As one of our mainstay features, Aaron is writing posts highlighting every single player in the NBA. Role players, superstars, key cogs, or players who are barely as useful as ballboys -- none are exempt from the prying eyes of our readers. Check the index for a lowdown on order, intent, and all that jazz. Today's batch includes Antawn Jamison, Glen Davis, and Carl Landry.

• • •

[004] Jamison, Antawn

For more on Antawn Jamison, see Aaron's player preview at Fear the Sword.

I don't really know what to say about Antawn. He's a class act. Really really nice dude. Watching interviews with him is usually heartwarming and he seems like a genuinely awesome, humble man. When the Cavs got him, I wasn't obscenely excited, because I always thought he was a tad overrated, but I was really glad I'd get to root for a class act like Antawn on my favorite team. A character guy like that? On that stacked Cavs team? Awesome. I thought. Then I had to spend a few games watching him. And let me just say: never again will I assume watchability based on personality. EVER. Seriously... I don't even know where to start. When he was on the Wizards, I didn't pay all that much attention to him. It was mostly all Gil, or Caron, or whoever the Wizards were playing. And rooting against them. Antawn always rather faded into the background for me.

But when he's playing for your own team you end up watching him pretty closely. And when you do that, you discover a lot about Antawn. And post-discovery? Christ, do I hate him. Not a single more frustrating player in the league, though Anthony Parker's chuck-friendly game comes close sometimes. Tawn's game is an amalgam of everything I dislike about modern NBA bigs -- big men thinking they have infinitely more range than they do (attention Antawn: you aren't a three point gunner no matter how many times Austin Carr sings his praises for your three-ball shot, get the hell inside), big men refusing to get position and lock down rebounds (I'm not exaggerating when I say that Antawn Jamison is the worst player at completing a simple box out in the entire league), and big men who cannot defend anyone (his defensive incompetence was bad before Cleveland, but the 2011 version of Antawn Jamison was a bold new talent in allowing every single opposing big man to score billions of points every fucking night). You'd know if you watched more than 50 of the 2011 Cavaliers' games. Which I did. Torturously. Jamison was without question the least enjoyable player to watch, night-in and night-out.

Do you remember that whole Yi Jianlin vs the world his team's chair debacle? The chair's defensive acumen is far beyond Jamison's. He is an actively horrible defensive player whose defense quite frankly GIVES the opposing team buckets. The man can't play within any defensive system with any success. There's a reason he's never been past the second round, you know. And this all isn't to say that he doesn't have some really nice pieces to his game -- the main one worth talking about is his ridiculous command of banking angles and his ability to get acrobatic, sideways roll shots through the hoop better than mostin the league. Because he does have that, and it's pretty cool to watch him make those crazy shots a few times a game. Sometimes. But there are so many goddamn flaws, you know? His game is the epitome of an empty lottery team stat-padder, which is a shame, because as dude he's a stand-up guy and it'd be pretty cool if his game matched the quality of his character. I'd feel a lot more sorry for him if I hadn't watched the 2011 Cavs. Now I just feel absolutely horrible for anyone who has had to consistently watch this guy over the course of his career. Yeesh.

• • •

[005] Davis, Glen

Glen Davis isn't a great player. But he's boisterous, high energy, and entertaining -- all the requisite pieces to be a fan favorite and an overrated fan-loved tertiary piece for a contender. He's a minus defender on his fundamentals, but he makes up for it by being dependably in the right place and taking a lot of charges. His offensive game has seen a lot of turbulence in the years since he entered the league -- Davis has transformed from an inside player to a big man whose J is essentially his only weapon. To wit, examine a small table I cooked up. %SHT indicates the percentage of his shots that came from that range, and FG% is how well he shot from the range on the shots he took.

========= AT RIM ======= JUMPER ====
....... %SHT   FG% ... %SHT   FG% ..
2008    0.61  0.54     0.39  0.33 ..
2009    0.33  0.59     0.67  0.40 ..
2010    0.48  0.52     0.52  0.37 ..
2011    0.30  0.63     0.70  0.39 ..
====================================

See the pattern? Essentially, Davis spent his rookie year trying to be an at-the-rim player. He only took 37 jump shots in his entire rookie season. The next year, though, he began to lean heavily on his improving jumper and for the most part quit forcing things in the post. That pattern has held relatively constant going forward, which is where the crux of his value comes into play. Davis is an extremely poor rebounder on both ends of the court (though he's a better offensive rebounder than a defensive rebounder), he's not a great man defender, and he isn't a reliable back to the basket presence. But he hustles, he can make a midrange shot when Rondo gets him open, and he sets decent screens. He knows the Celtics playbook and most likely has about 2-3x more value for them than he does for any other team in the league. So I'd normally think he'd be a lock to get resigned by the Celts once the lockout ends. Not positive that happens, though -- Davis has been sort of a jackass to the Celtics organization since the playoffs ended, and has confusingly stated that he wants to play starter's minutes (which... he's already playing for the Celtics, actually) and that he wants to get back to "Glen being Glen" instead of giving up his game for Boston's stars. So he may be heading out when the lockout ends. Personally, I don't think that would be such a bad thing for Celtics' fans -- I get the sense most of them think more of Davis than they should, and have visions of him as their big of the future. News flash: no. And that's all I have to say about that.

Off the court? I'm not one to talk about NBA players being dumb. Frankly, I think most athletes are given a horribly raw deal by a predominantly white media collective that loves to talk down to their intelligence and assume they're little more than mental midgets. Most NBA players are reasonably intelligent, and while we rarely consider it, the smarts it takes to master the mechanics of a basketball-playing body to become a good defender or a good shooter would be a significant mental asset if applied to any other field. What's more, modern NBA players tend to be businessmen, and while they hire people to help them out at the end of the day NBA players are making big decisions with large sums of money. Tim Duncan wrote a published thesis on the psychology of interpersonal reactions to excessive egoism. Steve Nash is a marketing genius who makes more money in a year on marketing than most people will ever make in their lives. Stephon Marbury may be a headcase, but even he built a more successful business operation than 95% of the world is capable of building. Intelligence isn't just how book smart you are, and NBA players have a lot of business intelligence, marketing acumen, and -- yes, Mr. Simmons -- plenty of intellectual capital to spare. Just because they have muscles doesn't mean they don't have brains.

Having said all that, Glen Davis strikes me as being, well, sort of dumb. His twitter is one of the most incomprehensible streams of idiotic babble this side of Dejuan Blair (a player I love, but who strikes me as a bit lacking in smarts). He's a funny guy, sort of, if you like humor like that -- me, personally, I always feel like I'm laughing more at him than with him, which makes me feel a little sad because I'm positive that's not his intent. Still. His relatively low mental faculties do lead to some funny quotes. Like the aforementioned "Glen being Glen" quote, in which he refers to himself in the third person not once, not twice, but five times in the span of three sentences:

“I just want to make sure I’m Glen Davis wherever I’m at. I think I can be Glen Davis wherever. It just depends on the system, the people around the system, who’s going to let Glen Davis be Glen Davis, not make Glen Davis something they think he should be.’’

That much third person is quite an accomplishment, really. If you're honest.

• • •

[006] Landry, Carl

Man. This dude fell off a cliff. He's been rather poor the last year and a half. Though, it wasn't always this way. In fact, at the time Kevin Martin got traded for Landry, I actually thought Landry was the best player in the deal. I was then proven so incredibly wrong it's hard to fathom how I ever thought that -- while Kevin Martin was an all-star quality player last year, Landry was barely replacement level. If even that. Regardless. We know how that turned out. Back in Houston, Landry was a 6MotY type burst scorer off the bench. He had an eldritch talent for drawing free throws, a decent post up game if he can catch his defender off balance, and a knack for snagging the contested offensive rebound to try a putback. He had a good sense of space on defense and although his size (extremely short for PF or C, his natural position) puts him at a disadvantage in a lot of cases he's decent at getting past his size. He uses his size to impose a quickness advantage versus the usual big men he faces -- in doing so, he becomes a tough individual defender, as his man can't regularly drive past him or lose control of the ball for fear that he'll hawk it.

The negatives? Well, first off, all that described his Houston game -- after he went to Sacramento, he became a tentative and nervous player who played passive on offense and rarely used the efficient burst scoring that made him an effective sixth man in Adelman's schemes. If he's not playing with a decent point guard who has some chemistry with him and can set him up with easy baskets, he tends to play as though he's having a bad night and eschews shots in order to keep out of the core offense. He's also a terrible help defender -- while he covers for his own size-challenged defense by funneling his man to the help (hence why he was so effective playing alongside Emeka Okafor, a great help defender) he gets lost on rotations and has trouble following guards. His biggest flaw, though, isn't any of those things -- it's his rebounding. He is quite possibly the least interested rebounder in the league, on the defensive end. While he's on the court, expect his man to get plenty of offensive rebounding opportunities -- he doesn't have the size to box out nor the will to contest, most of the time.

So, overall? You get a poor rebounding, undersized big man who doesn't have the ability to create his own offense or stay aggressive unless he's being set up by a guard he has a lot of chemistry with. Not a particularly good recipe for success. When he's on? Very efficient. Great sixth man. But not really a great player. Off the court, though, one has to give their due -- Landry is tough as nails. In mid 2009 he got shot in one of the stranger attacks I've heard an NBA player have to go through -- his car got slammed into on a city street, and when he got out to survey the damage and trade insurance information, the occupants of the offending car got out, shot him, and sped away. They only got his calf, but Landry was in a relatively remote location and ended up walking several miles to find help. With a bullet in his leg, and a dislocated finger from the accident. Pretty amazing, really. He also came back to the court less than three weeks after being shot, which is absurd as hell. Knock his game for how badly it has fallen off since his Houston days, but give the man his due -- dude is tough as hell.

• • •

To conclude, one last Big Baby quote. This time on the subject of why Big Baby hates Kobe Bryant.

“He just pisses me off on the court. You stress him out and he might speak some Spanish to you and you’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I know you’re from Italy or somewhere, but his charisma and just the way he’s so poised, it just gets under my skin.”

As a recurring feature, Alex will be reviewing and analyzing various blogs and hoops sites. No number ratings or anything silly like that, just a good overview of the sites at hand with their strengths, weaknesses, etc. To see an index of previously reviewed sites, click here.

The way many fans tell it, the field of sports statistics is a conspiracy against their favorite player (*cough* Kobe). For others, sports stats is a conspiracy against the fan experience. For many beyond that, sports stats is a useful and instructive field still in its infancy that often makes claims far above its pay grade and level of sophistication. For a fourth group, sports stats is absolutely perfect with no flaws. Now, most people are in the third camp, largely because of the way I worded that paragraph to make it seem most reasonable. Obviously you can find good examples of the first two groups on any sports comment section or any basketball forum. Of course, no one is really in the fourth group this brings us to Wages of Wins, by process of elimination.

You see, Wages of Wins is perhaps the only group of people in basketball that think that numbers speak for themselves, and that it's up to us intelligent people to give the numbers a voice against the unwashed masses. They might not say they believe this, but the evidence of their book, their head blog, and their overall perspective and approach combine to make me think this. If you want a (crude and somewhat unfair) analogy, you could say that Wages of Wins form a similar niche to Objectivists in American political culture. To make the analogy more precise (and hopefully less insulting), they take their own group's exclusive access to objective truth and intellectual courage as a collective and partially unstated given. Is either group filled with awful people or even stubborn people? No, not really. But the philosophy itself is stubborn, the heads of the two groups are frustratingly stubborn, and in general the movement represents an easy, half-assed way out of a hard problem. Let me explain:

There's a difference in any intellectual endeavor between positive and normative claims: both are subject to evidence, but are the result of fundamentally different perspectives. A positive claim goes something like this: "Increasing the minimum wage may increase the clearing price of wages but also will create labor shortages." Sure, it's not an easy empirical claim to think about or describe an experiment for, but, like you could design and describe an experiment from the nature of the claim. You know? You can use economic statistics, look at legal complications, take surveys, use research in psychology, even Platonic reasoning about an established model, and so on, to look at the historical effects of the minimum wage. You can make a good argument for or against a positive claim using both creative and established methodology.

Normative claims are a bit hairier. Whereas the positive claim above makes two casual links (Minimum wage up to wages up to supply of labor down), a normative claim makes one of its causal links a "better" or "more moral" universe. "Increasing the minimum wage will lead to a better world" Even in principle, to address whether this claim is true requires a whole lot of shared assumptions: most people might accept the claim if increasing the minimum wage increased both wages and supply of jobs for the poorest citizens. But unless you accept what someone else's version of a better world is, you are unlikely to be persuaded by their normative claims.

Now, positive and normative claims both have their purposes: positive claims help us turn our experience into sound theories about the world. Normative claims often lead to imaginative and thoughtful interpretations of the world around us. They also both have fundamental drawbacks. You can positively describe all the psychology and economic consequences of something stark in human experience like love or slavery - but at the end of the day it takes a normative claim to affirm what is right and reject what is wrong. And dually you can make loaded and rhetorical claims about the nature of things until you're blue in the face, but if you can't turn your judgments into empirical claims, you aren't going to change anything if you're right, and you're never going to find out your error if you're wrong.

Now, The Wages of Wins - to its credit - seems to steer towards and pay far more than lip service towards positive claims. One of the group's major pet peeves is the media bluster over a hyped-up, flashy player like Allen Iverson or Kobe Bryant. The group correctly notes that the media will use toy statistics and scoring numbers without context to make scorers like Iverson seem like the single most productive player on the floor at any given night, excusing shooting inefficiency with raw scoring numbers, excusing low defensive impact with the flash of steals, and so on. The numbers - as the Wages of Wins group reasons - don't lie. And just because you saw Iverson drop 60 one night doesn't excuse the shooting inefficiency he often brings to the table. Even if Kobe Bryant is legitimately great - if his stats don't match up - it's fair to call into question his sum total of accolades. I think most reasonable people can accept this.

To this end they developed on an interesting statistic (from Dean Oliver's work) - Wins Produced. I can't summarize it perfectly without getting a bit mathematical*, but to give you a toned-down version, they plot team point differential against winning percentage to calculate the marginal (economically speaking) value of points and possessions. They use these valuations more-or-less Platonically** to put box score stats like made field goals, steals, missed field goals, turnovers, and assists onto an additive scale, so that if you add together all the things in the box score given these weights, you'll come extremely close to knowing who won the game by what - and, adding up a team's stats over the course of the season - you should know more or less where they finished in the standings and/or how good they are. Then they take this (even after months of dissing them I still say) perfectly reasonable statistic and define an individual's "productivity" by their per-minute box score stats. And then they make a perfectly reasonable adjustment for position. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable is their statistic.

* Like all math majors, long, fascinating, and complex chains of reasoning appear to me in my head. This is a practical joke by math to see how badly I'll butcher these chains of reasoning when communicating them to other people.

_ ** Platonically in the sense that all assists are valued the same, all missed field goals are treated the same way, all turnovers are treated the same (and the same as missed field goals), steals are treated like anti-turnovers, steals are valued identically to rebounds, offensive rebounds are valued identically to defensive rebounds. More on this soon._

Do they have a point? Sure. When a perfectly reasonable statistic fails again and again in favor of the demonstrably worse metric scoring volume, they have successfully argued that there is a problem with NBA decision-making (at least - as they empirically show - with Rookie of the Year, MVP, All-NBA, etc. selections). You see, any perfectly reasonable statistic should be at least pretty decently correlated with merit. You know what I mean? That's not to say there can't be exceptions (perfectly good reasoning often systematically ignores exceptions), but basically, if you invent a statistic where points are good, misses are bad, steals are good, and assists are also good, and so on, you're probably not going to go too far astray as long as you keep a decent sense of proportions. If your proportions are given by team point differential, you're probably on the right track. You could easily - easily - use similar chains of reasoning to argue someone is the MVP. In fact, the popular "assist = 2 points" trope is a great example of this kind of argument back in the "Kobe vs. Nash" MVP debate in 2007. So yeah, there is a point to be made here: "Maybe Kevin Garnett isn't just doing a showy and historically great job of choking in the playoffs for the Wolves, big-market announcers. Maybe he's actually the best player in the league. Here's my argument. Maybe he is a winner. Maybe he's one of the best winners in the history of the league." That's what Wins Produced is - at first glance - all about. And it's a good thing.

It's perfectly reasonable. But then they stray from solid positive claims into (as opposed to equally solid) sketchy normative claims. They take their "perfectly reasonable" statistic and make an idol of it. Now, Richard Jefferson is a perfectly reasonable, likable, and competent player, but I shudder to think that anyone out there has made an idol of Richard Jefferson. Not only would it be an allocation problem (underutilizing perfectly fine stars to idolize instead like...I don't know, Chris Paul? Gosh.), but it would - in basketball terms - represent a fundamental misapprehension of the sport. If Richard Jefferson stops your show, it's probably not a very good show in the first place.* The problem is that instead of taking this Wins Produced statistic, putting it in their back pocket to counter a specious claim like that Allen Iverson did more to make his team win than Shaq in 2001, they argue that Shaq should be the MVP because their statistic says so. And then they argue that Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett and Chris Paul and Jason Kidd should have had the award for the next 8 years. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but the bottom line is: If he leads in Wins Produced for a year, the people at Wages of Wins will argue that he should be the MVP. Not "this should be used as a sanity check" because if a player is terribly mediocre according to this metric they're probably not an MVP. Not "this is one of many perfectly reasonable metrics, but it gives us some substantive clues into how good Kevin Love has been." Not "take this with a grain of salt, but Kevin Love comes up higher than all of Allen Iverson's career years combined." (Sorry about all these exaggerations, but it's how the Wages of Wins blog actually sounds, and it's seeping in to my own style to recall). And unfortunately while they may grasp the rules of basketball very well (and honestly do seem to be fans when all is said and done), they seem to regard any attempt to use the sport of basketball - as it empirically is, not just as the Platonic rulebook deems it to be - as a personal attack. It's hard to get them to acknowledge anything about the sport of basketball as they personally see it, opting for a bizarre and non-committal set of descriptions consistent with their intellectual views. "Kevin Love is amazing! Just look at these WP48 numbers!" Never a hint that they are watching, though for such committed people they must be watching.

* The preceding is statistical fact.

It's sad to say, but they don't have grains of salt, they don't have much context, and they don't have a multidimensional set of perfectly reasonable statistics. They're Johnny One-Note, and even though they at one point had one of the most reasonable concepts and some of the best experiments in all of basketball stats (heck, in all of sports), they just couldn't sustain one note for five years, and instead of adapting, "stretching the game out" in hip-hop lingo, and taking as an idol the braintrust which produced their fresh ideas, they Rip Van Winkled in a ranch of laurels, and curmudgeonly cut all ties with the rest of stats culture, and now subsist on incredibly lazy extensions of their original ideas, dogmatic and misguided rants about the problems in decision-making that they at one time helped to ameliorate a bit, and actually quite-good visualizations of their concepts. They idolized their original positive claims and made a normative universe around them until everyone accepts their claims. I don't know that I'm a humanist or anything, but if they're going to idolize their powerful claims, they probably could have done better idolizing the minds and processes that created those claims in the first place and then built their normative universe around these minds and processes. If they did this, we as fans - and writers, and intellectuals, and basketball enthusiasts - could at least begin to get behind them.

For a mind - infinitely more than a perfectly reasonable statistic ever could - can reason perfectly well.

Kevin Garnett, the Man of Unspeakable Cruelty.

And now, some Choice Examples of this Unspeakable Cruelty.

Ray Allen: Hey Kevin, could you help me out with moving this 50 pound bag?
Kevin Garnett: Do it yourself, Ray Allen. Here, take this strap so you can wear it on your back and buffer most of the load.

Stephon Marbury: Hey Kevin, could you help me pave my pool over?
Kevin Garnett: No, Stephon Marbury, because that's really not a wise decision. Drain your pool if you don't wish to use it or clean it, but it adds value to your property which is not going to be recouped by whatever else you put there.

Glen Davis: Hey Kevin, could you help me with a deeply personal problem?
Kevin Garnett: No, Glen Davis. You have to solve that by yourself. That's a personal problem.

Doc Rivers: Hey Kevin, can you help me motivate the team?
Kevin Garnett: I will try my best, Doc Rivers, but I demand that you oversee this, because that is your formal role as head coach of this team.

Sam Cassell: Hey Kevin, could you apply this hair-growth tonic to the back of my scalp?
Kevin Garnett: Sam Cassell, you are supposed to be in Washington. This is Boston, on the other-side of the massive metropolitan area which stretches across the Eastern Seaboard.

Leon Powe: Hey Kevin, do you remember me?
Kevin Garnett: Yes, Leon Powe. How are you?

Kendrick Perkins: Hey Kevin, can you guard Tim Duncan for me? He is sort of out-playing me recently.
Kevin Garnett: No, Kendrick, because if I did that I wouldn't be able to switch to cover their guards on the pick-and-rolls and flare screens which the Spurs are so fond of.

Tim Duncan: Hey Kevin.
Kevin Garnett: Hey... Tim Duncan...
Tim Duncan: We are playing a game against each other, tonight, Kevin. I just wanted to wish you luck. You could have had as many rings as I have if the luck of the draw had placed us differently, and I just wanted you to know that I have considered you my most potent and interesting rival over the years, and since we'll both be retiring soon, I wanted you to know that I have deep respect for your game and your toughness.
Kevin Garnett: Gee, Tim, thanks a lot! That means quite a bit, coming from you. I really wish we could have had more meetings in the playoffs with excellent teams, and while I do regret how things turned out, I finally got to a championship-caliber team late in my career, and I feel that vindicates everything that came before.
Tim Duncan: Yeah, I understand that. I didn't get full vindication for my skills until somewhat late in my career, either. But I was getting championships, and so it didn't matter as much to me. Well, I have to go to the arena, Kevin. I look forward to your performance.

Tim Duncan: Hey Kevin, now that it's about tip-off time, I wanted to, again, wish you luck.
Kevin Garnett: Thanks, Tim. You too.

Ref: Ray, you stand over there. Bruce, you stand on the left side, there, behind Tim. Alright, when I blow the whistle, it's tip-off time. Good luck.
Tim Duncan: Thank you, ref.
Ref: You're very welcome, Tim.
*whistle*
Manu Ginobili: Tim, get it to me...I will drive in the lane to space their shooters.
Tim Duncan: Okay, Manu.
Kevin Garnett: I WILL KILL YOU ALL WITH KNIVES MADE FROM YOUR BONES. AHHHHH. AHHHHH. AHHHH. GET OUT OF THE PAINT MANU THAT'S RIGHT. NOT TALL ENOUGH TO GET PAST ME. FUCK YOU TIM. THIS IS MY HOUSE, FROM SEA TO FUCKING SHINING SEA. AAHHHHH.
Doc Rivers: Oh Jesus Christ, Kevin, shut the fuck up.
Kevin Garnett: DON'T TELL ME HOW TO BE, DOC RIVERS. WHERE'S YOUR RING?
Ray Allen: Hey Kevin, can you pass the ball? I want to take this open shot.
Kevin Garnett: IN A MINUTE RAY ALLEN. I'M READING THE FUCKING DEFENSE. SO IF YOU CAN WAIT, JUST A FUCKING MINUTE. AAAHHHH.
Ray Allen: Okay, I can wait. But you know, the shot clock is 24 seconds, which is substantially less than a minute.
Kevin Garnett: RAY DON'T SHOVE MY LIMITATIONS IN MY FACE YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANT. DO I HAVE TO BREAK YOU LIKE I BROKE DUNCAN ON THAT LAST DUNK?
Ray Allen: Kevin, it's the first offensive possession of the game.
Kevin Garnett: I'M REFERRING BACK TO THE PLAYOFFS LAST YEAR RAY, YOU KNOW, WHEN DUNCAN WENT CRYING? HAHA IT'S GOOD TO BE THE BEST.
Ray Allen: The Spurs are in the Western Conference, while the Celtics are the in the East. Also, we lost in the second round last year.
Kevin Garnett: YEAH THAT'S WHAT KENDRICK WAS SAYING, BUT I THOUGHT HE WAS LYING.
Ray Allen: Well it's true. You should learn to trust people, Kevin.
Kevin Garnett: MAYBE, RAY, MAYBE.
Ray Allen: Like, I know that for all the bluster you're a fine, caring, thoughtful individual. If you added "trusting" to that, you would have quite an emotionally-available personality.
Kevin Garnett: NO, THAT'S NOT FOR ME RAY, I AM THE MAN OF UNSPEAKABLE CRUELTY AND I FIGURE I'LL ALWAYS BE.
Ray Allen: Oh, Kevin, that's not true. People can change in their lives.
Kevin Garnett: HAVEN'T YOU EVER SEEN A CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED DRAMA ABOUT A DAMAGED PROTAGONIST THAT TRIES TO CHANGE AND IN THE END REALIZES THAT THEY CANNOT? HOUSE, DEXTER, BREAKING BAD, THE WIRE? THE LIST GOES ON.
Ray Allen: Oh, come now, those shows are only that way for cynical economic reasons and because they don't want to alter the formula so much that they lose what made the shows successful in the first place. Looking at the formula for those shows is not the best way to find their most humane themes.
Kevin Garnett: MAYBE YOU'RE RIGHT RAY, MAYBE I CAN CHAN-
*whistle*
Ref: Shot clock violation. Spurs Ball.
Kevin Garnett: GODDAMN IT RAY. I WANT TO DUNK ON DUNCAN SO HARD LIKE LAST YEAR.
Ray Allen: Okay, Kevin.
Tim Duncan: Kevin, I just want to wish you the best of luck in this game.

For our inaugural post for our "Shades of Willis Reed" feature, I was planning on doing a post about one of the league's injury-ignoring resident badasses (most likely Kobe or Manu). Then I was looking through my player capsule stuff and realized that, given the feature isn't primarily about injury and more just about moments where a player simply does something undeniably awesome, I had a perfect anecdote to start the feature off with right under my nose. Our starting player? Not a well-known star or an injury-prone fighter, no. He's not even a regular starter, or a well-known player. But he is the subject of one of my most impressive personal basketball anecdotes, and that's all you really need to make this feature. So without further ado: today's post is about Ty Lawson.

Spoiler alert: I went to Duke. Not my favorite place in the world, not the best three years of my life, but I did go there and I did go to a bunch of Duke games. I halfheartedly rooted for our basketball team while I was a student (though hated the team before I went there and currently find myself relatively neutral on it) and actually don't particularly care about the UNC rivalry. Most likely because my girlfriend currently goes to UNC. And I have a lot of friends at UNC, enough so that I can't in good conscience hate the university with the requisite vim. So, that's me. A Duke alumni who doesn't really care about UNC. That's odd.

Still. Going to Duke, you get a lot of funny rivalry stories over the years. This one is probably my favorite. At Duke, you need to tent if you want to make it to the Duke vs UNC game in Cameron. Tenting involves living in a tent for several months with a few of your friends to hold your place in the ticket line for when the free student tickets get distributed. I was never a crazy enough Duke fan to tent for a ticket to Duke vs UNC, but one of my good friends was exactly that crazy. In fact, his group started tenting virtually the second you could start it. They actually ended their winter breaks early to come tent. That was how crazy it was. As it turned out, he was just crazy enough about it to end up being in the front row, on game night. Right at the edge of the section behind Carolina basket. Easily visible for most of the game. It was pretty sweet. He got all dressed up, and the cameras regularly would drift to him as they went off to commercial breaks.

The game started out well enough -- I was watching in the common room with a bunch of other friends who didn't intend to tent for tickets, and we'd cheer every time we saw him or anyone else from our dorm in the crowds. We were leading pretty big as we approached the end of the first half. Given that Duke was a fringe contender that year and UNC was one of the greatest teams of the last decade, it was a big accomplishment. But there's one moment that I distinctly remembered. The camera drifted to my friend right as he started yelling some not-particularly-safe-for-work stuff at some UNC player who happened to be walking by. We all got a laugh out of it.

UNC proceeded to make a huge run and went to the half with all the momentum as Duke clung to a single-digit lead. UNC ended up dropping 57 points in the second half and blew Duke out in Cameron Indoor, becoming the first team in 9 years to score triple digits against Duke and winners of four straight on Duke's home court -- making Hansbrough and Green (both seniors) two of only four players to win four games at Cameron Indoor in their collegiate career. They joined Rusty LaRue and Tim Duncan. Yes, Virginia, THAT Tim Duncan. Pretty wild. Anyway. Suffice to say, we got the stuffing kicked out of us.

I saw my friend later that night and didn't want to say anything. He was sad, angry, and disappointed. There wasn't much that would console him, and I felt like saying something would only needle him. But... well, don't ask me why -- I don't remember -- but I decided to throw all that to the wind and ask, because that image of him yelling at one of the Carolina players was stuck in my head.

"Man, who were you yelling at before the half?"

"Wait, you saw that?"

"Yeah. You were on TV."

"Dude... it was Lawson. I was yelling at Lawson."

"Wait, what? He scored, like, all of his points in the second half."

"Goddamnit, don't remind me, I know. We'd just scored and we were up by 15 or something and I yelled some catcalls and stuff, and someone else followed up with some shit about his mom. He looked back at us, grabbed the ball, drove down the court, and crushed all our guys to get an easy layup. He was staring at our corner all the way down the court. Next time Coach K called time, he walked up to me and basically told me I was a bastard from a shit school whose shit talk had guaranteed we'd lose. He told us to go fuck ourselves, and said that after he dealt with us he'd be laughing all the way to the NBA. Then he laughed at us while we stared at him and walked back to the bench. Then you know what happened. Twenty one fucking points in the second half. Ran the offense like a pro. And every one he scored, he catcalled the crowd. Kept looking at us and laughing. He was having a great time. Nobody could stop him. It was the worst fucking thing. Now I feel like I cost Duke the game and ruined our season. How the fuck do we come back from a loss like that?"

(He did. Duke bowed out early that year.)

• • •

At the time, this story made me greatly dislike Ty Lawson. With the benefit of time and separation from college ball, however, I now see it as a pretty amazing story about a great point guard who put the team on his back and actually did something about the kids who were mussin' on him. Honestly? Good on you, Ty Lawson. This story is badass as fuck and if it wasn't UNC vs Duke I would've recognized that long ago. Shades of Willis Reed up in here, in fact.

As one of our mainstay features, Aaron is writing posts highlighting every single player in the NBA. Role players, superstars, key cogs, or players who are barely as useful as ballboys -- none are exempt from the prying eyes of our readers. Check the index for a lowdown on order, intent, and all that jazz. For the starting five, we'll begin with Joakim Noah, Shawn Marion, and John Salmons.

• • •

[001] Noah, Joakim

Joakim Noah – starting center for the Chicago Bulls, and starting stoner in the hearts of NBA fans everywhere. Widely known because of the fact that he’s incredibly and hilariously unattractive, NCAA hoops fans would remember the fact that he won back to back titles under Billy Donovan at Florida. People who actually watch real grown-up basketball (just kidding, NCAA fans -- sort of) would remember the fact that, when healthy, Noah is among the best help defenders in the league. He's also surprisingly competent offensively – Noah doesn't have that many moves, but he's quick, huge, and rather good at establishing position. For all the dap he gets over his solid defense, Noah is also a relatively underrated cog in the Bulls offense, too -- his pivot passing really smooths out the holes in their offense when things are going well. Which wasn't very often under Vinny Del Negro, but as last season showed, things go well quite a bit more often when you aren’t, well, coached by Vinny Del Negro. For much of last season, Noah was actually more important to the Bulls' offensive flow than he was to their defensive flow.

He's also way more fast than a dude as ugly and large as him has any right whatsoever to be -- if you watch him stride down the court, he is actually fast enough to outrun the majority of the bigs in the NBA. This was made explicit in the classic Bulls vs Celtics series from 2009, wherein Noah had 3 or 4 hilarious fast break dunks where he shocked the world by taking the ball up the floor. If Thibodeau ran more fast break plays, and Rose was better at outlet passes on the break, he could establish position and score a great deal of points on the break. As is, though – he’s a very good player. Great defender, though perhaps a tad overrated – while he’s a great help defender and among the league’s best, he’s a not-particularly-special man defender and his overall impact on the Bulls’ team defense was a bit lessened last season both by Noah’s constant injuries and the Bulls’ bench bigs breaking out with some unexpectedly great defense. When you're backed up by Omer Asik and Taj Gibson, your defensive contributions are less noticeable.

If he can stay healthy sometime in the next 3-4 years I believe the Bulls will have a serious shot at another 65 to 70 win season. Which is pretty odd – the Bulls are suddenly really well-established for the future, and given the shitshow that Chicago underwent over the past decade, that’s strange to me. I've gotten sort of used to the Bulls being a bit of a punchline and having them go from "may challenge for a marquee free agent" to "oh my god they got Boozer sorry Chicago" to "...wait, they're still elite? What?" in the course of a season surprised me a bit. I would say, though, that his injury history has to be considered in any appraisal of Noah’s present and future value. And given it? He may very well be the most expendable core starter going forward for the Bulls. Ignoring Boozer because Boozer’s contract is absolutely untradeable, look at the Bulls' core pieces. Luol Deng’s durability has been questionable over his career but if last season is any indication he has a better chance of being an iron man going forward than Noah. He’s also far less tradeable, as his contract (fairly or not) has Luol seen around the league as a giant financial anchor. Rose is the franchise cornerstone. Taj Gibson and Omer Asik are both extremely young and talented bigs that were dependable and grew as the season went on – I’d be very hesitant to trade either if I were Chicago, especially given the price they've got their services at for the forseeable future.

For a team that absolutely positively NEEDS an upgrade at shooting guard and a second scorer to take the pressure off Rose, Noah may be their best bargaining chip. They’ll be drafting in the bottom ten for the foreseeable future, so lottery talent is going to be unavailable. The Bulls are, frankly, a pretty poor drafting team historically anyway. (Though you have to give them dap for Taj and Omer. Still. What they need is a miracle trade that retains Noah and trades their pu pu platter of awful off-guards with every draft pick they can possibly give up away for someone like George Hill, Courtney Lee, Delonte West, or any strong young guard talent. That sort of a trade isn't going to happen particularly often, though, and it's doubtful any team in the league is going to bite on that. The best chance they have at upgrading their two guard is probably to part with Noah. Which may seem like a steep price, but building a championship team is hard, and when you're a player away and you have a deal to get rid of one of your repeating pieces for that piece, you usually have to consider it. Outside of his game, though, Noah is generally known for -- yes -- being kind of a stoner and having a really hot girlfriend (you can google the pictures yourself if you really want to). He's also incredibly outspoken. In 2010 he said Cleveland sucks. As someone who roots for the Cavs and whose mother's family is from Cleveland this basically eliminates ability to root for Noah, ever.

So, screw you too, Noah.

• • •

[002] Marion, Shawn

Shawn Marion, starting small forward for the Dallas Mavericks. Shawn Marion is most famous for the fact that his shooting motion has and always will be a strong contender for the most awkward and hilarious shooting motion in the league. He basically crosses his legs, pops up like Michigan J. Frog, and has this ridiculous hitch in his release that's pretty much impossible to describe. In fact, just go watch it. Seriously, look at this. It's fun to watch.

In his heyday, Marion probably should have been known for more than his hilarious shot. He was by far the best defender on Mike D'Antoni's 55+ win Phoenix teams in the mid 2000s, and basically was tasked with defending players of any position on a nightly basis to cover for how D'Antoni never had a clue how to operate his teams on the defensive end. Opposing team's best player was a point guard? Whatever, D'Antoni would stick Marion on him. A center? Stick Marion on him. Shaq in his prime? Stick Marion on him and cry yourself to sleep as you lose by 200 points. Granted, those Suns teams royally sucked on defense, but they were never absolute last in the league, and some weren't even in the bottom 10. Given D'Antoni's limitations? That's a huge accomplishment. And that was basically entirely thanks to Marion's work, as seen by Phoenix's imploding pretend-defense after he left.

One thing that's worth noting and rarely gets mentioned by the commentariat who use Gentry's performance with the post-D'Antoni Suns as evidence that D'Antoni isn't as clueless as Gentry on defense is that D'Antoni's departure and Marion's departure came at roughly the same time. Gentry isn't good at coaching defense, don't get me wrong, but the fact that Gentry has done a worse job with the Suns roster on defense than D'Antoni ever did isn't a credit to D'Antoni, it's mostly a credit to Marion's ability to cover up for D'Antoni's defensive incompetence and his rather awesome ability at his peak to defend every position on the planet. Not necessarily amazingly well, but that versatility was an integral part of the run-and-gun Suns and deserved a lot more recognition than he got for it.

Regardless. Now he's more of a past-his-prime journeyman, but he's got some skills. In the Mavs' magic run to the 2011 title, Marion was a key low post presence who was one of the main beneficiaries of Kidd's remaining passing ability -- he has great chemistry with Kidd, who has Marion's Dallas offense better than it was in Miami by leaps and bounds. Still. His defense has fallen off quite a bit, which detracts from his value a lot. He's not a insanely big factor anymore on D, as he was in his prime, although he did do a reasonably good job on LeBron in the finals. I'd say he did better, but I don't think he was a factor on LeBron as much as LeBron was a factor on LeBron. If that makes sense. So that's Shawn Marion. You can also call him "The Matrix." You know. If you're an asshole.

• • •

[003] Salmons, John

John Salmons was the starting shooting guard for the Milwaukee Bucks last year. He was to be again, until the Sacramento Maloofs decided that they really really wanted to move down in the draft to acquire the glorious talents of John Salmons. Which... might rank as the most idiotic draft day trade I can remember in a while. Seriously. The Kings moved DOWN in the draft in order to acquire a chucker with poor shooting numbers who likes to think he's really swag but who actually kind of blows. They also gave up Beno Udrih, a decent stopgap point guard who has a lot of value as a bench guard. For John friggin' Salmons.

Salmons, though? He's basically the epitome of a contract year player. He plays really well right up to when he has to sign a contract, at which point his shooting percentages magically fall off a cliff, his decisionmaking falls to about 1st grade levels, and his demeanor on the court goes from desperate and high energy to a sort of "fuck you got mine" kind of aimless shot-hogging style that torpedoes his teams more often than not. His defense is abhorrent regardless of whether he's in a contract year or not. He'll occasionally make "big" shots, but frankly, he takes so many of them it's less of a skill and more of a "he has to make a few, right?" proposition. More often than not, Salmons will simply chuck his way to oblivion. He is named after a fish because he is not a crab. I don't actually know what I just said, but I'm not going to delete it, as pressing the backspace key to erase that sentence would take more effort than Salmons puts in for the first two years after he signs a new deal.

I'm just gonna leave it at that.

• • •

That's all for now. More tomorrow.

As a regular lockout feature, we will be highlighting old masters through a series of classic NBA games in our Eye on the Classics series. For our first featured game, I'll be taking a look at Bernard King's classic 60 point bomb in Madison Square Garden during one of the few successful seasons in a long and rarely noted career.

As a statistician, I'm always one of the strongest proponents of the idea that the average fan vastly overrates the importance of a volume scorer on a contending team. Rebounding, passing, and lockdown defense are all roughly as important as volume scoring -- in a vacuum. But even the most curmugeonly among us (Berri exempted) can't deny the sheer joy a basketball fan can find in a virtuoso scoring performance. Players who end a game having scored over half their team's points in an altogether dominating fashion are, at the moment they take their leave of the court, the most important thing a basketball player can be. They're the franchise. At least for a game. They vindicate their decision to regularly dominate the ball, again, at least for a single game. And they captivate us. They get our attention, no matter how negative we are about their skills.

In short, scoring may not be the single most important thing a player can do on the court. But it is, without question, the most electrifying. And Bernard King, bless his soul, exemplifies it. This game in particular. Like all record-setting or challenging performances, this one didn't really start with any particular fanfare. A lot like Kobe's 81. King misses his first several shots and actually fades badly in the second half, enough so that the Nets win the game despite his outburst and despite the Knicks being one of the four best teams in the league that season. But the failures are important for our purposes -- his misses allow watchers of this game the levity to properly examine King's offensive game, as well as differences in the general offensive strategy in the 80s compared to today.

The first observation I had when I watched the full game is that King's offensive game would fit just fine in the modern NBA. He can finish with both hands smoothly, and would still be one of the best in the league at that today. His shot is wet as a newly beached seal. And, perhaps most importantly, he draws free throws like an absolute boss. In an era with less whistle-heavy refs, no less. The announcer says he's the most physical offensive player in the leauge in the 80s. I don't really have any players off the top of my head that would refute that opinion. One comparison I think is at least somewhat apt is that King is the Melo of his era. Pretty easy to see where it comes from. First, obviously, both are Knicks and both are borderline franchise guys. Their offensive games are somewhat similar -- both extremely physical in the post, but with a smooth enough midrange shot (both long and short) that both are a serious threat from any spot on the court inside the three point line. Even the best defenders can't really do much against either of them. Play them close? They'll outmuscle you and get to the hole. Lay off? Silky midrange stepback in your grill. It's tough. The best way is to force them to ballhog and turn it over.

Not particularly difficult to do, if one's honest. But still.

Where King separates himself from Melo is in the fact that he basically takes everything Melo does and does it a bit better. Where Melo puts no effort in on the defensive end, King puts a bit of effort in -- he isn't a great defender (just watch his decisionmaking in the second half if you don't believe me, it's atrocious), but you can't really say he's really lacking in effort on that end if he puts in even a modicum of effort in such a lights out offensive performance. He's a marginally better passer, and beyond that, has a markedly better sense on how to get his teammates into the game than Melo does. King's general quality as a player at his peak shows in how different his peak playoff record is from Melo's current grind. In Melo's prime, he was the best player on a talent-rich Pistons-esque Nuggets team that went to a WCF after beating a straight up bad Mavs team and a wildly mediocre and broken Hornets team, only to get subsequently crushed by the Lakers. Who were, quite frankly, barely even trying until the finals.

King, though? Just look at this game. The Knicks team featured here ended up pushing the would-be champion Celtics to 7 games in the second round after upsetting Isiah's Pistons in the first round. Both of those are all-time great teams, with the Pistons a year away from becoming a serious title contender -- the argument could easily be made that King's Knicks were the 2nd or 3rd best team in the league in 1985. Very hard to make that argument about any of Melo's teams, and despite that, Melo had far more talent. Bernard King's teams were all extremely bare in the cupboard when it came to supporting casts around his scoring, whether in defense or tertiary scorers. The great tragedy of his career is how, like many mid-80s stars, it got derailed by injury. A devastating ACL injury, as a matter of fact, that made him miss almost 3 seasons and sapped him of the majority of his explosiveness. While King came back from the injury and eventually was a productive player again (making him the first major pro athlete to return to his sport from an ACL tear -- a big triumph for medicine) he was still never quite the same. Which is a shame. In an era filled with high scoring wingmen (see: Adrian Dantley, Mark Aguirre) King was one of the better ones. And his injury was a ridiculous shame.

One last thing I'd like to mention. While you can get a sense of King's scoring from the video above that highlights all of his scored points, you don't really get a sense of what a game in Madison Square Garden was like in the 80s. And I think that's worth looking at, if you ever see an 80s Knicks game on TV. Madison Square Garden is essentially the most famous arena in the country -- so called mecca of basketball and all that. And I think it's worth asking... why, exactly? Why not the Forum? Why not the Boston Garden? Why, exactly, is MSG so special? It isn't the Knicks, honestly. They've been an irrelevant team more often than a contender over the last 30-40 years. The Forum and the Garden are both more historically relevant. This game gives a bit of insight into why MSG is so revered. The 80s crowd that MSG draws is nothing like any other regular season 80s game I've seen. The crowd is into it and rocking. But I find it sort of funny that despite how nice it is compared to other 80s games, the crowd honestly pales in comparison to the crowds that are drawn by big games nowadays. There's a tendency to exalt the past as some incredible time when every game was rocking and people "really" followed the NBA, unlike today's contrived arenas and poor crowds.

But honestly, a big game at any arena across the country would give you a similar atmosphere to the 80s MSG now, which is less a mark of how poor the 80s MSG was (it wasn't) and more a mark of how far the NBA has come in improving the crowds and the customer experience. MSG deserves its place in NBA lore, don't get me wrong -- as I said, this game is probably the most rockin' of any game I've seen from the mid 80s, and being one of the better arenas in terms of crowd coverage over the course of NBA history is undoubtedly worth something. But with the Knicks franchise being somewhat irrelevant over the course of most post-1975 basketball history and the majority of MSG's lore coming from boxing, college hoops, and New York's incredible streetball culture I don't think it's particularly accurate or reasonable to call it the mecca of basketball persay. New York? Sure, maybe. But MSG itself? It's an institution in and of itself, above basketball or any particular sport. The arena has its own mythos quite separate from the NBA -- it would be nice if TV announcers started recognizing it instead of going with the intellectually lazy conflation of New York's basketball culture with MSG's singular mythos and the almost entirely unrelated New York Knicks.

That's my two cents, anyway. It was a fun game. I really hope King makes the Hall of Fame sometime soon.