type of basketball your team was used to playing was important. Run-and-gun offenses were harmed by the compression, while slowdown offenses prospered in adapting to the generalized decrease in speed of the game caused by the compression. Compounding this, there's the strange turnover percentage correlation. I was really confused about this at first, but realized after a while that it could be a result of the 1998 Bulls losing Jordan. The 1998 Bulls had a turnover percentage of 0.133 and a winning percentage of 0.756, while the 1999 Bulls had a turnover percentage of 0.151 to a winning percentage of 0.260. A pretty big difference, that.

To test what kind of effect eliminating the explicable Jordan-caused outlier would have, I changed the 1998 Bulls to a turnover percentage of 0.151 (dang, MJ, stop losin' the ball!) in an alternate spreadsheet and checked the correlations. It's still positive and well outside the standard deviation, but it's a more reasonable 0.026, indicating that turnover percentage isn't wildly positively correlated, just slightly. Which makes a bit more sense. You see tics like that all the time in odd datasets like this, but the initial result (a 0.127 POSITIVE correlation?) was simply too weird to not have some kind of strange outlier effecting the result. I'd also note that taking out the Bulls actually makes the pace factor slightly larger -- the Bulls were one of only three 1998 below-pace teams that got worse in 1999, so removing them from the dataset actually raises the correlation to -0.521. I would've put the Jordan-lacking numbers in the comparison, but I felt it would be better to explain why I took them out with the context of what I was seeing rather than just stating it as a prior fact. Throwing away data is bad, folks.

Part IV: Conclusion & Followups

So, overall takeaway? Zach isn't really wrong in his excellent post, let's start with that. This lockout may create a new trend, and the lessons of the past aren't strictly prescriptive. While 66 games crammed into the window of December 25th to May 1st is pretty bad, I'm not positive it's as bad as the insane pace the 1999 season was played at. It's comparable, but certainly not worse and possibly not on the same order of magnitude as bad, if they set up the schedule correctly. My analysis here doesn't even begin to touch the way that prevailing sentiment somehow says that the lockout will advantage the following types of teams:

1. Young teams, because they have "young legs."
2. Old teams, because they have "experience."
3. Strong systems, because they "don't need training camp."
4. Weak systems with talented players, because they "don't need training camp."
5. Samardo Samuels, because he "went to St. Benedicts."

In short, depending on who you ask, the lockout is either going to irrevocably destroy every team in the league's mojo or grant them infinite advantages over everyone else. Not contradictory in the slightest! But honestly, short answer is that we honestly don't know what exogenous factors are going to prove to be the defining things that advantage and disadvantage teams in this lockout. Zach is absolutely right about this.

But by looking a bit deeper into what happened directly before the lockout, we can tease out one big conclusion. Teams with high pace last season (the Raptors, Knicks, and Suns are big offenders here) have a reasonably good chance of starting day one at a disadvantage over teams that operated at a slow pace. We're going to see some outliers to this rule, because they're always there, but in the last lockout this was a relatively hard and fast rule. Teams that played fast in 1998 played worse in 1999. Teams that played slow in 1998 played better in 1999. Not hard to understand, nor is it altogether unintuitive -- fast paced teams generally do worse on back-to-backs, traditionally, and the compressed season means less recovery time between games for teams that try to push the pace.

Regardless, we probably could use a bit more analysis here. In particular, I'd like to do a ridge regression predicting season stats from the previous season's four factors stats -- there's enough data for it, and using the lockout data for a test sample could help put in context any joint effects among the covariates. But that's enough for today. This result is useful enough to post without having done the regressions yet, I think.

• • •

Feel free to poke around the sheet, comment on the conclusions, and note the things I've forgotten to mention. Because this is unfortunately a pretty slipshod analysis right now, and there's plenty of room to critique the methodology here. But I think it's useful, and worth a look. Please let me know if you have any followup questions in the comments, because I'll probably take a revised look at this sheet and the data this weekend with R and get some higher order models built for the sake of teasing out any joint effects. Until then? Keep it real, readers.

The lockout is over! As part of our coverage of the rapidly incoming season, Aaron is doing three-point previews (pre free agency) on every team in the NBA. We're splitting it up by divisions, in what will be the first and last time we look at NBA divisions this season. Seriously. Nobody really cares about divisions. Regardless, today's division is home to (if you don't remember, it's been a while) the Boston Celtics, the Philadelphia 76ers, the New Jersey Nets, the New York Knicks, and the Toronto Raptors.

Programming note, here -- all this week (and most likely for the next few weeks), I'm going to be at Fear the Sword working with Conrad Kaczmarek on a new series profiling all the Cavs players on this year's team. Monday we did Daniel Gibson, yesterday we did Ramon Sessions, and today we did Antawn Jamison. Tomorrow? A mystery, one worth checking out! Anyway. As a further programming note, my Kawhi Leonard post was linked in Truehoop's Wednesday bullets this week. If you're one of the new readers who stumbled upon us from the Truehoop post, welcome! We have a peculiar way of doing things, around here, but we hope you'll like what you see. There's going to be a lot of ridiculous stuff coming from Alex and I in the coming weeks, and it's our hope you'll stick around for it. And enjoy it. It'd hardly be worth sticking around for if you didn't enjoy it, you know? Regardless. Let's get thee to this preview.

• • •

TORONTO RAPTORS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

The Raptors are one of the few teams with no strong impact targets for the use of the amnesty clause. Their two worst contracts are Calderon and Bargnani, but they're the two of best players on this current incarnation of the Raptors, and it's quite possible they decide to keep them together. After all, with a new coach in Dwane Casey, the organization is most likely going to aim for the playoffs. Not a particularly strong chance they make it there, but the Raptors have always been a "hope springs eternal" type franchise. If they don't amnesty Bargnani or Calderon, they'll most likely consider applying it to Linas Kleiza, their embarrassingly bad "impact" free agent signing from 2010 that turned out to be a massively overpaid bust. In terms of additions, the Raptors have only so far added the #5 pick in the 2011 NBA draft, Jonas Valanciunas. He's going to be good, most likely, but he's also not going to be around this season. Which isn't quite so hot. Still, they're on a crash course for another high lottery pick, so whenever they have the ability to add Valanciunas, they should have a decent young core waiting for him.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

I'm not really sure how the lockout is going to impact Toronto. On the CBA side, it could be a negative. While the details haven't leaked on revenue sharing yet, if it's based solely on market size, the Raptors are going to be at a severe disadvantage and may get none of the money they put in the sharing pot -- Toronto is a huge market, even if it's a middling NBA-type locale. Teams like the Raptors that underperform relative to their market size could get screwed in the revenue sharing deal, so we'll have to wait and see how that goes. On the basketball side, the numbers don't look very good for the Raptors. In the last lockout-shortened season, teams that played at a fast pace and had poor defense in 1998 fared somewhat poorly relative to expectations in 1999, as you might see in more detail in a followup and clarification post to Zach Lowe's recent lockout piece that I'll be sharing soon. I did some stats for that piece, and I think it'd be cool to share them. But that's for another day.

3: Overall season outlook.

Exceedingly poor. For Raps fans, they can expect more of the same from last year, which was a pretty poor time to be a Raps fan. They have the young guns in DeRozan and Davis to eventually make some noise, but I'm not very high on DeRozan as an NBA star (guards with games as scoring-limited as him aren't usually championship starters). Davis has been really good so far, though, and with any luck Casey will stop trying to play Bargnani out of position where he can't operate. I'm going to go with 12 to 18 wins in a 66 game season, equivalent to a 15-22 win season in a full 82 games. In other words, marginally worse than last year. Long-term outlook? Dim, but getting brighter. Getting Triano the hell out of there is a great start, and bringing in Casey should be a great hire. We'll have to see, though -- I thought Kuester was really going to tear things up in Detroit.

• • •

NEW JERSEY NETS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

No key additions -- yet. Quite a few key POTENTIAL additions, though, and they're going to need to exhaust every single possibility if they intend to keep Deron Williams. When you trade for a fringe top-10 player in the league and rid your cupboard of every quality young asset to do it, you don't usually do it for the player to up and leave less than 82 games later. That's a very possible fate for these Nets, if Deron doesn't get surrounded by a team that can actually contend. They may have more time than you'd initially think, though -- the new CBA makes it most profitable, if I'm reading it right, for Deron to take his player option for 2013 and have his future salary/raises based on his over $17.8 mil 2013 salary rather than his $16.3 mil 2012 salary. That would give the Nets a good two years to build. It could help. In terms of subtractions and amnesty targets, it's basically "pin the tail on the summer 2010 contract" over in Newark. They'd probably like to get back all three of the contracts they signed -- Morrow has been atrocious, Petro's been worse, and there's not a single player in the league who was more disappointing than Travis Outlaw last season. The first digit of his salary ($7 million) was very nearly larger than his PER (8.80), and while I don't like using a metric as a catch all, a PER of 8.80 with awful defense is barely deserving of a contract in the league at all, let alone a $7 million dollar one. One of the few teams that will probably use their amnesty in the first few days of free agency.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

It was reported in whispers throughout the lockout that Prokhorov was one of the hardline owners. Not because he wanted competitive balance or revenue sharing (after the Brooklyn move, the Nets will be putting a ton of money into the system), but because a lost season would eliminate the Nets last season in Newark and give the Nets a unique chance to do a full-scale rebrand in 2013. Honestly, though? That was always a very risky strategy. While I'm working off the assumption I just laid out that Deron is going to want to take his player option, there's a non-negligible chance he doesn't. If that happened, and they lost the 2012 season, Deron could've opted out of his player option once the 2013 season began. He would've gone directly to free agency, and left the Nets nothing but 20 games of an injured Deron Williams for the investment of Derrick Favors, Devin Harris, an unrestricted lottery pick and a lightly restricted late lottery pick, and cash. That would be a catastrophic setback for a franchise desperately needing to take a step forward, and a 2012 season ensures that Deron is going to have at least one full year in Newark. I don't see any way that's a bad thing for New Jersey. The other CBA aspects -- revenue sharing, hurting luxury tax teams, etc -- are going to hurt the Nets in the future, but they're so moribund as a franchise right now it's doubtful to have a big impact for 2 or 3 seasons at the least. By the time the Nets are starting to really feel the impact of the CBA, a new CBA will be 2 or 3 years down the road. So, not too huge.

3: Overall season outlook.

Not as bad as the Raptors (by a long shot), but not all that great either. The Nets enter free agency with three players who played league average or better ball last year -- Deron Williams, Brook Lopez, and Kris Humphries. Humphries is a free agent who's likely to leave the team, leaving Lopez and Deron as the only two pieces worth starting on any other team in the league. And Deron was injured late last season. While he's been great overseas, we have to temper enthusiasm a little -- this isn't Deron coming off the height of his powers, this is Deron coming from a bad finish and trying to recoup. Lopez was atrocious defensively last year, rating among the worst centers in the league on defending the pick and roll. He stays back on his heels when he needs to contest, and he has a marked hesitation atop his generally lacking lateral quickness. He completely loses defenders when they get close enough to the basket, and he doesn't have the ability to stay on rotations. And his rebounding? Don't get me started -- despite playing a ton of minutes per game, Brook somehow managed to have more games with five or fewer rebounds than games with six or more. Abhorrent. Out of any other player in the league, the Nets most need Dwight Howard. A Dwight-Lopez-Deron core could potentially be decent enough to contend in the East, with the added bonus of experimenting with Brook as a power forward. I don't know if they get Dwight, but they really need him. Without him, their season is going to be a massively underwhelming disappointment unless they pick up the right bunch of bargain free agents to improve the team. If they keep last year's roster with minor additions? I honestly don't see them making the playoffs or even sniffing them. Their outlook is a wait-and-see prospect right now. So, we wait.

• • •

PHILADELPHIA 76ERS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

Amnesty and the Sixers is a funny combination. Word has gotten out that they don't intend to amnesty Elton Brand, given that he's only got a few seasons left and he's their only big man that's even remotely close to "quality" right now. That makes sense, and starts to get at why there probably won't be more than 4 or 5 amnesties this year. They don't want to waste amnesty on Nocioni when they don't have any free agent targets, so they're sitting on it until a better opportunity arises. In the draft, the Sixers picked up Nicolas Vucevic, who may in the long term be the most important big man of the future in Philly -- he was the tallest player taken this year and projects out to be a quality NBA big man. He has a well defined post game, and is underrated in his ability to affect a game with one-on-one offense. He gives most of that back with his infuriating obsession with proving himself as a shooter (he's simply not a good pick and pop player, and he lessens his gifts when he spends half the game trying to be Pau Gasol) and turning the ball over like it's nobody's business. But he's a solid prospect who's easily going to be their 2nd best big man from day one, and may end the season as their best. That's a good pick, and even if it doesn't bring them back to the playoffs this season, it should help immeasurably in the years to come.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Probably a net positive, overall. One of the very few teams that can say that. The Sixers may be the single most positively affected team by the supposition that amnesty won't be of the vintage 2005 "use it or lose it" type. Because they can wait and see. If Vucevic gets better and Elton Brand is poor this year, they can amnesty him right before next summer and enter the 2012 free agency period with quite a lot of cap room (well over $20 million), enough to potentially entice a max free agent to call Philly home and fill in the team with a few decent guys around them. The contract sizes mean they're less likely to get roped into another Elton Brand type contract, and they're just on the cusp where they won't be required to forfeit much to the revenue sharing but they aren't in bad enough shape that they explicitly needed a stronger system. Given Iggy, Brand, and their litany of not-great contracts, they aren't going to be scrambling to get to the minimum any time soon either. A good situation for them going forward.

3: Overall season outlook.

While they're one of the better positioned teams to navigate the post-lockout CBA, one can't really say the same about their team on a basketball level. Not for next season. Last season's Sixers were an overachieving bunch that were able to succeed on their general grit, Iggy's defense, and the most inconceivable of bounce-back seasons for one Elton Brand. I don't see that carrying over to this season, as Brand's season was (in all possible respects) incredibly flukish. Lou Williams and Thad Young will continue to be straight decent, Jrue Holiday will continue to improve, and perhaps Evan Turner can stop being useless. But unless Vucevic is an instant star and Brand avoids the dropoff that usually comes after a fluke season late in a player's career? They have no big man rotation whatsoever. Spencer Hawes may see serious minutes. That's their situation. And because of that, they probably won't quite make it into the playoffs again, barring injury to the myriad of lower-tier east teams (namely the Bucks, Pistons, New Jersey) that stand to get a lot better this season. Then again, this is a team that may look totally different after free agency. Check back with us after that goes down.

• • •

NEW YORK KNICKS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

Amnesty came just slightly too late for the Knicks to get value out of it -- they have no strong candidates for the clause, for the first time in almost 10 years. Really. I'm not going to go into it, but go onto Basketball Reference and look at all the Knicks rosters from 2000-2010. Pretty much at least one player per season who would be a good candidate for amnesty. Now, though, the closest is Roger Mason Jr. Who makes virtually nothing, cap-wise. The key for them is really in Amare's contract -- amnesty gives them a get-out-of-cap-hell-free card to play if his knees blow up sometime in the next four years. Always a good card to have in your bag. Additions are headlined by Iman Shumpert, the physically gifted standout from Georgia Tech whose somewhat unsatisfying college career can be virtually ignored because, after all, he went to Georgia Tech. Paul Hewitt is notorious for completely masking the draft potential of his players by running the worst systems in the history of the human race. Shumpert may be no exception. Regardless, I thought it was something of a misguided choice. The Knicks have Fields, Douglas, Rautins, and Billups manning the guard slots right now, and fill-in stopgap guards aren't hard to find. They're depressing the playing time of those three while ignoring their gaping holes in the middle. Kenneth Faried would've been a better pick, I think. Shumpert should be a good rookie, probably top 10, and a decent workaday player in the league. But they needed a big, and a great one was sitting at their fingertips. Poor decisions all around.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Bad. Very, actually. As I mentioned earlier, the only use amnesty really holds for the Knicks is as an insurance policy for Amare's knees. The general consensus among the hysterical New York media gaggle is that the lockout had no effect on free agency and the Knicks remain in perfect shape to land Dwight or Chris Paul. This is about as untrue as possible. The Knicks have left themselves with no assets whatsoever from the deck-clearing they went through for the Carmelo trade, and as I discussed in my discussion of the previous CBA proposal, the CBA generally will cut down on free agent acquisition in favor of Deron-type superstar trades. The best way to get CP3 or Dwight in this CBA's environment? Trade for them and entice them to stay. The Knicks have no assets whatsoever to offer -- every player they have of any value is either on a one year contract at this point (Fields, Douglas, Rautins), too old to contribute (Billups), or is one of their core two (Melo/Amare). They NEED to acquire CP3 or Dwight in free agency, and there's no particularly good way to see that happening short of either choosing to take an insanely large paycut (and, more importantly, a 4 year contract compared to a 5 year contract) to play in New York. Impossible? Not at all. But I'd put the odds well under 10% that it goes through, far lower than they would be if we were still under the last CBA. And top that off with the strengthened luxury tax that makes it harder than ever to simply outspend your competitors? The lockout hurt the Knicks. Don't think otherwise.

3: Overall season outlook.

I'm relatively down on them this season, pre free agency. You have a rather incredible one-two scoring punch with Melo and Amare, a decent starting-quality talent in Fields, and an aging chucker in Chauncey. Beyond that? Virtually nothing. As good as Turiaf makes them when he's on the court, he's exactly the sort of player who crumbles on back to backs and exactly the sort who's more susceptible to injury in a compressed season. Not to mention pace -- in the 1999 season, pace took a steep nosedive from 1998, and of the teams with extremely high pace in 1998 only one of them actually improved -- the Sacramento Kings, midway through a renaissance led by a young Chris Webber. I don't think the lockout shortened season is going to force the Knicks into being an awful team. But I do think the lack of training camp, lack of defense, and the general lack of depth to absorb injuries is going to lead them to be essentially the same team they were at the end of last year. Around 0.500, consistently described as "a threat", falls toothlessly in the night to a better team when the playoffs begin. Sorry, Knicks fans. Maybe if you signed Grover. Hey, speaking of the playoffs...

• • •

BOSTON CELTICS

1: Key additions, subtractions, and amnesty targets.

Frankly, there's no way to know what's what with the Celtics for additions and subtractions. If they decide to resign Jeff Green (a good bet, given that refusing to sign him means you traded Kendrick Perkins away for Nenad Kristic alone), they aren't going to have the space for any free agents that aren't acquired through trade. There are many potential avenues for improvement on their bench (Delonte West getting back to his natural position, Troy Murphy shaping up, et cetera) but in terms of new player additions the Celtics are going to be relegated to the Telfairs and Gadzurics of the world if they want to add new faces. As for rookies, last year the Celts drafted JaJuan Johnson and E'Twaun Moore, both out of Purdue -- I'm not very familiar with them, but if JaJuan is even remotely servicable it'll be an improvement over the Shelden Williams experiment they used to be rolling with. Glen Davis realistically isn't a good player and isn't a player they want to pay, but they're lacking in other options so they'll probably try the college try to resign him.

2: Lockout impacts, bad or good?

Well, they probably won't be building a star team on the fly like they did in 2008 anytime soon. The restrictions on trading would have most likely prevented the Celtics from picking up Ray Allen for the 2008 title run, thus making the 2008 Celtics merely a big two with a puncher's chance at a title but not an overwhelming favorite. But that all happened in the past, and going forward, they're not well off. Could be worse, but still not good. While it's true that the Celtics will be putting money into the revenue sharing pot, they'll be in full-rebuild mode in two years when the tax provisions really start kicking in and destroying the lives of GMs everywhere. The only real amnesty candidate, ironically, is Paul Pierce. Hardly a player the Celtics are ever going to consider using the clause on. It is worth noting that it looks like they're somewhat cursed in that they simply can't add pieces without flipping Rondo at this point -- resigning Green alone may very well take them over the MLE level, leaving them with min contracts and the mini-MLE for roster-building purposes. That's going to hurt a team already severely lacking in bench depth. So overall? Future-looking bad, present-looking bad. Not a great CBA for the Boston Celtics.

3: Overall season outlook.

As with this entire division, really, I'm not very up on them. This is a very weak division this year, barring some major explosions from young players on the teams in it. The Celtics are an aging team whose primary stars are all on the dark side of 33 -- by the time next year's playoffs start, KG will be well over 35 years old. I'm not one to doubt that KG won't be as batshit insane when next year's playoffs start, but you'd be a fool to honestly expect them to maintain the level of play they had last season. And with the CBA harming their ability to augment their depth... how do they improve? I don't really see it. Their best chance for any improvement lies in their bench shaping up behind Delonte West and Jeff Green reinventing himself as a useful basketball player. I'm dubious on both. And you may call me a homer all you want, but I'd take a 29 year old Tony, 34 year old Manu, and a 35 year old Duncan entering next year's playoffs over a 34 year old Pierce, 35 year old KG, and a 37 year old Ray. Especially considering the potential of the Spurs supporting cast over the Celtics supporting cast. No, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that although the Celtics do have a title shot this year, it's the smallest and least realistic among any of the KG years -- a strong second round performance would be a blessing, with this crew. But in this division? Weak on a broader scale or not, they'll win the division handily, and probably get a top 3 seed in the East. But even if all goes right, I just can't see them stepping beyond the ECF, I don't think -- this team is going to have to scrap and fight and overcome the process of aging simply to contend at all, and imagining a team like that winning four series in a row takes a lot of stretching.

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