This writing project is courtesy of everyone's good friend Angelo. I'll let him describe it:

A friend challenged me to a writing contest. The basic premise is that for two months, she will send me a writing prompt twice a week. 750 word response. I will do the same with her. The point is to get some experience/feedback writing a bunch of different, unusual things with odd prompts that you don't expect. Would you be interested in doing one a week for the rest of the offseason?

Fun times in Cleveland today. (Cleveland!) He's posting his on Goodspeed and Poe, everyone's favorite blog. I'm posting my contributions on Gothic Ginobili, everyone's favorite basketball. No, I didn't mean to type "basketball blog." Gothic Ginobili is not a blog. Gothic Ginobili is a basketball. If you disagree with this particular assessment, you just haven't experienced this place properly yet. Here are the previous prompts:

• WEEK #1: Dispatches from 3030 & Drive Thru Disaster
• WEEK #2: The Dangers of Thrift & Forever Inked
• WEEK #3: MackGuire vs Hogan & Mega Blogger Man
  
• WEEK #4: Moosepocalypse Now & Leave it to Beaver
• WEEK #5: Halloween Follies & The Boy Who Cried Apocalypse

Here's this week's prompt.

• • •

PROMPT #6: GTA: Grand Theft Aaron. As my life right now is primarily composed of Breaking Bad re-watches & playing GTA 5, the topic of crime is foremost in my mind. What would it take for you, Mr McGuire, to abandon your life of statistical analysis & turn to a life of crime? What would your crime of choice be? Would you go all Walter White and enter the drug trade? Take after Trevor Phillips and become a complete psychopath? Or perhaps would you use your statistical prowess in some sort of white collar endeavor?

To a certain extent, crime is often precluded by a sort of moral code. Dexter Morgan's code made sure that he only killed serial killers and his popular eponymous television show. Walter White constantly states that he's willing to give up everything to save his family -- whether or not you believe him is another matter, but there's a stated code to the way he acts. Avon Barksdale's code precludes him from ordering a hit on the Lord's day of rest. John Marston commits his crimes for his kidnapped family. Et cetera, et cetera. Criminals in popular fiction almost always have some sort of warped morality play in their wheelhouse. It serves two purposes -- it allows the criminals to justify their actions and allows the mass audience to find some tiny common ground with a criminal they'd normally detest. For the purposes of this question, though, I'm trying to get to the bottom of the first purpose. What crimes, exactly, could I justify to myself if I had to try?

Let's start high and descend slowly. First, we'll start with the highest crime of all: domestic terrorism. And the answer to that is an obvious "no." It breaks morality on several levels. It kills innocent people as well as any guilty people who happen to be in the vicinity, it causes massive property damage, and can serve as justification for misguided mass military action. That's decidedly beyond my ability to justify. There is no cause I can think of that would make domestic terrorism something I could live with. What about the individual pieces of domestic terrorism? Property damage seems like an easy "sure, I could do that!" crime until one really starts to ruminate on the consequences. Who pays for rebuilding property you destroyed? Depending on the property, it could be any number of people who aren't at all responsible for ill action towards anyone. And even if crooked insurance companies are paying out for your damage, the inconvenience to everyone caused by the damage can often be entirely too much. (Seriously, have you ever lived near a place that was recently vandalized and is undergoing massive repairs? It sucks!) And if you're destroying a little mom-and-pop store, your act of vandalism may very well be enough to put them out of business and on the street. Smooth move, Ferguson.

Then there's the obvious biggie -- murder. Could I actually kill someone? I'd never say never, but I'd deem it highly unlikely. Look: I still feel a twinge of guilt every time I recall making fun of a kid in elementary school. Even for the most grotesque of individuals, there are still a few people on Earth who care about them. Mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers. A murder you get away with is still a murder that leaves family and friends grasping for reasons why it happened. Could I live with that on my conscience? Not sure. And we're talking about a life of crime, here -- I'm just talking about a single murder. Perhaps I'd go Walter White on life and stop caring about murders after I commit my 5th. But I feel it's far more likely I'd make a mistake disposing evidence or turn myself in out of guilt. I can only imagine being okay with murder in cases of extreme self defense -- that is, a position where family or self is being mortally threatened and the only way out is to kill the threat who's looming. Or someone who threatens my livelihood in such a way that would destroy everything I've worked to achieve.

So, yes. Maybe I could murder under the proper circumstances. Still, that doesn't mean I'd be able to murder lightly. And there's still the matter of finding a criminal livelihood that would be even remotely possible under my personal moral mores. That leaves one criminal potentiality: white collar crime. There are a lot of ways to go about that. Fraud, money laundering, covert heists. But every action runs up against a serious problem, for me -- I have no desire whatsoever to harm those less fortunate than myself. If I feel the need to steal when I already have more than the people I'm stealing from, I'm putting them in a legitimately impossible situation. I'd feel guilty as hell. The unfettered avarice you need to feel to steal from the less fortunate disturbs me. Could I live with that? Probably not.

But then there's the other side of stealing -- skimming from the rich. But then you're faced with yet another moral quandary. Is it all THAT much better to steal from richer people, if you aren't keying in on those whose fortunes are largely illicit? There's a large chance I'm stealing away well-earned money that people worked extremely hard to cultivate. Is that really worth it? Professional money laundering is an easy white-collar crime tactic, but then you're simply enabling all the crimes listed above that I am morally uneasy on. At what point would I turn to a life of crime? I'd assume I'd need to have exhausted every possible means of legal living, and I'd need to have people who depend on me financially. That way, I could feel less conflicted about stealing from anyone. But then I'd be working with zero resources. How do you start a life of rewarding white collar crime with zero resources?

... okay, you know what? Angelo, I think all I've realized from this prompt is that I'm by far the worst criminal ever. But it's okay, I finally figured out my calling. When I was a kid, I kinda liked politics. Really wanted to be Sam Seaborn. Let's say THAT'S how I get into a life of crime -- I sign on as a starry-eyed speechwriter for an idealistic world-builder. I get elected to public office and gradually lose my principles a la Thomas Carcetti. I steal from the government by offering up terrible contracts for kickbacks and regulations that cause incredible cronyism. I retire and become a lobbyist trafficking in war machines. Beautiful, simple, completely believable. Classic story.

Thanks, Obama.

• • •

Just a programming note -- our normal basketball-heavy content will begin anew this October. Get excited!

This writing project is courtesy of everyone's good friend Angelo. I'll let him describe it:

A friend challenged me to a writing contest. The basic premise is that for two months, she will send me a writing prompt twice a week. 750 word response. I will do the same with her. The point is to get some experience/feedback writing a bunch of different, unusual things with odd prompts that you don't expect. Would you be interested in doing one a week for the rest of the offseason?

Fun times in Cleveland today. (Cleveland!) He's posting his on Goodspeed and Poe, everyone's favorite blog. I'm posting my contributions on Gothic Ginobili, everyone's favorite basketball. No, I didn't mean to type "basketball blog." Gothic Ginobili is not a blog. Gothic Ginobili is a basketball. If you disagree with this particular assessment, you just haven't experienced this place properly yet. Here are the previous prompts:

• WEEK #1: Dispatches from 3030 & Drive Thru Disaster
• WEEK #2: The Dangers of Thrift & Forever Inked
• WEEK #3: MackGuire vs Hogan & Mega Blogger Man
  
• WEEK #4: Moosepocalypse Now & Leave it to Beaver

Here's this week's prompt.

• • •

PROMPT #5: This is the time of year when I really start gearing up for Halloween. Despite what many adults would say, Halloween is easily the best holiday of the year. Shitty horror movies are on TV all the time, you can binge eat candy without any of your coworkers guilt tripping you and talking about the "paleo diet", and pumpkin flavored everything is everywhere. It's the greatest. That said, the best part of Halloween is easily the Halloween party and the corresponding costumes. And that brings us to your prompt, Aaron. Give us all a brief history of the Halloween costumes of Aaron McGuire. What are you most proud of? The most ashamed? Have you ever seen a costume that brought a tear to your eye? Any that made you shudder in fright?

A brief history of my Halloween costumes is just that: brief. For someone that's as huge of an unrepentant nerd as I am, I've never been one to really go all-out and create a super-intricate Halloween costume. I've been content to linger with the unwashed masses, reveling in our completely unremarkable costumes and leaving the truly impressive stuff for others. Most of my costumes were so unremarkable as to be totally forgettable, and I honestly can't say I remember what I went as for most of them.

The ones I remember include:

• Age 5: Waldo from Where's Waldo. (There are some really adorable pictures of this one.)
• Age 6: Steven Spielberg (Yes, I went as a famous Jewish filmmaker as a 6-year-old. Classic Aaron McGuire.)
• Age 9: Obi-Wan Kenobi (The cloak from this one formed the basis of every costume I wore for the next 5 years.)
• Age 17: Dr. McNinja (From the webcomic, unexpectedly titled The Adventures of Dr. McNinja.)
• Age 21: Scarecrow (From Wizard of Oz. Girlfriend went as Dorothy.)

That's all I really can recall, which is both the sign of someone who really didn't put a wealth of effort into the craft and a sign of someone who didn't have particularly good ideas to begin with. At least I didn't ever go with any of the classics (Frankenstein's monster, zombies, warlocks) -- I would've probably made a mockery of them, and if you're gonna make a mockery of a costume you might as well keep it relatively off the beaten path. I added a photograph of my Dr. McNinja costume to the front of the post, as well as a photograph of my scarecrow costume to the bottom. As those are by far my two best ones, you can make your own silent judgments on the rest of them from there. In terms of pride and shame, I'm a bit proud of the Dr. McNinja costume simply because it was a cheap-yet-fun costume that I thought I executed reasonably well with scant little money to spend on it. Using my Obi-Wan Kenobi cloak for five years of costumes would be my biggest source of shame -- few things are more shameful than Halloween half-measures, and recycling a costume for that long is the king of all half-measures.

As for the costumes of others, that's another admittedly scant subject for me. When I was in college, I somehow managed to be working on Halloween night every single year. The night I was Dr. McNinja, I didn't even go out -- I stayed in and handed out candy while my parents had a relaxing night with the X-Files movie and my brother trick-or-treated with friends. There was only one particularly costume-filled Halloween night, and that was the time I went as Scarecrow, traveled back to Chapel Hill, went to one a Halloween party thrown by some of my UNC friends. If you aren't familiar, UNC's Franklin Street goes nuts on Halloween. They rope off several blocks and it becomes a gigantic outdoor party, one of drunk heckling and costume admiration all around. While I've only been there once, I have to admit, it was pretty fantastic. The creativity was incredible. Costumes I can remember off the top of my head include:

• A living set of Tetris pieces, occasionally being lifted up and placed atop each other.

• One man went as a giant (and semi-functional!!!) Connect Four board. Rajon Rondo would've freaked.

• Scrabble tiles. (Carved ones, too -- not just flimsy cardboard crap, they actually carved out life-size scrabble tiles.)

• Some frat boys went as a centaur. Wouldn't have been notable, except it looked exactly like the Alex Rodriguez centaur that everyone knows about. Which is, you know, completely 100% perfect.

• Seven people fully painted themselves the seven shades of a rainbow. Pedestrian, right? Wrong -- they moved in complete concert with each other, never breaking character as a living rainbow for over an hour.

What.

Look, Angelo. I'm not saying that you need to make a point to come to Chapel Hill just to see their Halloween celebrations. I'm just saying that exact thing I just said I wasn't saying, you know? I am not enticing you to come to Chapel Hill, except for the part where that is exactly what I'm doing. The decision is entirely up to you, although there is a clear delineation between right and wrong in this specific case. No judgment here, except the judgment I am making right at this very moment on you as a human being. Feel free to do whatever it is you want to do, as long as whatever you want to do intersects with exactly what I have outlined in this confusing paragraph.

... Happy Halloween!

Bonjour, readers. Welcome to the first -- and perhaps only! -- edition of the Gothic Ginobili Intrigue Rankings! Why? Because regular power rankings are boring, that's why. It's a lot more fun to rank to teams by how interesting they are rather than how good they are. At least for me. What makes a team intriguing, other than my personal whims? A big part of it the distance between a team's ceiling and its floor. If I can pick a team's win total within five games without thinking too hard about it, that's not a particularly interesting team. If I can look at a team and see 30 and 50 wins as being equally possible, that's a lot more fun to think about. Relevance also matters, although less so. I try not to go strictly by ability, but if I know a team is going to be awful and it's just a matter of how awful they'll be, they will likely linger towards the bottom of the list. Above all else, this is a list about how fun a team is to think about, and whether or not I think they'll be interesting to follow in 2013-14. Now that that's set up, let's dive into the second half of yesterday's list. Rather than an ordinal 1-30 ranking, I've compiled a list of roughly ordered tiers corresponding to various levels of interest.

• • •

TIER #8: STAYING THE COURSE (... WELL, THEY CAN AFFORD TO)

Miami Heat

I had to put the Heat in the top half of this list because... well, they're the Heat. Their mere existence piques one's interest. Still, it's basically the exact same team every year at this point. Beyond their ridiculous streak last season, they weren't nearly the compelling story they were in 2011 or 2012 -- a title gives you carte blanche to rest your guys and take your foot off the gas. Hard to really blame them, but it made them inherently a little less fun. And the continuity is ridiculous.When you're invested in multiple superstars, you're pretty much stuck with that roster. The question of whether or not any team can make the Finals four years in a row at a time where the league is so competitive is the most fascinating question here. The Heat would be the favorites against any team in the East right now, but can they get through all of them? Last year, the Heat didn't face a real challenge until the Conference Finals, and they were taken right to the razor's edge by the Pacers and the Spurs. Now that the Bulls are back in the mix, the Nets got considerably better, and whoever represents the West should remain as stout a challenge as last year's Spurs -- whoever they are. The pressure could be a bit much. The possibility of Greg Oden becoming a serious contributor is a mildly entertaining sub-plot. Considering everyone they've trotted out at center over the past five years, he was easily worth the risk.

San Antonio Spurs

Some signings are interesting solely because of the team making them. If Marco Belinelli signs with the Bucks or the Raptors, no one gives a crap. If he signs with the Spurs? Genius! Bon vivant! The perfect fit! Pop is going to get SO MUCH out of him! ... Of course, for all the mocking we'd like to do of the predictable narrative, all of that is probably true. That's San Antonio for you. Anyway, the Spurs are a lot like the Heat, only a little more interesting because of the "how long can they possibly keep this up?!" factor. They seem like a lock for a playoff spot, and they're one of this season's 5 or 6 teams with a serious shot at a ring. But maybe that's the problem. Right now, everyone but a few quiet doubters fully believes that the Spurs will contend this year, especially with Kawhi Leonard gradually taking Manu's spot in the Big 3. It would be sort of amusing -- and classic Spurs misdirection -- if the Spurs finally ran out of steam the one year people stopped expecting them to die. Still, seems rather unlikely. They'll probably win another 55-60 games, take down another top seed that receives far more hype, and bow out gracefully after winning 2-3 rounds of playoff basketball. Sunrise, sunset.

TIER #7: WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS

New York Knicks

You know what's really funny, given all the hand-wringing people do about New York? The Knicks have made the playoffs three years in a row! Think about that. They were one of the worst teams in the league for almost a decade, but they've reached a reasonable amount of sustained success. They'll probably make the playoffs again this year, too. Four in a row! That's almost half a decade of sustained success. The problem? They've done it in such an impressively dysfunctional way, where all of their flaws are readily apparent the drama gets leeched of the proceedings. The Knicks are always fun, but it's kind of a circus of a team. And it's tough to root for that, sometimes. Andrea Bargnani seems like a semi-risky signing at first glance. But the expectations for him are hilariously low, and they gave up virtually nothing to get him. It's hard to see him not being a somewhat valuable bench player, so it may turn out to be a low-risk, high-reward move. I didn't mind the Metta signing either. Yeah, he's old, but he's coming off his most productive season since 2008-09, and he'll love every minute he gets to play in New York. The Knicks will be pushed this season, no doubt -- the Pacers, Bulls, and Nets will likely all pass them in record, and there's always the potential for a massive implosion. But chances are high that they won't be a tranwreck, and they'll be a fun story all the way from opening night to their 2nd round swan song.

TIER #6: THEORETICAL CHAMPIONS

Houston Rockets & Brooklyn Nets

I talked a lot about both of these teams in my last article, but essentially each of these teams are interesting because they've gotten themselves to a point where the idea of them winning a title doesn't seem completely off-the-wall. That's not to say it's LIKELY, mind you... just that the notion can't be laughed off. While signing Dwight Howard comes with a lot of potential pitfalls, the Nets actually took the bigger risk here. They basically have a two year window to win a title. After that, KG and Pierce will be gone or nonfactors, Joe Johnson will be in his mid 30s, and Deron/Brook will be their last two pieces of any real consequence. This is why the trade for KG, Pierce, and Jason Terry was panned by some. But I encourage the skeptics to look at the smaller picture: for the next two seasons, the Nets will be a force to contend with. That's at least worth something. Right? As for the Rockets, they may benefit this season from a surprising lack of hype. The Dwight signing itself received a ton of press, but once he officially came aboard, there have been very few articles talking up a potential dynasty in Houston, perhaps because Big Twos and Big Threes are so common that the formation of another one just isn't that big of a deal anymore. In any case, the Rockets will be very good team that will nonetheless face some big questions. Will Dwight get his 2008-11 form back? Can he play with Harden? Can we play with Asik? [ED. NOTE: I usually edit out typos, but I can't edit this one out. The childlike innocence of the question "can we play with Asik" is just too much. Thanks, John. Thanks for brightening our day.] Can Jeremy Lin run this team? Is Chandler Parsons a potential All-Star? Should be fun to watch, all things considered. We're in new territory, for sure.

TIER #5: IT TAKES TWO (HOPEFULLY)

Oklahoma City Thunder

I won't spend too much raking them over the coals for the Harden trade. It seems like everyone in the world has, and I have little to add. Still, with Kevin Martin leaving, this team is officially a two-headed monster, and it'll be interesting to see if Durant and Westbrook are enough to guide this team to a championship without a particularly stout of a supporting cast. Serge Ibaka is a force on defense, but he hasn't become the All-Star the Thunder thought he would when they chose him over Harden. And after that? It's slim pickings, and it remains to be seen if this team is still a favorite or an also-ran in a conference chock-full of both. Even if Westbrook-Durant is a better duo than Dwight-Harden, the Rockets may have the superior cast surrounding them. And that's where OKC's intrigue comes in -- if they can win the West at a time when so many teams appear better constructed, Durant's legend grows further. He'll officially be entering LeBron territory. Don't rule out this possibility.

Los Angeles Clippers

There's a metric ton of hype around this team, especially when you consider the fact that they a) lost in the first round last season, b) are the Los Angeles Clippers, and c) didn't get a great deal better in the off-season. The excitement over re-signing Chris Paul has drowned out the reasonable concern that they haven't really done anything worth noting with Chris Paul yet, and that he's still never played for a team constructed well enough to get past the second round. The Clippers could provide an all-time answer an immortal question this year: how much difference can a coach makes, really? Doc Rivers is an immeasurable upgrade over Vinny Del Negro, and that may be the difference needed to get them over the hump. Replacing Eric Bledsoe with the guy who lost his job to Mike James is a considerable downgrade, but replacing Tuff Juice with Jared Dudley -- who FINALLY gets to be on a good team! -- might make up for it. The talent level is roughly equal, and it's all about whether Doc is good enough to get this team past the other star-studded squads in the always-brutal West.

TIER #4: WE NOW RETURN TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

Chicago Bulls

One of the most fascinating things about last season was the how the identity of the Bulls changed without Rose in the lineup. In the past, when he missed a few games, they would try to replicate his production by committee, and essentially play the same way, With Rose gone for a full year, the Bulls had no choice but to become a completely different team. Joakim Noah became the leader, and their brutal defense replaced Rose as the star of the show while Nate Robinson did a surprisingly excellent job of replacing Rose's energy. It makes you wonder how they'll operate with #1 back at the 1. Will they essentially go back to playing the way they did before he went down, or will elements of Rose-Lacking Bulls infiltrate the genetic makeup of the Rosebud Bulls? It certainly wouldn't be surprising to see Noah continue to pay a bigger role, as Rose's unofficial sidekick. Meanwhile Jimmy Butler's presence will allow Luol Deng to get some rest, if Thibs is smart, and quite possibly make him expendable. The questions of whether Rose will be his old self, how the team adjusts to his return, and whether or not Deng becomes trade bait are all enough to make the Bulls a surprisignly intriguing team going into next season.

TIER #3: THE EASTERN INSURGENCY

Washington Wizards

These next three are very much joined at the hip, as they're all young squads looking to sneak into the playoffs this year. The Wizards are the team I have the most doubts about, personally. They played .500 ball in the second half of last season's action against a not-particularly-easy schedule, and they would figure to be __at least __that good this year. Right? But it's hard to be confident. The Wizards are hoping the John Wall who showed up January was the real John Wall, and all of his earlier problems were simply side effects of him adjusting to the NBA and we won't see any of them ever again. Might be the case, but I wouldn't say for sure. The Wizards are also counting on Martell Webster to be just as productive as was last year, which seems like a risky proposition given that he'd been a scrap-heap amnesty guy on the cusp of retirement. We also don't know how healthy Bradley Beal will be, or if he's the potential superstar so many think he is. So yeah, there are a few big issues, but the Wizards should still be a fun energetic team. Hopefully, they'll frighten the establishment a little bit.

Detroit Pistons

I get why the Pistons went for Brandon Jennings -- he's young, and he might be a better player than his last few years in Milwaukee suggest. Still, I wish they had brought Calderon back. Sure, he's older, but during his brief time in Detroit, he was ridiculously amazing. He shot .527 from the field and .520 on threes. He took 98 three-pointers with the Pistons, and he made 51 of them! And the Pistons replaced him with a dude who struggles to shoot 40 percent? Is youth really that important? That gripe aside, I still really like this team. Josh Smith and Andre Drummond on the same team makes me wonder if @Jose3030 is secretly in charge of personnel decisions for the Pistons, and Greg Monroe finally has some talent around him. I still don't know they'll space the floor (another reason why they should have re-signed Calderon), but this team is easily good enough to sneak into the first round and give Miami or Chicago a good scare.

Cleveland Cavaliers

As for the Cavs, their big problem is injury potentialities. Bynum was the ultimate high-risk high-reward individual signing, and frankly, I thought it was a good move. We all know what his problems are, but if he's on his game, the Cavaliers could become really scary really fast. Honestly, if Kyrie, Varejao, and Bynum all end up staying healthy, I'd put the Cavs ahead of every team in the east except for the Heat, Bulls, Pacers, and Nets. And they could leapfrog one or two of that group, with some fortuitious injuries to those four. Obviously, that's a budget-of-The-Lone-Ranger sized if, but that's what puts a team near the top of the intrigue rankings. The Cavs could give the Heat a brutal second round push... or they could win 30 games. Who knows! The journey there should be a lot of fun, regardless. It doesn't hurt that they have Kyrie Irving, who is effectively a league pass alert unto himself.

TIER #2: YES WE PELI-CAN

New Orleans Pelicans

No team -- not even the Cavs -- had a bigger high-risk, high-reward offseason in its totality. Bynum is individually a bigger high-risk high-reward signing than any of the New Orleans signings, but New Orleans had SO MANY OF THEM! The Pelicans decided to go after Tyreke Evans and Jrue Holiday, and try to get them to play with Eric Gordon. Woah! Just, woah! There's so much potential here, but it's hard to know if any of them will live up to it or if they'll complement each other's play in any tangible way. Still, if this arrangement works, it's hard to dislike what the Pelicans have put together. Anthony Davis could yet emerge to be a superstar, and the Pelicans are trying to surround him with as much talent as possible. They'll either be an unwatchable mess, or the team that the Western Establishment is deathly afraid of drawing in round 1. So many possibilities.

TIER #1: THE MOST INTERESTING TEAM ON EARTH

Golden State Warriors

Ethan Sherwood Strauss put it best -- it would not surprise me if the Warriors make the finals, miss the playoffs, or do anything in between. Steph could get hurt again. They could painfully regress to the mean if they don't win as many close games. Harrison Barnes might not be productive of the bench. David Lee could emerge as the odd man out, forcing the Warriors to trade him. And yet, if it all works out, this team could beat anyone in the league. Stephen Curry is more dangerous than Walter White when he gets hot, and it doesn't usually matter how you guard him -- he'll get the shot anyway. Curry plays with a freedom, with a reckless abandon that is glorious to watch, and impossible to defend. If he stays healthy, he'll be a superstar. Plain and simple. Meanwhile, Klay Thompson is the perfect sidekick for the Best Backcourt Ever. If you double team Steph, you leave Klay open, and he can murder you. And neither one of these guys has reached their full potential yet! Meanwhile, Iguodala was a cosmically brilliant signing that should do a lot to fix their defensive struggles, and give them yet another three-point shooter. There all sorts of reasons why this might not work out, but if everything congeals together, this team will be a rampaging beast capable of destroying everyone in their wake. In the meantime, they've earned the top spot in this list. And I can't wait to see them work.

• • •

Once again, disagreements are prime to be registered in the comments below. Hope you enjoyed this ranking exercise. Join me next week when I rank which team eats the most satisfying lunches, probably! [ED. NOTE: Do not join him for this. It will not happen.]

Bonjour, readers. Welcome to the first -- and perhaps only! -- edition of the Gothic Ginobili Intrigue Rankings! Why? Because regular power rankings are boring, that's why. It's a lot more fun to rank to teams by how interesting they are rather than how good they are. At least for me. What makes a team intriguing, other than my personal whims? A big part of it the distance between a team's ceiling and its floor. If I can pick a team's win total within five games without thinking too hard about it, that's not a particularly interesting team. If I can look at a team and see 30 and 50 wins as being equally possible, that's a lot more fun to think about. Relevance also matters, although less so. I try not to go strictly by ability, but if I know a team is going to be awful and it's just a matter of how awful they'll be, they will likely linger towards the bottom of the list. Above all else, this is a list about how fun a team is to think about, and whether or not I think they'll be interesting to follow in 2013-14. Now that that's set up, let's dive into the list. Rather than an ordinal 1-30 ranking, I've compiled a list of roughly ordered tiers corresponding to various levels of interest.

• • •

TIER #15: PERPETUAL MEDIOCRITY IS OUR ULTIMATE GOAL!

Milwaukee Bucks

I originally had this team a few spots higher, but when they traded for Caron Butler last week, it served as a well-timed reminder of just how mind-numbingly dull this franchise is. They replaced their starters at three positions, but I'm not sure it'll have even the slightest impact on their win total. Brandon Jennings for Brandon Knight and Monta Ellis for O.J. Mayo are both largely lateral moves, and Caron Butler's most attractive quality is his ability to be utterly average. The Bucks front office is too afraid of sinking into the abyss to give itself a chance to become serious contenders. They tread water every single year, hell-bent on boarding a train that leads nowhere. They'll win 35-40 games in the Eastern Conference for next 30 seasons. We all know this.

Atlanta Hawks

Meet the new Hawks -- same as the old Hawks. They're perpetually competent in the least interesting way possible. [ED. NOTE: Hey, Horford's pretty good! ... Okay, starting to see your point.] There was brief talk that the Hawks might get CP3, Dwight, or both. Those were the days. When that fell through, we thought the Hawks might blow it up, and try their luck in the lottery. Nothing doing. Instead, they brought back Jeff Teague and replaced Josh Smith with Paul Millsap, leaving them in effectively the exact same place they were last year. The difference? With the Cavs, Pistons and Wizards all looking to take huge leaps, it might not be enough to squeak into the playoffs anymore. This could be a good thing for the league -- I'm of the view that we could be better off if the Hawks fall into the more useless end of the lottery. Who REALLY wants to watch them lose to Indiana in six completely unwatchable games yet again?

Toronto Raptors

Had the Raptors made their big gamble -- the Rudy Gay trade -- in this fast-receding offseason, they might be a bit higher for me. But we already watched this for 10 weeks, and it's unlikely this team is going anywhere other than a first-round exit. Gay has always had more potential than actual ability, and for six and a half seasons, Grizzlies fans talked themselves into believing he was a potential superstar. When the team thrived after getting rid of him, it probably shouldn't have been all that surprising to anyone. Kyle Lowry is a similarly pedestrian star. He exhibits consistent yet brief flashes of brilliance and every team he's on starts to think he might be an All-Star. Never seems to happen. Neither of these quasi-stars can really carry a team, and the Raptors will hang around 0.500 this year. It should be their best season since Bosh left, but it still leaves them with a wispy future.

TIER #14: HOW LOW CAN THEY GO?

Philadelphia 76ers

If the only criteria for my intrigue was the carnival sideshow factor, the Sixers would be much higher. I honestly can't see a scenario where this team wins 20 games. Their point guards are Michael Carter-Williams and Tony Wroten. They're combo guards. J-Rich might not play all year. No one knows when Nerlens Noel will be back. This team has a real shot at being historically awful, which can be interesting if you're into bad horror movies where the ending is telegraphed in the first scene. [ED. NOTE: Hi, Angelo!] If they don't finish with the worst record in the NBA, Thaddeus Young deserves a Nobel Prize. In what, you ask? I have absolutely no idea. Just give him one. The only interesting thing I spy here is the possibility that they break their own franchise record for losses in an 82-game season. Woo-hoo!

Phoenix Suns

Do you think anyone bought a Caron Butler Suns jersey? In the entire world? ... someone had to, right? That guy has my deepest sympathies. This is another team that won't start contending for relevance until they get a new piece in next year's lottery, and they're the odds-on favorite to finish last in the West. For a second straight year, I remind you. The most intriguing thing about this team is how they handle the Bledsoe-Dragic situation. Does Dragic's seniority earn him the starting gig even though Bledsoe has more potential? Do they possibly both start, with Bledsoe at 2-guard? That could be fun to watch. Kinda. Either way, this is gonna be a pretty awful eason. On the plus side, those new uniforms are pretty spiffy. [ED. NOTE: That is the most generous use of the word "spiffy" I have ever read in my life. Good job, John.] I feel like the Suns had to change uniforms; their previous digs reminded everyone of the Seven Seconds Or Less era and watching Michael Beasley and P.J. Tucker wear them was just depressing.

Utah Jazz

Much like the Sixers, the Jazz have embraced the idea of sinking to the bottom. They still feel like a better team, and almost certainly a more interesting one. Trey Burke seems like a considerably more exciting rookie point guard than Michael Carter-Williams. You get the sense than Trey could light up the highlight reels while the Jazz drop 60-65 games, but there's always the possibility that he has the type of year Lillard had last year, shining incandescently as he carries the Jazz to semi-competence on his lonesome. When Jefferson and Millsap were around, we praised the backup bigs and talked how they could start for a fair amount of teams. Now, we get to see if that's actually true. Derrick Favors feels like a potential breakout player, though I'm far more apprehensive about Kanter, who's game feels a bit unpolished. Also, Gordon Hayward might be their top scoring option. What? The overall picture feels like an enjoyable, fun team that will get annihilated on a regular basis. Which isn't super intriguing to me, although you're welcome to disagree.

TIER #13: ENCOURAGINGLY BAD

Sacramento Kings

When it was decided that the Kings would stay in Sacramento, I was happy. While I have no connection to California's capital city, I appreciated their love for their perpetually disappointing team. As a lifelong Buffalo Sabres fan, I can certainly relate. That said, I despair of the missed opportunities had this team gone to Seattle. Seriously: THEY DRAFTED A GUY NAMED MCLEMORE! How perfect would that have been to christen the new Seattle Supersonics? Is there any way a McLemore and Macklemore joint ad campaign wouldn't have have been plastered all over Seattle's billboards in an alternate universe? Anyway, all jokes aside, these guys should be reasonably enjoyable even if the depth of the West prevents them from having any NBA class mobility. Greivis Vasquez gives them their first real point guard since Bibby laced his work-boots, and McLemore was a steal at No. 7 with the potential to become an All-Star. Still, I feel like DeMarcus Cousins has gone from potential franchise player to albatross. No matter how good his numbers are, no one really believes in the guy -- except Jacob Harmon, kind of. But only sorta. Some other team will offer him a deal next summer, and the Kings will probably rejoice being rid of him.

Orlando Magic

How bad do you think Jameer Nelson feels right now? Oladipo is capable of playing the 2 or the 3. But the team doesn't want to bring Afflalo or Harris off the bench. Their solution is to start Oladipo at the point, even those he's never played it before, and send poor Jameer to bench because he's just that expendable. I hope he gets traded to a contender before the deadline, though I can't imagine who'd actually want him. They should still try. It's the least they could do. This team should carries some intrigue because they have a lot of talented young folks, and there's the slight possibility that they could exceed expectations and hover around the 8-seed. Still, between Oladipo playing out of position and the team's dreadful finish last year, I see the Magic as a team that loses a lot of entertaining games. They'll starts contending again in 2014-15. Join us then.

TIER #12: FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON KHAN

Minnesota Timberwolves

Could the T-Wolves be good this year? Absolutely. Could they make the playoffs in a middling-low seed, and give a favorite like the Rockets or the Clippers a serious run for their money? I'd have to say it's possible. But after what happened the last two years it's getting increasingly hard to trust this team. Rubio and Love are their two most essential players, and it appears they're both made of glass. Maybe they stay healthy this year and Minnesota becomes a scary team. But I wouldn't bet on it. I've been burned too many times before to commit to that. Still, picking up Kevin Martin was the best signing that nobody's talking about. Assuming he returns to the starting lineup, he and Rubio could be a deadly pairing. Imagine the spot-ups! Their ranking boils down to trust for me. This team has a boatload of theoretical talent, but I just don't trust them.

TIER #11: THE PROBLEM IS, THEY MIGHT BE GOOD

Boston Celtics

What's fascinating about this team to me is that Rondo may very well be able to carry them an 8-seed... even though that's the last thing the front office wants. For a team that ostensibly appears to be tanking for a lottery spot, the Celtics may have to deal with the problem of not actually being that bad. For one thing, if Rondo is healthy, it's hard to see them not winning at least 30 games. And the supporting cast is nowhere near as awful as you might think. Marshon Brooks is quite undervalued at this point -- while most believe he had an off-year, his dip in numbers was primarily attributed to playing fewer minutes. His per-36 averages were actually better! I'd be surprised if Kris Humphries is that bad for a second straight year, considering he averaged a double-double in 2011-12. Even Gerald Wallace looked a little better as the season progressed. You get the feeling this team really WANTS to be terrible, but may be stuck being mediocre. [ED. NOTE: Just wanted to register my paramount disagreement with this one. The Celtics will have a gimpy Rondo for half a season, and their big man rotation is INCREDIBLY thin. Brandon Bass and Kris Humphries may very well be playing big minutes at center for the hapless bunch. Even if they get bounce-back seasons from both of them, neither of those players have ever been a regular center. There's a reason for that -- THEY AREN'T GOOD AT IT. Without even a pretense of having a man in the middle, their defense will be awful and Rondo's hardly known for inspiring offensive over-achievement. Absolutely disagree that this team comes within sniffing distance of an 8-seed. And now that I've proclaimed this in a public forum, they'll win 40 games and finish with a 9th seed. It's just how these editor's notes work. --Aaron]

Charlotte Bobcats

There are too many good teams in the East for the Bobcats to be viewed as a playoff team with any legitimate chance, but they're worthy of a second look if little else. If I had to pick one team to be this year's version of the Golden State Warriors, I'd go with the Cats. We all know Al Jefferson can't play defense, but let's keep an eye to the context: HE'S REPLACING BYRON MULLENS! Imagine if Nick Young was a center. Okay, stop imagining, I see the blood too. Why did I tell anyone to imagine that? Jesus. But that's all you needed -- now you have an idea of what playing Byron Mullens is like. This might be the biggest upgrade at any position that a team has made this offseason. Should be good for 10 more wins right there. The intrigue here comes from the possibility of their young talent coming together sooner than most would expect, and looking like a poor man's version the 2009-10 Thunder. Like the Celtics, if this team wants a prime lottery pick, they might suffer from being too good. Unlike the Celtics, they're trending upward already, so the situation would be a lot easier to deal with.

TIER #10: WORKING CLASS HEROES

Indiana Pacers & Memphis Grizzlies

Here's where the difference between "intriguing" and "good" comes into play. Both of these teams will win a ton of games this year. A Memphis/Indiana finals isn't the most likely scenario, but you'd be hard pressed to find a serious hoops-head that would pish posh the potentiality. Despite that contention wrinkle, it's hard to get particularly excited about either one unless you're a diehard fan. They both play slow, ugly, defensive-grit basketball that wins games instead of hearts. Neither team made any particularly drastic roster changes in the off-season, either -- that keeps the intrigue lower than it perhaps could've been. That said, each of them got a tiny bit better with the moves they did make. Luis Scola is a considerable upgrade over Tyler Hansbrough. Yes, he struggled in Phoenix last year, but he was playing for one of the least inspiring teams of all-time. Being part of a contender should provide him with some motivation. Meanwhile, Memphis flipping Darrell Arthur for Kosta Koufos was a fantastic move. Not only did it solve their problem of having three power forwards and one center, there's a decent case to be made that Grizzlies now have the best center in the league and the best backup center as well. This should free up some playing time for Ed Davis, whose talents were largely wasted in his first half-season with Memphis. They also signed Mike Miller, who will do virtually nothing in the regular season but provide a requisite payoff in the playoffs. Neither of the teams made huge, attention-grabbing moves. Still got better. Just... not more interesting, really.

TIER #9: I JUST DON'T TRUST THESE GUYS WHATSOEVER OKAY

Denver Nuggets

Everything that happened to the Nuggets this off-season leads me to believe they're going to take an enormous step backward. They fired George Karl, and they were unable to keep Iguodala. Both seemed like admissions of defeat, as though this team decided that after losing to the Warriors in the first round there was no way their current core was going to achieve anything significant. Better to just blow it up before wasting any more time, right? And yet... when I look at this team, I can't completely write them off. They could 55 games again for all I know. Or, they could win 35, and the sink to the lower depths of the Western Conference. So, really... why not have them higher than this? Because teams who are trending upward strike me as more intriguing than teams who are trending downward. One last thing: can someone can explain the Nate Robinson signing to me? Please? They already have two point guards! When that happened, I froze up for hours in frozen wonderment -- had I missed Andre Miller's retirement? Was I that out of touch? I quickly realized that was completely impossible. Every NBA writer in the world adores Andre Miller, and his retirement would have sparked about 500 tribute pieces. I have legitimately no idea how this team is going to use Nate, and that alone makes them reasonably interesting.

Los Angeles Lakers

In every sport there are certain teams who win so often that even when they're going through a rough patch they still inspire fear. Even though everyone expects the Steelers to be mediocre this year, I still get nervous when I see them on the schedule. That's how the Lakers are. I know they're supposed to be awful, but I just don't trust them. It seems like too much went wrong last year, and we're basing our expectations on what may have been an anomaly. If Kobe's gone for a huge chunk of the year, they'll be terrible, mostly because Nick Young will be their starting 2-guard. But if the Mamba shows up on opening night, this team is at least a little bit frightening. Really, 95% of the intrigue here comes from figuring out what Kobe is going to do, while other 5% is for the question of whether Cryptkeeper Nash starts getting assists again, or if he's decided that he's better off just letting Kobe handle everything.

Dallas Mavericks

When mulling over the Mavs, it's easy to think about the disappointments. They didn't get Dwight, Deron Williams, or CP3. It's easy to think of them as losers. But this team had a surprisingly decent off-season anyway! The Calderon signing represents a huge upgrade at point guard. Calderon will never be a superstar, so it's easy to forget that he's an excellent shooter and a fantastic passer. Also, THIS TEAM STARTED MIKE JAMES LAST YEAR! ON NATIONAL TELEVISION! WITH EVERYONE WATCHING! Replacing Mayo with Monta feels like a lateral move, but Monta is a little bit more exciting, and Dirk's excited to see him. Here, he gets to work with a pass-first point guard, and the presence of Dirk as the main scoring option will take a lot of the pressure off him. This team is intriguing because virtually no one thinks they can do anything more than challenge for the 8-seed. But... if their off-season moves pan out, their ceiling might be __considerably __higher. Also, Dirk was really amazing at the end of last season. Really freaking phenomenal. Like, the return of 2006-07 Dirk. It may have been an anomaly, but if Dirk returns to his prime form for a twilight candle-flash year, this team becomes a huge sleeper. If I had to pick one under-the-radar team in the West to surprise everybody and make the second round, I'd probably take the Mavs.

Portland Trail Blazers

Last year, the Blazers achieved one of the most unique accomplishments a team can pull in the NBA: they won 33 games despite literally not having a bench. How this team was so competitive despite having only five players that could actually play NBA basketball boggles the mind. Their core five were good, mind you, but seriously! They only had five players! How did they win so many?! Anyway, a ton of people are high on the Blazers this year, but I have my doubts. The possibility that Damian Lillard has already reached the peak of his powers looms large, LaMarcus Aldridge is constantly brought up in trade rumors, and it just seems like this team has a lot more cracks than anyone wants admit. Their intrigue comes from the possibility that Lillard hasn't hit his ceiling yet, that C.J. McCollum will be a great contributor right away, and that LaMarcus Aldridge will have a bit of a bounce-back after a slightly disappointing last year. And I'm not really positive about any of those things. But hey. At least J.J. Hickson won't be their center anymore, right?

• • •

The next part of this series comes tomorrow. Join us as we finish the list off and run down the most interesting 13 teams in the league. If you'd like to register profound disagreement with the opinions expressed herein, there's a comment section below. On the other hand, if you'd like to register BROFOUND disagreement with the opinions expressed herein... there's a comment section below, brah.

Tanking exists to avoid contraction. Can we be completely upfront about that? If we didn't have a system that could bail out a team that is legitimately doing horrible, then teams that are horrible would tend to remain horrible. And teams that remain horrible are the first in line for contraction, relocation, and long-term disrespect and franchise deflation the likes of which tanking strategically can never bring them. Sure, horrible teams would have some natural pressure towards the mean and 41 wins, but in the "meantime" would also have plenty of opportunities to fall into historic and un-climbable holes.

Fundamentally, this is a worse state of affairs than what we have now. If we did something to eliminate tanking, then we might have teams competing hard for 1,230 games today, this season, but teams on the verge of historical, long-term awfulness would tire out as the lack of cushioning their bad seasons would begin to wear them down. A bad team might even over-play its best players and trade assets to the point of injury and be left with nothing, even if all the stars would have otherwise aligned. You can't simply eliminate tanking and leave no options for the teams with bare cupboards. That said, tanking is a problem and it hurts to watch those teams. And it's a negative externality: teams may pay a price when they tank, but a tanking team hurts the league as a whole more than the team loses itself.

So, after thinking on it for a while, I've come up with an interesting idea that could retain the opportunity-for-betterment that tanking brings without sabotaging league-wide play. Let's talk about the "Rebuilding Tag."

• • •

The first key component of this idea could come to pass in the next round of T.V. negotiations. Enough experience with the national schedule has convinced me that we should adopt the NFL's approach to flexible scheduling as the next TV contracts are negotiated. That is to say, halfway through the season, national networks could become flexible and select games of a pressing interest for the national slate. This would eliminate terribly uncompelling late-season matchups with out-of-contention teams while fun and important games by surprise contenders are broadcast locally. It might help to eliminate something in the future like Rest-gate last year, where the Spurs sat 4 of their best players against the Heat, by allowing Spurs Coach Popovich to tell the league and the networks of his plan to rest players in advance of that matchup. Flexible scheduling would give the networks a chance to slot a better game there instead (granted, that game was awesome).

In addition to flexible scheduling, I'd add a wrinkle that would allow teams to demonstrate their competitive need. Here's the plan: At the beginning of every month (starting with the September before the season), NBA teams can apply to the league office for a [REBUILDING] tag if they reasonably expect to win fewer than some threshold of games for the remainder of the season - say, 34 wins for the whole season, but adjusted and prorated as the season goes on (28 of your last 66, 21 of your last 50, etc.). Probably you'd make the threshold a bit lower, but the point is that right now, it's a threshold set such that there is not much incentive in exceeding the threshold - there's not much difference between a 25-win team and a 34-win team as far as the most relevant and important teams are concerned. Anyway, so if a team applies to the league office, and their claim of haplessness is accepted, they are marked for the rest of the season (barring an unlikely turnaround) as [REBUILDING]. Like a giant red stamp that will haunt TV Guide schedules and blog logos everywhere, the [REBUILDING] tag on franchises carries with it one basic obligation -- pay a bunch of money to the teams you're playing against.

Okay, not a bunch of money, but pay a fixed fee of 5% of the gate revenues from a sold-out regular season game (the league could figure out a calculation)... per game of being in [REBUILDING] mode. That isn't a whole lot of money, but here's the rub: you don't expect to sell out regular season games when you're rebuilding, so 5% of a full house probably amounts to a solid 10-20% of your gate revenue. And it's essentially all going to your opponents' franchises while you have the [REBUILDING] tag. It's a lot of money, and yet, at maximum it's 5%*82... or 4.1 sold-out games of gate revenue... it's not crazy. Say an average arena has 30,000 capacity and an average league ticket price is $100 bucks. 30,000*$100*4.1=$12.30 million per year.

This money isn't crazy for most owners, especially considering that tanking teams who are operating on a skeleton crew often pull as much of a profit as low-tier playoff teams. And, it's a zero-sum game for the league as a whole - you might be [REBUILDING] this year, but in a couple years you might be contending and getting back what you paid in. This money would serve as a sort of Pigovian tax to correct the negative externality: That is, the money would compensate teams that have to play less-televised, less-profitable games against the [REBUILDING] team, given that the non-[REBUILDING] team provides an increasingly large share of the justification for fans that come out to see the losing team. From the vantage point of the [REBUILDING] team, they are signalling their need of rejuvenation through the draft. This tag, while embarrassing and costly, would give them extra lottery balls - we'd have some system where a team in [REBUILDING] mode would bump its draft position slightly, by, say, an extra notch per month of [REBUILDING] tag application compared to a team that is completely out of this mode.

It's embarrassing to be [REBUILDING], but it's less embarrassing to be [REBUILDING] away from nationally-televised games (as the flexibile schedule would allow the league to focus the national games on teams that are competing). The sooner a team commits to the tag (or commits to try to win that season), the better the national schedule can be, and the more the league can charge for TV rights.

A few details:

• This isn't really a disincentive for tanking - it's a disincentive for tanking disingenuously. If you're truly not in rebuilding mode, then it's a good deal for you. Say you're a perfectly well-constructed roster. You can have a shot at the 7th pick in a random lottery and the gate revenue from the teams that are tanking. If you are in rebuilding mode, you should be willing to compensate other teams for your negative externalities. Not as a punishment for those externalities, but as a system that costs you dearly in the short-term in exchange for long-term success.

• Fairly technical note, and the main reason for the late edit: Aaron and I have had a fairly long discussion since the initial publication of this article about what exactly the lottery-ball consequences of this idea should be - Aaron's idea was to have a tiered system, with the teams that have been [REBUILDING] since September getting the top tier of picks, teams that have been [REBUILDING] since October getting the next tier of picks, and so on until you're left with the non-[REBUILDING] franchises in the final tier. And, within tiers, you have a miniature lottery to determine the order. So the most desperate teams will all pick first, then the second-most-desperate, and so on. While this is very cool (and, as Aaron noted to me, much more likely to be accepted by late-seed playoff teams who suddenly might be in the running to get the 13th pick randomly), I'd suggest a couple of tweaks:

• I tend to think that a team with 48 wins and misses the playoffs should get something like the 15th pick, instead of potentially getting the 30th pick! Even though player evaluation after about the 15th pick tends to be a lot more like a crapshoot anyway, we should still have some checks in place to prevent that situation - maybe for the non-REBUILDING tier you'd have a traditional reverse-order-of-records system.

• I also don't think any team should be able to get a free pass at a generational talent just because it was the only one that was desperate from the start of the year. So, basically, I'd modify Aaron's tier-based idea to be slightly less strict (maybe lump three-month REBUILDING tag windows like Sept.-Nov. together). And maybe allow a less desperate team (say, that's been REBUILDING since December) an outside shot at the first tier of picks... Other than that I like his approach.

• If the league feels the REBUILDING tag is being abused, it can revoke the tag immediately for certain teams.

• Teams with the tag have the same amount of medical oversight as teams without, but they will face less scrutiny for sitting players, both naturally by not being televised but also institutionally by not being hassled. It is understood that they're losing, but their internal decision-making can be given more free rein. These teams will be encouraged (and given league support) to experiment with personnel, strategies, scouting, and management.

  • You say "But what if they're sitting their best players, Alex?" What, you mean so that they could potentially trade them and make the playoffs better? What a travesty!

All in all, I don't really know how effective this idea would be to ameliorate tanking and the NBA's nigh-unwatchable March Miasma. But I wonder if a [REBUILDING] tag wouldn't embolden teams to try enough new things and be on-the-level enough to create some good stories, interesting subplots, and sort of a "We've paid our dues, now let's play our hardest because losing doesn't provide as much additional incentive in the draft." vibe to those kinds of rosters. I don't know.

But even if this idea doesn't work? Then the teams that are tanking are at least paying into the system and we're not televising them. And no one is under any illusions as to what they're getting when they buy season tickets or go to a game featuring one or two of those teams. That's considerably more than half the problem of tanking solved right there.

Tweak the numbers as appropriate; this is a back-of-the-envelope, intuitive idea. I couldn't find any analogue to this anywhere else, but, to be fair, I didn't look very hard.

Update (7:30 EST): Edited the lottery detail-bullet to take into account a later discussion Aaron and I had. -Alex

This writing project is courtesy of everyone's good friend Angelo. I'll let him describe it:

A friend challenged me to a writing contest. The basic premise is that for two months, she will send me a writing prompt twice a week. 750 word response. I will do the same with her. The point is to get some experience/feedback writing a bunch of different, unusual things with odd prompts that you don't expect. Would you be interested in doing one a week for the rest of the offseason?

Fun times in Cleveland today. (Cleveland!) He's posting his on Goodspeed and Poe, everyone's favorite blog. I'm posting my contributions (apparently!) on Gothic Ginobili, everyone's favorite basketball. No, I didn't mean to type "basketball blog." Gothic Ginobili is not a blog. Gothic Ginobili is a basketball. If you disagree with this particular assessment, you just haven't experienced this place properly yet. Here are the previous prompts:

• WEEK #1: Dispatches from 3030 & Drive Thru Disaster
• WEEK #2: The Dangers of Thrift & Forever Inked
• WEEK #3: MackGuire vs Hogan & Mega Blogger Man
  

Here's last week's prompt. (We gave ourselves a week off due to labor day weekend getting up in our business.)

• • •

PROMPT #4: You are the head of programming at the Syfy channel. In recent years, the Syfy channel has discovered the formula for made-for-TV movie success; washed up stars from 90's television shows and ridiculous monsters. Unfortunately, after the successes of films like Sharktopus, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Sharknado, Dinoshark, Spring Break Shark Attack, Sharks in Venice, and Ghost Shark, the public is beginning to sour on films involving the aquatic predators. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find the next big thing in Syfy entertainment. The one catch? The financiers have refused to fund another film involving sharks. Without sharks, what creature will the film revolve around? What will it be called? And finally, what washed up star will play the lead?

MEMO TO FINANCIERS

That's sharky? That's malarky. You speak, we hear. SyFy's new intellectual property is poised to blow any residual shark-tinged viewer fantasies out of the water, and begin a new age of made-for-TV faux-horror. We know you don't want sharks. We don't either. And though our viewers would disagree, they're just in denial. You know that, we know that, end of story. Sharks are old hat. Old, profitable, fearmongering, classic, and totally unremarkable hat. Those are the kinds of hat they are. Those are not hats I would like to wear, and I am incredibly fashionable. I bet they aren't the kinds of hats you want either. Instead of those outmoded tams, we put on some thinking caps. Really classy. And we racked our brains til' the ribs were jealous. And after all that, we came up with an idea that really pops. Absolutely guaranteed to open your hearts, minds, and -- most importantly -- wallets.

Prepare yourselves... for "Moosepocalypse Now."

As the maiden installment, Moosepocalypse Now represents the first salvo in what's sure to be SyFy's next big faux-franchise. The sea is dark and mysterious, with briny depths unknown and horrors unseen by man. But that reliable spookiness is exactly why our next property can't come from the sea -- it's too expected. Too vanilla. Too boring. Instead, we're taking our cue from the frigid hinterlands, and our animal from a too often slept-on time bomb. Have you ever thought about just how easily a moose could murder you, your wife, and your infant daughter? Have you ever considered the dire threat they could pose to humanity, if only they felt the need? I assume you have not. Please peruse this list of True Moose Facts, and try to keep your creeping terrors at bay.

• Bull moose antlers can span up to six feet wide. If sanded to jagged edges, that's a living chainsaw.

• A fully-grown moose can weigh up to 1500 pounds. That's not a typo. If two of them teamed up, they'd outweigh most sedans.

• At full stride, a moose can run 35 miles an hour. You can get speeding tickets at moose running speed.

• Moose can swim at 6 MPH. Think you can get away from a killer moose by jumping into the water? Think again, fatso! (Sorry. Your weight is a sore subject. I'll keep that to myself.)

• Despite their size, due to large hooves and deft feet, a moose can travel silently through snow, underbrush, and muskeg. Metal Gear Solid 5 -- Solid Moose Strikes Back.

And that all ignores the fact that the moose may be the strongest animal on the face of the earth -- their legs are only thin on appearance, their muscle mass is legendary. The moose race -- if they ever woke up -- represent a huge danger to society at large. And that's exactly what we plan to film. In Moosepocalypse Now, FBI agent Kelsey Fringmann (played by Anthony Michael Hall, known for his work in The Dead Zone, Edward Scissorhands, The Breakfast Club, and vanishing into the ether after The Dead Zone concluded) investigates a series of strange happenings in Maine. Gruesome bloody massacres, people with their heads crushed like soda cans, cars stomped and thrown into rivers, buildings trampled. Nobody knows what could possibly be causing it.

The first act covers both their investigation and a mirroring thread in Russia. The caretakers of Russia's moose conservatory (led by Yakov Dramadov, played by Anton Yelchin) have noticed a spate of odd behavior from their formerly docile moose population. They're getting hyped. In the movie's suspenseful middle-act, the moose revolt in Maine and Russia, leveling towns and producing large-scale destruction the likes of which no military unit has ever seen. It's revealed that Russian testing of a new chemical agent has mutated hundreds of Russian specimen into super-mutant moose warlords, 7000 pound behemoths that are virtually impervious to bullets and possess the speed and intelligence to outsmart and destroy tanks and helicopters. These super-moose agents have developed a telepathic link to the planet's moose population, inciting them to revolt and instigating a mass takeover of the northeastern United States, Canada, Russia, and Alaska.

In the movie's final act, the super-moose warlords -- now firmly in control of St. Petersburg and Moscow -- are inching closer to figuring out Russia's nuclear launch codes, with every intention of carpet-bombing the civilized world with nukes and leaving the noble moose as Earth's last remaining sentient species. It's up to Agent Fringmann and Dr. Dramadov to unite the gene sequences from two improbably similar USA/USSR testing sites to produce a moose-targeting biological weapon that will kill off the super-moose warlords and save humanity. Will they succeed? Will the moose reign be thwarted? We don't know, because we actually haven't written a script yet. What, you think we actually write the scripts for these things before we start production?

Shut UP, dude, that's ridiculous.

Coming this fall to a SyFy near you: MOOSEPOCALYPSE NOW. Don't miss it.

-- GERALDINE Q. MEGABUXX, SyFy Head of Programming

Full disclosure: I’m predisposed to liking DeMarcus Cousins. As a native of Mobile, Alabama, where the basketball ain't football and the hoops are hard to come by, I’ve got a soft spot for the Sacramento big man. He represents the most prominent active representative of my state in the world of professional basketball (sorry, Eric Bledsoe). That means something. I attended high school down the street from the guy, at the same time he did. I’d love to tell some illuminating story about our relationship before we made it big, but I never once met him. I never even saw him play. To be honest, I never heard of him until he played for Kentucky. Like I said, Alabama -- and particularly the high school I grew up at -- is the land of college, high-school, and professional football. In that order. The next Michael Jordan could’ve played for my own high school team and I probably wouldn’t have known it. But hindsight is 20/20, and knowing what I know about Cousins now, my affinity remains as strong.

Of course, it’s not just that Cousins is from my hometown that piques my interest. You could say I like the idea of Boogie Cousins. I’m the biggest Charles Barkley fan on planet Earth (self-appointed), and though I believe Chuck resents the comparisons (and let’s face it, Cousins is no Charles Barkley in game or in wit), there’s something intriguing and familiar about a volatile big man ascending from my neck of the woods and into the heights of basketball. His game an amalgam of oddly-fitting talents with a penchant for snarling at referees and snatching down offensive rebounds. I think that I see in Cousins some of the same qualities that led me to idolize Barkley the basketball player as a child. Maybe that’s why I so often find myself defending Cousins, and hear phrases coming out of my mouth like “That Sacramento franchise has been toxic, it would stunt anyone’s development,” or “He’s still really young, give him time.” Maybe it’s why I nod my head enthusiastically when I hear anyone from Shaquille O’Neal to an anonymous forum poster say that Cousins could be the best big man in basketball.

I see his athleticism, his diverse offensive skill-set, and his skill on the boards. I see what anyone else who’s watched the Kings fumble their way through an allegedly professional basketball game has seen: potential. And as often happens with hoops fans and analysts alike, I conflate potential with certainty. But those aren’t the same thing. The world is filled with walking monuments to unfulfilled potential. The NBA especially. Could DeMarcus Cousins ever really be the best big man in the NBA, or is it the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams? Anything’s possible, of course, given that a 37-year-old Tim Duncan just made a strong argument for the post. But is a beautiful Cousins redemption even remotely likely, at any point in his career? I’m not so sure.

• • •

Cousins isn’t just the NBA’s most prominent bipedal manifestation of unrealized potential. He’s also the quintessential rookie, even as we prepare for his fourth year in the league. He stands a generous 6’11, 270 lbs, with a near 7’6 wingspan. Looking at him in uniform and seeing him use his immense strength to bully his way to a post position, then catching the ball and powering it down over and through opposing centers, it’s easy to see the promise. If you happened to catch the rare game where Cousins consistently commits to this style of play, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was already one of the most unstoppable offensive centers in the league. But like many young players, he either doesn’t recognize his skillset or lacks the discipline to properly apply it.

The big man's shot selection isn't just bad -- it's abysmal. Last season a whole 53% of his attempted shots were jumpers, which he converted only 31% of (credit to 82games.com). That 31% is bad for any player, but it’s especially bad for a big man who presumably should only be taking those shots off either wide-open spot-up opportunities or to keep outmatched post defenses trying to pack the paint honest. Cousins converted 64% of his inside shots over the season, yet only 47% of his attempted shots were in the paint. I was going to say that those attempt rates should be reversed, but Cousins would be remiss for taking even that many jump shots. The man has excellent touch around the basket, but he simply isn’t a great jump shooter. His poor shot selection (plus the general chaos of Sacramento's so-called offense) only exacerbates his problem.

Cousins is still young. His shot selection could well improve with the addition of a competent coaching staff and a roster more coherently assembled around him. Even without that, his passing and offensive rebounding is exceptional. Perhaps more than Shaquille O'Neal pipe-dreams of looping drop-steps and thunderous dunks, these elements comprise Cousins’ most tantalizing dimension on the offensive end. Unfortunately, his defense is straight-up appalling. Check out Zach Lowe’s excellent piece on the subject. He shows all the lack of discipline typical to a young player on the offensive end, paired with a foul rate that borders on tragicomedy. Only three players in the NBA fouled more than Cousins did last season. One was Dwight Howard (both a superior offensive and defensive threat), one was Roy Hibbert (an elite defender in the paint), and the other was Amir Johnson (who plays for the Toronto Raptors). For a team that doesn’t have much more going for it, Cousins has somehow been a statistical net negative on both ends of the floor for the Sacramento Kings, with the team a -1.7 points scored on offense and a +2.0 points allowed on defense (see 82games.com for this grim tableau). That’s pretty bad.

In spite of all this negativity, it's not rare to see Cousins featured in comparisons to Dwight Howard who (while insufferable) has been the popular choice for best center in the NBA for quite some time now. When the Kings defeated the doomed 2012-2013 Lakers in the preseason, in those halcyon days before that dread ship had even begun its cursed voyage, Kings fans and Laker-haters alike cheered Cousins name from the rooftops (despite him not having a particularly great game). If I wasn’t among them, my heart certainly was. The season that followed that game saw Howard’s team underperform spectacularly, his individual statistics dip, and his popularity stock hit rock bottom. Meanwhile, Cousins drew about as much attention as he always does, which is to say... well, not much aside from when his ejection makes a slow day on SportsCenter. [Editor's Note: And Sean Elliot noticed him, which counts for... OK, no, that doesn't count for anything.]

Let’s pretend for a moment that the Dwightmare never happened, that Dwight’s 2012-2013 campaign wasn’t marred with any extra-curricular stigma. Let’s pretend that Dwight’s status as the best center in basketball wasn’t really in contention, and do a comparison: Cousins, the so-called-best-big-man-in-basketball-to-be, versus Howard, the best-big-man-in-basketball-that-was-and-might-be-again [Editor's Note: Why-are-we-talking-like-this-can-I-join-this-gravy-train?].

• • •

COUSINS vs HOWARD

A lot is made about Dwight Howard's lack of offensive game, and it's almost always the central point of conversation when comparing him with Cousins. But what's overlooked is that in spite of Howard's lack of finesse on the block and recent reluctance to play the pick and roll, he's a more than solid offensive option on the block with his back to the basket. More than 70% of Dwight's offensive possessions took place inside, and he scored on them at an exceptional clip, with an eFG% of .603. Compare this to Cousins, who as mentioned earlier only took less than half of his shots inside (47%) and converted at a 64% rate. That's pretty comparable, and you'd probably give the edge to Cousins. The way I figure it, there's two ways of looking at that. On the one hand, Dwight's efficiency is probably somewhat inflated by hack-a-Dwight, a strategy that couldn't be effectively employed on Cousins in the same scenario. So there you have it, Cousins is the better inside man.

But then there's the other way of looking at it. A lot of people present Cousins as the center of the future, and point to his footwork and finesse in explaining the bountiful reach of his potential. But for all that finesse, it hasn't actually manifested in any measurable offensive advantage for Boogie. For one, Cousins seems utterly incapable of dealing with double-teams, often turning the ball over or forcing the issue too late. For a big man whose passing is their most clearly evident skill on paper, that's not a good sign. For two, he just doesn't like to play down low consistently. Though he scores much more efficiently than Dwight inside, he scores less (8.4/ppg vs. Dwight's 9.1 ppg down there) because he doesn't even take half of his shots there. Dwight hasn't looked like he possessed a clear offensive move with his back to the basket for a couple of years now, yet he's still a much more reliable option on the block than Cousins for sheer virtue of that he _believe_s he is. He goes there.

But maybe it's not all about the block. One of Cousins' claims to fame is his versatility on offense, and to see him play on the nights he's on is a surreal thing of beauty. Unfortunately, he's usually not on. His complete lack of conscience in regards to his shot selection belies his potential -- while Cousins may be less polished than Howard, he's at least a lot more versatile. And that may be the case, but it's difficult to analyze how much of Cousins' inefficiency is skill limitations, how much is the weakness of his team or organization, and how much is talent that is simply undeveloped. But if you're half of your shots are outside jumpers and you're only hitting 31% of them, it might be that you're just not a very good jump shooter. Dwight Howard isn't, and he didn't take very many jumpers last year either. He converted 52% of the ones he did take. We can lambast D12 for refusing to play to his strengths all we want (and rightfully so), but his shot selection last season was the mark of a developed player that understands their limitations and their offensive abilities, and is capable of executing on those abilities in spite of a down year. DeMarcus Cousins doesn't show any of that.

I alluded to Cousins' passing, and it really does deserve special attention, because it's (spoiler alert) the only area in which he seems to hold a clear measurable advantage over D12. But outside of that, there isn't much of a comparison. Dwight is both a more prodigious and a more efficient scorer, and in spite of his reluctance to RUN THE PICK AND ROLL WITH STEVE NASH he demonstrated an understanding of his strengths and weaknesses on offense that might as well be worlds away from anything we've seen from Cousins. On defense, I don't think anyone needs to go into it. If you're reading this, you know Dwight's pedigree, and if you're even remotely interested in Boogie Cousins you know that for him defense is a thing that you close to keep the dog in. The gap between Cousins and Dwight's crown, tarnished as it is, is as vast and seemingly insurmountable as that chasm at the end of Last Crusade.

• • •

COUSINS vs JEFFERSON

Of course, plenty of people are fine for Cousins not to become Dwight, and aren't interested in even entertaining the comparison. Instead, they have more realistic expectations. The one I've seen recently is between Cousins and the lovable Big Al Jefferson of the soon-to-be Charlotte Hornets. Bobnets. Hornetcats.

Wow, Hornetcats sounds like a sweet name.

Anyway, this is the comparison for the learned fan. The fan who doesn't expect Cousins to ever learn defense. This fan keeps their expectations grounded, and is unshook by a world that is both uncertain and scary. This is your moment, this fan.

What's the book on Al Jefferson? Good offensive player, weird-looking hook shot, doesn't play defense, offensive black hole, nice guy, good sense of humor, just good enough to ruin the Bobcats chances at a legitimately good 2014 lottery pick? Sounds about right, yeah? So here's the thing. Al Jefferson is a one-dimensional offensive player, yes. Right now, he's a slightly more productive option than Cousins (17.8/50% vs. 17.1/47%) , but that's likely to change, especially if we're to presume Jefferson is who he is and Cousins is going to improve.

Honestly though, outside of the comparable scoring, I don't think this is a very fair comparison to Cousins. As stated, he's already right there in regards to scoring and efficiency, and he does it in a number of ways (even though he probably shouldn't) whereas Big Al is largely a one trick pony. On defense, there's simply no comparison. For all the hand-wringing over Cousins' disinterest in playing defense, it pales in comparison to what Jefferson accomplishes (or fails to accomplish) on that end of the floor. Opposing teams score 9.3 more points when Big Al's on the floor, whereas that figure with Cousins is only a +2. Part of that was Jefferson's excellent defensive backups in Favors and Kanter, but it wasn't ALL backups. Cousins blocks more shots than Al Jefferson does and fouls less. While Cousins has shown little interest in playing disciplined team defense to this point in his career, Jefferson has shown literally no capacity for playing defense whatsoever. I don't even feel like that's too mean of an assessment, Big Al would agree with me on this.

Comparing Cousins to Jefferson has a certain pleasing symmetry to it, but it isn't fair to either player. Though his growth is uncertain, there's no reason to think Cousins can't marginally improve on his defensive shortcomings. And even as bad as they are, they're already vastly superior to Jefferson's. His passing is beyond what Big Al has displayed, though whether it's that dramatic of a difference is open for debate. Cousins averages 1 more assist per game (though it's accompanied by more turnovers, yet another question mark in his future development) 82games.com gives Cousins a passing rating of 2.7, calculated from assist/turnover ratio. Jefferson has a 2.8.

Al Jefferson is a player who has maximized the use of the tools in his toolbox, and succeeded in spite of his limitations. He's also (probably) the player he's going to be for the rest of his career. Comparing what he's accomplished to the mountain of unmolded clay and unfulfilled potential that is DeMarcus Cousins is just as unfair to him as it is to Cousins.

• • •

If you really think on it, there aren't any current players that represent particularly compelling comparisons for Cousins. He's a big angry golem of talent and potential with possibilities that stretch on forever yet uncertainties that dominate the conversation. There's no other player in the NBA of his age or experience that is in a particularly similar situation to him that permits a fair comparison. Perhaps if we were to look way back into the annals of NBA history, we might unravel the mystery.

Perhaps there was a player in their third year in the league, for whom scoring in a variety of ways and without prejudice seemed easy. For whom defense was an afterthought. Who played for a troubled franchise in a time of turmoil. A player whose skill and potential was outweighed only by their outsized confidence in their own abilities and public assurances of their own dominance. A player with a similar PER and WS/48. A player who seemed destined to either be adopted as the face of their shaky franchise or shipped out, where they would likely find themselves occupying the roster of any team willing to take a chance on them.

COUSINS vs ELLIS

Oh my god.

This writing project is courtesy of everyone's good friend Angelo. I'll let him describe it:

A friend challenged me to a writing contest. The basic premise is that for two months, she will send me a writing prompt twice a week. 750 word response. I will do the same with her. The point is to get some experience/feedback writing a bunch of different, unusual things with odd prompts that you don't expect. Would you be interested in doing one a week for the rest of the offseason?

Fun times in Cleveland today. (Cleveland!) Now, that said, we started this exercise a month ago and only recently finished our first contributions. He's posting his on Goodspeed and Poe, everyone's favorite blog. I'm posting my contributions (apparently!) on Gothic Ginobili, everyone's favorite basketball. No, I didn't mean to type "basketball blog." Gothic Ginobili is not a blog. Gothic Ginobili is a basketball. If you disagree with this particular assessment, you just haven't experienced this place properly yet. Here are the previous prompts:

• WEEK #1: Dispatches from 3030 & Drive Thru Disaster
• WEEK #2: The Dangers of Thrift & Forever Inked

Here's this week's prompt. Angelo was really mean to me this week.

• • •

PROMPT #3: The year is 1988. It's the evening before the World Wrestling Federation's flagship event, Wrestlemania and you, Aaron McGuire, have a shot at the WWF Championship. Your opponent is none other than the legendary Hulk Hogan. You find yourself in front of a green screen with a camera pointed on you. It's time to film your pre-match promo in which you get to address your opponent one last time before you two face off in the squared circle.

What do you say?

You have the creative freedom to create your character as you see fit but with one limitation. As it is 1988, you are the product of the '80's pro wrestling circuit. As such, assume your brain is under the influence of the same amount of steroids, cocaine and concussions as all pro wrestlers of the era. Think like a wrestler, McGuire.

[The camera turns on. MCGUIRE stares into it blankly for what seems like an hour. He speaks.]

MCGUIRE: I brought a dictionary, Hulk Hogan.

[He reaches down and picks up a dictionary off the ground. He flips through it, seemingly completely unaware of the large bookmark roughly two thirds of the way through the tome. After some mindless flipping, he realizes the bookmark exists and turns to it, tossing the bookmark aside.]

MCGUIRE: I'm not big... on words. I'm big on results. I'm big on being big. I'm big on the Mack. I am "Mack Hammer" MackGuire, the greatest to ever flex. You? You're Hulk Hogan. And when I think of Hulk Hogan, I think of this thing.

[MCGUIRE MACKGUIRE waves the dictionary.]

MACKGUIRE: I think of WORDS, Hulk Hogan. Words I don't like. Words I hate. And one word for sure. It is the word called... traitor. It says here, in the Yoxford Real American Dictionary, that you only need two words to define a true traitor to his people. Do you know what those words are, Hulk Hogan?

[He begins to tear pages out of the dictionary indiscriminately. He takes special care to rip out the page that contains the word "traitor", shoving it into his mouth like a raspberry danish gone wrong. He flexes, chews, and yells.]

MACKGUIRE: THOSE WORDS ARE HULK HOGAN.

[He swallows.]

MACKGUIRE: Dictionaries are for nerds and televisions and heads. You don't have any of those, so you probably never knew you were in the dictionary. But that's OK, Hulk Hogan. Because you won't ever have the chance to. I just wanted you to know before Wrestlemania ends you. Because it will, Hulk Hogan. You don't understand these demons. You don't get it.

[He goes silent. The camera zooms in on his eyes. This zoom takes roughly 20 seconds of dead air.]

MACKGUIRE: I am the swamp giant, Hulk Hogan.

[The camera shakes, as if to emulate an earthquake. It instead emulates your father's Christmas home movies.]

MACKGUIRE: Long ago I rose from the swamp at the bottom of the ocean, hungry for sharks and blood. But I'm all out of sharks and blood only makes sense when it's from a traitor, because that's the rules of blood. Rules that people know. Except for traitors, because they don't GET to know that. They don't GET to understand. And you, Hulk Hogan, you're the biggest traitor of them all. You gave up Wrestlemania. You gave up your friends and family. All for what? All for WHAT, HOGAN?

[He stops. He might have lost track of what he was saying, much like everyone watching.]

MACKGUIRE: Hooooooooo... gaaaaaan...

[Oh, nevermind, he's back on track, guess he just wanted to be dramatic.]

MACKGUIRE: Traitors never prosper, except when they're Eggs Benedict. He prospered back when Lincoln was president and the world was different. But you, Hulk Hogan, you're no Eggs Benedict. You're not even the Pope. You're Hulk Hogan, which is a noun, which is a dictionary for traitor. The swamp giant was made to eat traitors for breakfast. And the Mack Hammer never surrenders. Not like you. You always surrender. I know you, even if you think I don't. So step up to that ring, Hulk Hogan, and fight me like a man. And I will destroy you, just like the traitor you are. Just like the traitor you knew you'd be. Kiss your world goodbye, Hulk Hogan. Because it's about to be over. Traitor.

[He mean-mugs the camera, flexing incoherently. Camera fades to black.]

This writing project is courtesy of everyone's good friend Angelo. I'll let him describe it:

A friend challenged me to a writing contest. The basic premise is that for two months, she will send me a writing prompt twice a week. 750 word response. I will do the same with her. The point is to get some experience/feedback writing a bunch of different, unusual things with odd prompts that you don't expect. Would you be interested in doing one a week for the rest of the offseason?

Fun times in Cleveland today. (Cleveland!) Now, that said, we started this exercise a month ago and only recently finished our first contributions. He's posting his on Goodspeed and Poe, everyone's favorite blog. I'm posting my contributions (apparently!) on Gothic Ginobili, everyone's favorite basketball. No, I didn't mean to type "basketball blog." Gothic Ginobili is not a blog. Gothic Ginobili is a basketball. If you disagree with this particular assessment, you just haven't experienced this place properly yet. Here are the previous prompts:

• WEEK #1: Dispatches from 3030 & Drive Thru Disaster

Here's this week's prompt, alongside my confessional.

• • •

PROMPT #2: Your next prompt, if you choose to accept it, is to write about the stupidest thing you ever purchased. Why did you buy it? How has it affected your life? How would your life be different if you had that money back and could choose to invest it more wisely?

A little bit of background on me: I'm thrifty. Full-blown penny-pincher. Cheap, on any given Monday. I value my money and it values me. (It does not value me. Money is not a person. That sentence was untrue.) For me, retail therapy involves going to Costco and finding a great deal on snacks I'd buy anyway. Clipping a coupon and applying it at the exact perfect moment. Example: I cook a LOT of soup. Every few weeks, I make a ton of soup and I jar it into Ball jars and I eat the soup as a side for the next few weeks. It's neat. Thing is: I only got a ladle two weeks ago. That's right -- for two years of my life I made soup every 10-15 days, but I never thought to get a ladle to serve it. I'd just tip the pot and use measuring cups for soup disbursement. Seriously. My friends made fun of me for it, but I'm not in the business of changing my life just to accommodate the naysayers and people named Gerald. Gerald can find his own way.

I'm thrifty and generally prone to making best with quite little. And for this very reason, I had trouble thinking of any particular purchase that was too large and too stupid. This is hardly just me, of course -- most people remember their purchasing successes long before they recall their purchasing failures. Hindsight is usually 20/20 for your triumphs and cloudy for your failures. It's the way of things. I had to think back hard to remember the poor investments I'd made in my life. My college education was a bit of a poor investment -- I could've gone to a state school on a full ride, but I chose to go out of state for slight added benefit. My first (and current) car -- a used 2009 Toyota Camry -- is serviceable. But at the price I paid for it, I should've just bit the bullet and gotten a new car. Used cars lose most of their value the second you take them off the lot, despite the fact that you still have 6-7 years of paying for it. Come on, Aaron. Get it together. I could also talk about my enormous book collection, one of the few things I collect. Dropped many ducats on the craft, for sure. Do I need it? Perhaps not. Perhaps so. I do not know.

None of those things are the stupidest purchase I've ever made. The stupidest purchase I ever made defines me. It's a scarlet letter. It's a flashing neon symbol of cheapness and thrift-over-blood that I should've figured out from the start. I have been trapped in this hell for years, my friends -- I must confess and seek absolution for this sin. It's one thing to buy multi-use kitchen tools so that everything stays in your cooking rotation. It's one thing to buy bulk items from Costco and freeze extra things in the freezer to keep them longer. It's one thing to eat slightly-maybe-a-few-days-expired food as long as it doesn't look or smell disgusting. It's one thing to take your garbage to the dump by hand because you haven't gotten the motivation to purchase garbage service for your home yet.

It's quite another to ever buy the cheapest toilet paper. At Costco.

I don't want to give you the gory details. Nobody wants to hear that. Ever. What happens in the bathroom is humanity's grandest secret. There is nothing to be said, no words to be shared. I stare silently at you, you stare silently at me. You turn up your nose. I shake my head and stare at my feet, ashamed. This is the way of things, and this is how it must be. But you know exactly what I mean when I say that this -- this -- was the stupidest purchase I ever made.

Look, Costco sells things in grotesque bulk. You know this. In a moment of weakness, two years prior, I chose to go with the cheapest of all possible toilet papers. I am not a wastrel. If I waste a single pea on a plate of prepared food, I feel bad. So I knew going in that I was going to have to use all the damn paper if I intended to ever move up in the world. But what the doomed never realizes is just how long that take__s. I also did not realize that the questionable luxury of good toilet paper is only truly possible to understand when you experience its absence for several years of your life. I also did not fully comprehend my impending shame. Imagine: friends come over. They need a restroom. You watch helplessly as your friends and family enter the valley of the shadow of death. You cringe. You shiver. You know the truth.

Might as well just dab it with cyanide and get it over with, huh? Death by toilet paper only seems impossible until you buy the worst toilet paper. Then you know. Then you are made aware of the possibilities. It is horrible, to buy the worst toilet paper. It is unnecessary. Why did you do it, Aaron? "Oh, I saved a quarter." Stop. Cease. You mortgaged years of your life away. You became the evil you sought to conquer. You sold out for twenty-five cents. Even Judas Iscarot got thirty. You are a fool, McGuire, consumed by thrift and reduced to dust. "You are a toilet seat that smokes a cigar."

... Now, uh, that said, I don't really know what I'd do with that money if I hadn't bought them. I mean, Christ, guys. It's like two dollars. I'm going to assume I would have put it towards toilet paper that didn't make me want to skydive without a parachute. My life would be improved, and I would be twenty-five cents poorer. I would be infinitely wiser, although without this prolonged suffering, I may never have properly learned this lesson. Perhaps it's all for the best.

(No. No it is not. Never do this.)

Hey, all. Having a good summer? Yep. Me too. I've been enjoying my time away from basketball, truth be told. You have to realize this -- no matter how much a person enjoys writing about hoops, a 370,000 series crammed into one month combined with 3-4 posts a week for the preceding and following 7 months is completely exhausting. I've been taking the time to get into video games I never played (currently slogging through Mass Effect, just finished Half-Life 2, et cetera), sleep more than I'm used to, and affect mischief around the town. Fun times forever. That said, I love writing. No matter how slowly I'm getting back into the swing of my basketball writing, I'm still doing a few tertiary writing projects. On Twitter's recommendation, I decided to bring one of my projects to Gothic Ginobili. This one is courtesy of everyone's good friend Angelo, and I'll let him describe it:

A friend challenged me to a writing contest. The basic premise is that for two months, she will send me a writing prompt twice a week. 750 word response. I will do the same with her. The point is to get some experience/feedback writing a bunch of different, unusual things with odd prompts that you don't expect. Would you be interested in doing one a week for the rest of the offseason?

Fun times in Cleveland today. (Cleveland!) Now, that said, we started this exercise a month ago and only recently finished our first contributions. He's posting his on Goodspeed and Poe, everyone's favorite blog. I'm posting my contributions (apparently!) on Gothic Ginobili, everyone's favorite basketball. No, I didn't mean to type "basketball blog." Gothic Ginobili is not a blog. Gothic Ginobili is a basketball. If you disagree with this particular assessment, you just haven't experienced this place properly yet.

Here's this week's prompt, alongside my diary-style response.

• • •

PROMPT #1: You've somehow found yourself somehow transplanted to the year 3030. Aaron McGuire (circa 2013) is trapped in the world of 3030. What do you see? Try to describe it in terms that would make sense to someone of the year 2013. What frightens you the most? What makes you the most hopeful?

CAPTAIN'S LOG, STARDATE 3030 -- AARON MCGUIRE, c. 2013

In the year 1030, Olaf II of Norway was slaughtered on the field of battle. (Gross.) Henry I revolted against his father, King Robert, and Romanus III invaded Syria to a crushing defeat at the Battle of Azaz. To my knowledge, these are the three most impactful things that occurred in the year 1030. Which makes it sort of strange that none of these three things had any traceable impact on our modern, 2013-style world. The most immediately evident is Olaf's fate, as he was canonized to become the patron saint of Norway. "Rex perpetuum Norvegiae" -- 'the eternal king of Norway', if you aren't one of those crazy people who speak Latin. The second most immediately evident is Azaz Ansari, who got his name fr--... wait, no, he's Aziz. Wow. This is tough.

Anyways. Point is: in 2013, we didn't know JACK about what happened a thousand years prior. I don't know anything about how King Olaf lived. I don't understand why Romanus III invaded Syria. I don't know why Henry I revolted. We had historical record, and we had scores of brilliant historians who put their life and soul into sifting through the past and pre-digesting historical truths like a beneficent mother bird. As I come to build a comfort level in the year 3030, I realize slowly that our inability to relate to or understand the bygone times isn't some struggle of information flow. Our lack of understanding around the figures who came before us is a persistent bug in the system. It's not an idiosyncrasy of data quality, in short -- it's a fundamental problem with time and the human condition.

The world's different, but the people aren't. We have some absolutely incredible technology here in 3030. World hunger has been eradicated -- humans are fed through these giant floating sky-barns. They're these giant floating globules over every city. They're weird. Every day, rockets with seeds in them get shot into their cores. The seeds disperse, creating a dandelion of genetically perfected vegetables and fruits. They have all of our daily values covered. They rain down from the heavens -- perfectly ripened -- at a specified time each day, and everyone wanders outside to catch them. Overpopulation was solved in a way that terrifies me, a bit -- the human race holds steady at roughly 125% the population of 2013, sterilizing children at random to ensure the population stays in a specified range. Random children! "It's fair if everyone has the same shot, right?" The nuclear family is gone, a bygone product of a lost age. You have a partner, and you have a neighborhood. These are your family. Your children are not yours -- they belong to the world at large, to be redistributed to a community that's lacking. Wealth and monetary achievement are still differential across states and nations, but the fortunes of the world's citizens are more dispersed among individual neighborhoods than the individual actors. People are a bit shorter than in our time, due to stricter height requirements on buildings. At 6'4", I'm something of a monster to my fellow man.

That's the world, though. That's not the people. I started that paragraph with the idea that people "aren't very different." And although I just listed a score of differences and dispersions from our 2013 norm, I stand by that -- society has changed, and the context in which we live is different. But what of people? Citizens of the world? The human soul? We're about the same, believe it or not. We still love and lose and live and lie. We cry and beam, we strive and die. Even in a world where food and survival is no longer a primary concern, we drop bombs over territorial disputes and the most wealthy nations of the world still go crazy to flex our national powers. Even for nothing. World War I started when a Bosnian national assassinated the wrong rich heir. The Great War of 3025 started when a Eurasian spy was shot in an American supermart -- a completely unrelated stickup, with no global consequences anticipated. If I'd been there when it started, I'd have yelled and pounded my fists and tried to make people realize the sad truth: it had happened before! World War I was the same exact thing! Same reasons, same illogic. But the alliances and treaties forced the world into an all-out war. Kids aren't getting sterilized as much, these days -- the population is STILL recovering.

I would've yelled. I would've pointed at the past and pleaded with the powers that be. "Listen to me! It's happened before!" The more I consider it, though, the less faith I have that it would've done anything at all. You know, some historians -- a few fringe 1900s scholars -- yelled their freaking heads off. It never did anything. Nothing whatsoever. That's what's so incredibly frightening about this world of the future. Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but as time goes by, the mistakes are forgotten and the triumphs idealized. World War I's lesson is lost, as generations melt into generations and the future has fewer and fewer direct connections. And then nations allied once more, and the droning march of history trudges onwards into a self-repeating abyss. What use is life, if the hard-fought lessons of your generation have no bearing on anything other than the immediate future? What's the real footprint of a humanity that goes in circles?

But then, hey. Step back a bit. Why worry yourself with the machinations of history when you have the machinations of those around you to distract? Look at yourself in the mirror, Aaron. There's this cute girl. Adrienne. We smile when we pass each other. She slipped me her number the other day. Real hush-hush, you know? We're meeting up for coffee on Thursday. And there's this bubbly anticipation for nothing but the potential of an unknown love. And when you stop rehashing the existential longing of a society that never learns? The concerns seem to fade away. I have her number. She's cute. She seems to like me. What's the distraction, anyway? Is it the fun personal meandering, or the concerns of humanity as a whole? Maybe the meandering is why we're here in the first place. Maybe the broader world is the distraction.

I'll ask her on Thursday. Maybe she'll know.

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If you want to fill out the prompt with your take, the comments are open. I'll be sure to leave my thoughts on any attempts.