Sort of what we have instead of God

Peas in a Podcast!

Read our heartfelt examination of My Bloody Valentine. Then listen to this week's episode of FreeDarko Presents the Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast, complete with what was supposed to be "a very sexy playoffs preview." By the ladies, for everyone!



(Other methods: iTunes and the XML feed.)

It's After the End of the World

Periodically, and without any fair warning, FreeDarko turns into a music blog. Like when the Recluse and myself joined hands in celebration of ancestral favorites Polvo. Or today, roughly 24 hours after I became the last person to stand before My Bloody Valentine's reunion tour. What follows is an exchange between myself and Zac Crain, senior editor at D Magazine and author of the forthcoming Dimebag Darrell bio, Black Tooth Grin

Bethlehem Shoals: You know how everyone talks about the new Terminator movie, or The Dark Knight, as a franchise "reboot?" That's what this show was like for me. And others, I think. One friend just said to me "I feel like the band is entirely different to me now." It's true—I tried to listen to Loveless afterward to figure out the setlist, and there was zero familiarity with the music on my part. And this is a record I've listened to thousands of times. I also believe, or want to believe, that the MBVocaust was especially deadly. The sound crew were going nuts, especially some bald guy who appeared to be in charge. They were all taping it, and these dudes had been on the road with them through the whole tour (last date was tonight). I won't go into any great detail over what parts of my body were affected and how, or how satisfying it was to watch "fans" around us who wouldn't shut up before leave after five minutes. Like motherfuckers, what did you think you were getting into? Don't you know shit about their live show?

Zac Crain: Someone offered me what he termed "the best mushrooms ever" pre-show, and I wisely declined. Because I think it might have ended up looking like the opening of the ark scene from Raiders. And I can't imagine playing that shit while intoxicated in any way. I also like the fact that, of a few thousand, maybe a handful of people had seen them before, and maybe one of those people saw them back in the day. So it was totally different than seeing, say, the Pixies, where everyone had a memory to stack it up against, or you really felt you were getting less than you might have back in the day. Totally fresh. I think reboot more or less nails it, because it was new. You weren't seeing the old band, or the the band on the record, but you weren't getting a rehash necessarily either.

BS: A friend of mine feels that Loveless once and for all destroyed the possibility of album-live performance correlation. I'd take it even further—that album's vastly human, but who ever thinks it was made by people with bodies? Even the erotics of them are soft-focus: sleeping, dreaming, bathing in sound without any punk-like penetration. Or emotions that go past the womb or certain altered states. It's like ghosts' wet dreams. Live, though, they're the polar opposite: Rock performance at its most raw and elemental. The ballad-ic songs barely existed in that context (at all, or when they were played). Then the onslaught at the end, which was like stripping their live ethos down to the bare essence. And look what you get. So basically, they're the end of rock on two different extremes of the spectrum.



ZC: I listened to Loveless the next day, and it's sort of like a tape loop of the echo of the show in my head as I was driving home, but not as pejorative as that probably sounds. But, yeah, it's not the same. It's like the difference between a jet stream and an actual jet. The MBVocaust, to me, is sort of the combine harvester of rock shows, separating the people who were there for the music and the people who were there just to be there. I was about maybe 30 feet back. People were streaming past me to leave, but just as many were streaming past me to get closer. I enjoyed that. I can't, even in my mind, completely recreate what it felt/sounded like, but I did notice when I was leaving that I felt it physically way more than anything I can remember.

BS: To me, it wasn't a question of there for the music vs. there for the event, but more "there to hear Loveless really fucking loud" vs. "people who have really spent time with this music."

ZC: Weird thing for me is I grew up in intensely small town Texas. So I had no idea about them until they were well and truly dead, or it seemed so. And then there was so much catching up to do with other stuff, I really didn't listen to MBV until really really late. And then that's all I listened to, for a time. So this wasn't really ancient to me. It was more like a band that hadn't toured in like, maybe, six or seven years. (I kind of did everything backwards or mixed up or something: hip-hop was my high school punk rock, then punk rock was my punk rock, then Britpop, then nothing but Stax/Volt, and somewhere in that game of Twister I spun "left hand, MBV.") So last Wednesday I expected to be monumental, then I was worried it wouldn't be, then it was way more than I thought it would be originally.

BS: One thing I thought halfway through is "wait, what exactly makes for an MBV 'fan'?" There's so little music. Like three CD-R's of rarities. And I don't think your experience with them (which sounds a lot like mine) is uncommon, or somehow lesser than . . . that one guy who saw them in 1991? If anything, there's a way in which you can listen to them as a totally dated band; getting into them later, when they've taken on legendary status, and realizing how easy/essential it is to do so, emphasizes just how colossal they are. Like, who says "you weren't listening to Coltrane in 1965!" God doesn't belong to anyone in particular, does he? Or some people more than others?

ZC: That's a good point. There's really not as much to grab onto, musically, as with other bands that have that stature, though I guess someone like the Stone Roses would have a similar situation should they ever get back together. It's funny looking back -- because that's mostly what I have to do with the bands I really like -- and they 1) weren't together as long as you think and 2) didn't record as much either. The deal with MBV is that part of what they did has been so bastardized -- by bands, and by critics describing those bands -- that until they started playing again, it was less a band than an idea, but an idea no one really remembered anymore, or remembered really imprecisely. Sort of like a scene from a movie you talk about with your friends all the time but never actually watch, and so, the dialogue gets botched, and then screwed up even more, and on and on. When you actually watch the movie, the scene is as great as you remembered, but not anything at all how you remembered it, if that makes any sense.



BS: I would almost say that the "I saw them in 1991" dudes become part of that hazy past. So someone says that to your face and they automatically start to dissipate a little. They become part of the legend: "those fans that heard the sound." Weird that the sheer physicality of their past live shows had become as elusive, as much of an idea, as "Loveless" was the day it was released. As opposed to, say, the time I went to Sonic Youth in 1996 and some middle-aged black dude with a Confusion is Sex tee tucked into acid-washed jeans just kept glaring at everyone.

ZC: Elusive is a good word because I can't remember the last time I went to a show where so many people didn't know exactly what to expect. At best you have someone who went to a show in another city, but they don't give you much. The sense beforehand was more than nervousness, less than fear. "Can I handle this?" was part of it, but more than that it was "How do I want to handle this? What are they/am I capable of?" Can't think of anyone else that can do that. There are bands that are sort of wildly different from record to stage and back, but even those bands, like I suppose people would consider Radiohead to be one, are wildly different in kind of predictable ways. I think MBV is permanently other. It's whatever you want it to be, but it is also none of those things exactly, and probably never will be.

BS: This goes back, as do all things in life, to the MBVocaust. If some noise band had just come out swinging with that, I would've left. But to have that as the culmination of a set that contained so many emotions, and contrasts, and history, made it well-earned. Wait, that's such a dispassionate way of looking at it. It was both laying all that to waste and boiling it down to its essence. Like the world ending so it could start over again. I really have no idea how something so stupid and obvious could be so profound. Actually, I do: If a band of unparalleled artistic excellence did it after a great set that came after almost twenty years of build-up. Catharsis shouldn't be complicated, just the circumstances surrounding it.



As a bonus, here's David Wingo's "Macrophenomenal Anthem," which only really began to take shape when MBV-mania swept New York last fall.

I'm from Barcelona

And now, a look overseas, courtesy of Bricko. For some NBA, try my post on the Bulls and Celtics finding themselves.

There's a band composed of 29 musicians whose lead singer looks like a young Kurt Rambis minus the googles. They're « I'm from Barcelona » though they're actually from a small town in Sweden. Joan Mirò was from Barcelona, Scarlett Johansson kissed Penelope Cruz in Barcelona. Even Ricky Rubio is from Barcelona. His hometown stands 10 miles away from Plaça de Catalunya. By the time you read this, maybe more people will claim they're from Barcelona as the city continues to be synonymous with excellence. “I’m from Barcelona” as a post-modern “Ich bin ein Berliner” for sports. Today Barcelona's main artists do not paint cubic faces or melted watches, they play on a football pitch or a basketball court. For the first time in European sports history, one team could get a European crown in both football and basketball over the same season. Tomorrow night the football section will host Chelsea FC in the first leg of the UEFA Champions League semi finals. The basketball section? They will head to Berlin to play CSKA Moscow in the Euroleague Final Four on Friday.

We may have the same old VHS starring Marv Albert and Frank Layden. I remember them joking about how the Dream Teamers enjoyed the local specialities during the 1992 Olympics while showing footage of players entering a McDonald’s restaurant. Well maybe that’s the thing: Larry Bird peeing his large Sprite at the local McDo’s thus fertilizing the soil of Barcelona. Being responsible for an array of talent in the area 17 years later. But that of course would be an offense to people who know history and would come up with names like Johan Cruyff, Juan Antonio San Epifanio and Diego Maradona. Barcelona’s basketball team is no Dream Team. It took them all 5 games to overcome Spanish rivals Tau Vitoria in the Quarter Finals. They do not have this sense of perfection the football section has. Twice these last few weeks – Leo Messi, Xavi and Andres Iniesta put on a show in the UEFA Champions League – claiming 5-1 and 5-2 wins against Bayern Munich and Olympique Lyonnais. Those 2 nights, this team played close to perfection. It was like listening to Catalonia’s Isaac Albeniz.



For most experts FC Barcelona however plays the best basketball in Europe today. Like their pals from the football pitch, they emphasise ball movement and knocks down their outside shots. At 38%, Barça ranks third in Europe this season in 3 point percentage. With Italian sharpshooter Gianluca Basile netting over 50% of his long-range bombs. I remember running an interview with Basile back in the days and blaming my cell phone for bad connection. It took me 10 long minutes to understand he was a stammerer. And I found it so antinomic for a guy who can arm so quickly to face shot clock violation whenever he answers a question. While Basile is solid, Barcelona’s main asset is to be found on the other wing with Juan Carlos Navarro being back in business after an ambivalent year in Memphis (11 ppg though). “La Bomba” is arguably the most talented player heading to this Final Four with a skillset made of long with little rotation three points shots and floaters that he trademarked long before the TP9s and the CP3s. But Barcelona’s biggest strength might as well be its depth, especially down the lane. With 4 big men being starting 5 - worthy for any contender. All 4 were drafted. NBA geeks may be familiar with names like Fran Vasquez, Daniel Santiago, Ersan Ilyasova and David Andersen. The first two provide an intimidating force in the paint while the other two bring a deadly outside touch. A very deep team I said – strangely enough without any American contributor.

First hurdle on the road to the Euroleague title, a certain Ettore Messina. Who’s been heralded as the future first European head coach in the NBA forever. He did win the European trophy twice in 3 years with CSKA Moscow and forged a reputation as one of the biggest brains in the business. He did lose a couple of bets with his summer signings but can still rely on his vets including 2008 Euroleague MVP Ramunas Šiškauskas, who’s the closest thing to Brandon Roy this side of the ocean. Second hurdle will be the result of a Greek tragedy. Bitter enemies Panathinaikos and Olympiacos meet one more time and for once in a long long time, the latter have a shot at getting away with the win. Hence they even broke the record for the best winning percentage in the Greek League history (they only lost one game all season). Josh Childress’ fro might draw the attention though his… 9 ppg have been anything but spectacular – in the eye of the beholder (ask the defender on the poster).



FC Barcelona’s quest for a triumph in European sports starts tomorrow before 90,000 something Blaugrana fans against Chelsea FC, the 2008 UEFA Champions League runners up. The proud metropolis - home of close to 5,000,000 sports fans - is not even the capital of its own country yet it has a chance to become the center of Europe - at least on the sports map. And many could soon climb on the Barcelona bandwagon as the team looks like the last defense against British imperialism in European football and the Orthodox dominance in European basketball. With Leo Messi and Juan Carlos Navarro as the best ambassadors of a game where creativity wins games. So who's from Barcelona?

The Day They All Changed

Make sure you ready Joey's post on the trajectory of the league, and get used to seeing him here regularly. Also, I've updated the Amazon widget, but am not going to beat over the head with the reasoning behind the recommendations.

I mentioned this point already on my TSB weekend review, but it's so important it deserves its own post. On the last FDPDOCNBAPC (the podcast), Dan, Shoefly, and myself decided that the "putting it all together for the playoff run" cliche is largely specious. It's almost always the result of injured players coming back and getting into the swing of things at the right time, or the team trading for someone huge at the deadline. It just doesn't make sense that the onset of "real" basketball would suddenly cause a mediocre team to transform into something mighty. Yes, it happens in some other sports; this just proves how random and unconvincing their postseasons are.

Well, I'm here this morning to tell you that we were wrong. Sort of. I'd assumed, like most people, that the KG-less Garnett would be just that: the Celtics, minus their best player, plus everyone else trying to pick up the slack in slightly embarrassing (or at least paltry) fashion. What I certainly didn't count on was seeing a team in the playoffs that, while maybe not as good as the team that equation yielded, is fresh and exciting in new ways. Quite simply, this is a very different Celtics team. For one, the unquestioned star and center of attention is Rajon Rondo, a longtime FD favorite who in these playoffs has asserted himself as part of the "point guards now win games" movement (even if it took the media a few days, and Mark Jackson till overtime on Sunday, to figure this out). I've written at length about the strangeness of Rondo's game, even if I neglected to really break his signature move/nervous tic—the behind-the-back fake that, in effect, feigns the element of surprise in an attempt to gain the element of surprise (a double-negative? net result, zero? the key to Rondo's everywhere/nowhere style?). Suffice it to say that in this series, Rondo's used the playoffs as a platform to expose his most potent essence.

But this isn't only about Rondo's welcome-here parade. It's fascinating to watch the overall dynamic of the team develop, as something quite different from the previous (incarnation of) The Big Three (minus one) gives way to, well, a team for the future. Pierce has been far less conspicious, functioning not as someone who would brag he could take Kobe, but a wily veteran whose scoring is deployed selectively and attracts a lot of defensive attention. Allen has been thus pigeon-holed the whole time he's been in Boston—disastrously the first season, to far better effect this year. These playoffs, Ray Ray's not being asked to hit too many stand-still jumpers (he hates those, I've realized) or create for himself (not clear he can do that these days). Instead, he's coming off of screens like a champ, staying in motion so he gets the kind of shot he thrives on: An eye-blink clear look, for a split-second, from an absolutely exact spot on the floor.



In short, the older dudes, while still key producers—ironically, Allen more so than Pierce—are beginning to gracefully recede from the foreground, or at least play in a way that's not going to fall off a cliff one day. At the same time, Big Baby and Perkins, while hardly anyone's idea of a formidable front court, are playing solid, well-rounded basketball that makes it possible to imagine life without Garnett. The Celtics are, for lack of a better word, pulling a Dumars without even meaning to (by the logic of a TSB post last week, would this make Rondo into Bias?). The team's different, but they have less rigid, more malleable identity that serves them well going forward. Damn you, Danny Ainge!

The Bulls, I feel even worse for maligning going into the playoffs. Maybe that's because they've tried to rebuild three times in a row now, and have a roster that reads like a geological cross-section of failed recent history. There's also just something really unseemly about this year's additions: Pull the ROY out of a hat, and then tack on two vets way late just for the hell of it. This team seemed like glimpses at several different philosophies, held together with glue and mud, with a non-coach coaching it all. And then somehow, everyone (and what they stand for) ended up facing the same direction. We need not speak much of Derrick Rose, except to say that as a 20 year-old, he's solidified his standing as somewhere between that Game One juggernaut and the off-nights we saw throughout the season (and elsewhere in this series).

Now, as if by miracle, suddenly this patchwork team makes perfect sense. Ben Gordon, possibly the most boring enigma in basketball history, was perfect as the fearless scorer who, for the most part, realizes there's a time and place for his would-be heroic. Hinrich, too, is a role player extraordinaire: Expert defender, long-range option, scraggly grit monster, can handle the ball. Tyrus Thomas and Joakim Noah are far more mercurial than Davis and Perkins, but they can finally take the floor together as a big man tandemn of tomorrow. Noah's all hustle (real, these days) and elegant effort, Thomas has that jumper to go with his arsenal of general havoc-wreaking. Backed up by Miller and Salmons, vets perfectly content to occasionally remind us that they were once capable of star-caliber play, insurance policies willing to come in to steady or bring order to this tenuous assemblage. The Bulls, rather than looking like the unrelated wreckage of front office chicanery, are instead a real team. If just for this series.

I don't see this like last year's Hawks, or the Warriors of 2007. There's not the sense that these teams are living on the edge, or betting the farm on something outlandish. And maybe this does fall under my original rubric of players discovering their limits, for better or worse, in the playoffs (I would say that last year, Iguodala experienced the latter; this year, the former). I think we can say, however, that we're seeing off-season concerns seamlessly dealt with at the most high-pressure part of the season. Maybe you could call it a fluke, except these teams just keep honing these new models, and the whole things just makes too much sense. The individual/team key might be thus: When one or two key guys outstrip themselves, all of a sudden it's contagious. Boston's was brought about by necessity; Chicago's, on the other hand, is almost inexplicable, especially in the way it caps off an entire season of muddle. It begins with Derrick Rose, but you've got to give everyone on the team credit, one-by-one. And that's how a team puts it all together: By everyone involved catching some individual inspiration.

Slip Not on My Tears as You Dance

First order of business: if you have not yet done so, please listen to this week's installment of FreeDarko Presents the Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast. Shoefly was in the house as a guest on the show. Also, don't forget some of his excellent recent updates at Boxiana.

Second order of business: what follows is a reflection upon a changing of the NBA guard. Make note that it was wholly conceived independent of Shoals, who has made reference to and advanced a similar theory. He can, and surely will, better explain his take on it at a later date. Among other things, he's smarter than I am. But please know that this post reflects no collaboration or previous discussion.

Third order of business: you may know me from Straight Bangin', and as a sometime FreeDarko guest lecturer. Well, I have an account over here, now, and will be doing some writing. I hope that preempts any confusion. Onward...


This postseason, there is much to celebrate, what with the revelations that Denver is not Denver this year, Dallas is a new version of the old Dallas, and Kobe vs. LeBron is seemingly swelling toward a crest. Plus, we’ve received the usual glimpses of exciting youth, this year provided by Philadelphia (again), Chicago, and Portland (sort of). We also have the tabula rasa of Houston’s impending participation in a second round: it is either a fairy tale about Yao’s quiet fortitude and the harnessing of new, quirky powers (who knew Aaron Brooks would be this way?), or it is the latest cause for lamentation as we continue to chronicle the heartbreak that is Tracy McGrady. We might even add that these playoffs, so far, stand as a refutation to the tired criticism that the NBA is solely a league of isolation and one over five. To the contrary, while stars continue to shine bright, it is readily apparent that it takes a real team to win. Were it otherwise, Orlando wouldn’t be mired in panic, and New Orleans wouldn’t be an afterthought. (Maybe this makes Dwyane Wade even more impressive.)

That’s all good, however, it’s not most pressing in my mind. This is almost surely a function of my rooting interests, but these playoffs, through two weekends, have taken on an elegiac tone that cannot be escaped. I am enticed by the good, of course, but I’ve found myself dwelling on the bad. Or, really, the sad.


(props to nahright)

2009 marks the end of an era in the NBA. Some would argue “error” (zing!), but nonetheless, caring about the Pistons and Spurs was a rite of spring that is suddenly useless. The Spurs will soon be over, either now or in the next round, most likely. The Pistons are surely over. Their twin demises are not shocking, but now that they’ve arrived, the reality is somewhat jarring. I’d fallen into the habit of caring about these teams, of considering these teams, of closely watching these teams. That’s no longer necessary, and that’s weird. The Spurs and Pistons have served as barometers for the league this decade. We’ve calibrated our beliefs about worth and value using those heretofore enduring measuring posts. You don’t just switch off the gold standard to something else and not notice. You know?

But it’s bigger than those two teams, even. Kevin Garnett, who long suffered from knee problems that are degenerative and won’t just get better with surgery and rest, is not a part of the playoffs. It’s a sad portend of his coming decline, as his departure from our regular consideration will draw to a close a period of NBA history when a league of brand names grown in college started regularly running into the newjacks who short circuited the process. Beyond the obvious lessons taken from that merger of those disjointed cultural norms, Garnett had special meaning, because he was almost a template for a new kind of fan relationship with players. Without college incubation, Garnett’s growth as a person and a player was harder to discern, and to predict. But his youth, which served as his defining characteristic having never gone to college, also invited fans to care about him in a different sort of way. At least, that’s how I felt. I so desperately hoped for his success because I thought he needed it. He was just a kid. Actually, he was Da Kid, which seems even more apt when Garnett is cast in this light.

But it’s bigger than KG, too. Allen Iverson effectively played his way out of NBA relevance this year, and the consensus appears to be that he won’t be coming back. Iverson, too, was a certain sort of paradigm who marked the shift in the NBA. The interregnum between Magic-Larry-Michael and LeBron-Wade-Paul-Howard may not have clean dividing lines, and its leading historical stars may be Shaq, Tim Duncan, and Kobe, but Iverson, more than anyone else, was clearly of that time. He arguably was that time, his body, itself, standing as a testament to a change in the Association. He’s now gone, an absence made even more conspicuous because his team has chosen to play without him.



To all of these reasons for mournful reflection, we might add a contemporary sadness: Dwight Howard. Blaming him for Orlando’s feebleness, and almost palpable panic, may not be fair. He was terrible in Game Two, but he’s otherwise played well. And yet, it seems impossible to not be angry at him, and disappointed in him. Some of it may be our fault. Since August, we’ve deified him, almost willing the manifestation of his potential. And he obliged in every way--he was stellar on the floor, he grew as a player, and he seems to have no limits as a personality. That may have simultaneously neglected his shortcomings and set unrealistic expectations. Let’s be straight up: for all of his muscular excitement, Dwight has few moves and no jumper. He hit two big free throws in crunch time last night, but he’s far from reliable at the stripe. With a smaller man pinned at the basket, the Defensive Player of the Year couldn’t find a way to prevent the game-winning layup. And on a team that was so clearly jittery in the clutch, he did little to mollify nerves. Reading that back makes me depressed. That’s the problem. He’s not where I want him to be yet.

Kind of like these playoffs. For as much good as we’ve seen, there’s been an equal amount of bad. At least, for me, there has been. It’s an odd duality well captured by the Celtics, in fact. As sad as it is to watch Kevin Garnett reduced to the world’s most profane, best-dressed cheerleader, Rajon Rondo’s playoff performance has been a sensational counter, offering the sort of boundary-challenging performance we like to celebrate and mythologize. Of course, it likely comes from necessity precisely because Kevin is hurt. I don’t think one necessarily trumps the other, but this year, the bad seems to be a consequence of the good in a way that’s more pronounced than usual.

Who Invented Silent Radio?

Shoefly trekked all the way out to Seattle just for to see Leonard Cohen perform, and it was good. While here, he also wrote a bunch for Boxiana, and appeared on this week's episode of FreeDarko Presents the Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast. Our segment was recorded just after the conclusion of Hawks/Heat, which probably explains a thing or two about the tone. Incidentally, how weird is it that I'm now marking time in terms of playoff games, and each as its own epoch.

Now, the document:



If you would prefer to have this podcast delivered directly to your doorstep, you can utilize either iTunes or the XML feed.

Playlist will be provided if we get enough requests, but I am trying to be more discreet with our SUPPORT US BY BUYING AMAZON ITEMS THROUGH THIS SITE campaign.

STORE UPDATE: Jackson for President and Classics are in and mostly shipped, Bron/Kobe (Kobe/Bron) will go out today, about another week on the Durant tee. Thank you for your patience.

Leave Home

Links of goodness today:

-Shoals Unlimited about the real story of Nuggets/Hornets: The revenge of J.R. Smith and the Birdman.

-Whoever asked for more Mavs, here's your Mavs-only content, in a guest post for D Magazine's Inside Corner.

-Not only is this latest Boxiana post excellent, it was also composed roughly five feet from me.

Podcast tomorrow!

That Ghost Holds My Hand!

Let me attempt to explain to all of you exactly why the "Z-graphs" (link is to overview) were so seductive. On a number of intuitive, if largely metaphoric, levels, they made perfect sense: Both center and point guard, the position's most often discussed in terms of "purity," are represented as untroubled rows of attributes. They flow from logically from one to the next, even as they start toward more nebulous areas. But insofar as we believe these positions to have some sort of enduring essence, it makes sense that they'd maintain an untroubled, un-sloped plane of description. Furthermore, this allows either the PG or C section to serve as a base—or, to reify the thought, a foundation. This is consistent with our understanding of big men to this day, but the Stockton/Cousy point guard who excelled simply at a select set of responsibilities essential to any functional line-up, no longer defines the position (sorry, Steve Blake). For instance, Chris Paul, arguably the finest in the league at this position, was almost single-handedly responsible for the scrapping of the "Z," since his chart was almost as "impure" as that of, say, Allen Iverson. Paul basks in legitimacy, as did forebears Isiah, Kevin Johnson, and Payton. The likes of Magic and to some degree, Kidd, are pure in heart but can't help contributing all the over the place as well.

I never felt like Rose/Beasley was really a small man/big man dilemma. Beasley's a total weirdo and an idiosyncratic player, more SF than some SF's, more PF than many PF's, and quite possibly to "tweener" what Arenas was to "combo guard." Rose, on the other hand, was a pure point guard (relatively, historically, speaking). But with Ricky Rubio throwing his name into the hat for this summer's draft, we finally are presented with a real small/big dilemma. Blake Griffin is big, athletic, fairly skilled, and automatic; Rubio is mercurial, Pistol-like as a descriptive quality, and a natural-made trickster with an offense. Griffin—stable, staunch, and unromantic—is exactly the kind of foundation proposed by the visual metaphor of the "Z". The connotations will bury you, so don't spend too much time there: Anchoring the frontcourt, providing insurance through boards, dunks, and interior defense, you build a team around a known quantity that, for lack of a non-slang term, holds it down at both ends. Indisputably. Today's point guard, though, isn't drafted to provide a foundation (as the "Z" would suggest), but a non-stop spark. They're playmakers, here to furnish the unexpected without betraying our trust, following their muse as responsibly as possible while taking the team with them. They are, in short, anti-foundational, always reaching upward and looking for that new angle or opportunity. That involves running an offense and controlling the ball, but its stability is exactly that assurance of ambitious play-making that sweeps up the rest of the team with it.



For the most pure example of this impure point guard, you need look no further than Rajon Rondo, who has gone grievously underrated in this series exactly because he cares so little to project authority, gravitas, or emotion—those silly markers of "quarterbacking" that, ironically, have no place in Brett Favre-inspired mayhem.. I'm not placing Rondo in the same anarchic category as Westbrook, because he obviously fits into the Celtics (or rather, the team accommodates and respond to him). But instead of pin-point passing and orchestrated partings of the defense, Rondo just kind of speeds towards the basket or ball on every play, and then either ends up tossing in an off-balance lay-up, crookedly finding a teammate for the easy shot, or grabbing the rebound. Same goes for his defense: He'll lock down opponents, only to lunge after loose balls and errant passes not with a speedster's hubris, but because it's his job to make a play. He's fast, physical, and utterly undemonstrative. Rajon Rondo is the engine of that team, especially in this series, and yet he remains strangely elusive. You wonder if he's not just making every decision on the fly, in an off-hand manner that evokes nothing if not his childhood idol Favre. There's no need for poise, or bravura, because Rondo just blankets the court with his blinding speed and long arms. He's vague, even ectoplasmic, everywhere at once while only rarely making what feels like a statement play.

Does that make Rondo any kind of traditional "foundation"? Of course not. But if he keeps this up, then no lack of poise, or stability, can take away from the key role he plays on that team. Maybe Rondo is the ultimate postmodern PG. Not in the scoring vein of Isiah, or Magic/Kidd's augmented pure point-ness. Unlike Rose, Rondo is anything but immediate and tactile. If you blink you might miss him, because he does little to establish any continuity or sustained position of authority. Yet for all the fragments and impression he yields, for all his refusal to stand up and project authority, Rondo is doing exactly what a new, non-foundational PG should. He takes care of the ball, makes it move, creates shots for others, and consistently saves possessions when they appear lost. That he produces little that can pass for iconic or poised shows only that he's mastered the raw material of playmaking, and with it, a resistance to fall back on cliche or positional piety. Not a foundation, but a skyward gesture that sets parameters by remaining tethered to the team.

I Am Somebody

You cannot stop me, I am still excited to see Deron Williams in the playoffs—at least when it heads back to SLC. I now fully accept Iguodala after his game-winner, which at the same time, I do not hesitate to chalk up to circumstance. A rookie playing his best game of the season in his first playoff appearance? That's not improbable, it's attributable to a kind of logic we have boldly ignored up until this point. Proof of Kobe's greatness? Just say "Kobe" and "playoffs" in the same sentence and try not to get chills (even if you have to scoff at last year's Finals). And damn, the thought of what Kevin Durant would do in the playoffs is flat-out scary.

There have long been concerns that FreeDarko is somehow not suited for the playoffs. Either because it marks the elimination of cult players and sideshows (it doesn't) or, more darkly, because there's no way to ignore the fact of winning and losing (we don't want to do that). I suspect, though, that there's some intuitive truth to the thought that the individual is sublimated more than ever in a certain, largely mythological, form of playoff ball. That the playoffs and style are mortals enemies who, while they may be reconciled, always rest uneasily at opposite poles. Of course, this depends on defining style as separate from function, and presuming that the playoff mindset is not only generic, but bound to affect some sort of uniformity in those who submit to its sway. Which frankly, is an insult nor only to what "FD" has come to mean, but also to the players themselves—as if the competitive spirit were somehow not an individual question.



The postseason inspires players. It's understandable, and in no way reflects on their attitude toward the regular season. But the stakes are higher, they dig down deeper, and in some cases, you find them more fully-realized, ferocious, and expressive than ever. I point to Williams, for the zillionth time, and submit that Jazz/Lakers will be enjoyable simply because I get to watch this heightened and enhanced version of an elite PG. This is, simply put, playoff style, and it's the intersection of FD's more esoteric concerns and our more hum-drum interest in who goes all the way. That's why a series can be interesting even if the outcome's a no-brainer, and why the drama inherent in any postseason context is ramped up by the NBA's capacity for the individual to contribute to this ambience on a micro-level.

So while the playoffs never make me avidly dislike a player, they can certainly open my eyes to what they're all about, or make me their biggest fan all over again. Playoff style proves, like Iguodala did today, that it's when players push themselves to the limits that they expand and discover just how resourceful, and awe-inspiring, they can be on the court. Today was the best I've seen Josh Smith play all season, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. We talked earlier today about Ariza's coming-out party; J.R. Smith and Beasley didn't do so badly, either. This is when basketball matters most, and consequently, when players put the most of themselves out there. And in the end, there's no way that happens in a manner devoid of, or hostile toward, style.



FreeDarko Recommends Updates: Mike James Kirkland's Hang on in There is so good, I just defied my own personal record spending freeze to finally bid on a copy; I keep staying up way too late reading The Buried Book, even it's about Gilgamesh and British archaeologists; Speaking of indispensable basketball books, Robert Peterson's Cages to Jumpshots, which tells of the NBA's pre-history (I can't muster a Gilgamesh analogy right now), is out of print; this Les Rallizes Denudes live album is enduring proof to me that noise has heart, even soul; Barry Hannah's High Lonesome falls under the category of "stuff that's really influenced my writing that I can still stand to read"; I think pot is absolutely hilarious, and Laurie Colwin's The Lone Pilgrim contains the single funniest short story about pot ever written.

(Clarification: We get paid even if you buy something else, as long as you go in through these links/the widget/the FD book links.)

Time to Build My Brand Back Up

Me and him both. This is the most important man in the playoffs, for now, and I can't wait. Apologies to Rose (Celtics will adjust, can Rose make the superhuman rock-solid, I refuse to believe that team is always there for him in any structurally sound way), and anyone else I missed because I was off in music crit realm yesterday and barely watched. Am willing to hear other nominees.

This might have to be an open thread for now, but one point: What are the chances the Ariza is pretty much what we hope TT might one day become?

Oh, and Texans out there, please help me convince Lady Shoals that she really, really needs to be excited about her Mavs vs. Spurs. I like the Mavs as underdogs, maybe even miscreants and misfits, instead of the establishment. It's like the old days, sort of.

BONUS: Joey continues to rain hot fire with his most impassioned, and yet sympathetic (for him and them) defense of the Spurs ever.

The Nothingness Is Lovely

By now, you should know Joey [classified Jew name]. He writes for FD on occasion, is responsible for the ever-excellent Straight Bangin', and this week was a guest on the FD/DoC podcast. He also really likes The Hills, which figures prominently in a long interview I did with Eugene for his "The People You Don't Know" podcast. It will either make you love or hate me more than ever, or maybe send me sympathy ribbons.

Growing up in a household bereft of prescribed bedtimes or limits on television, and one where knowledge of all kinds remains the leading currency, I developed a “talent” about which most parents wouldn’t normally brag to others. But on more than just a few occasions, my parents would smile with this weird, proud amusement as they told other people that, “Joe stays up so late and likes sports so much that he can watch the same SportsCenter three or four times a day.”

That Joe--he really knows how to use his time well.

My neuroses aside, I summon this memory because it reinforces two related things: 1) I consume a lot of sports media; 2) I still have no clue as to what the NFL Draft is supposed to be about. Every year, I am left feeling the same way--the most misleading weekend in sports is that of the NFL Draft, because, honestly, it seems to be about everything but the actual sport that it nourishes. It strikes me as even more bizarre when it is juxtaposed against the NBA Draft. The NBA Draft is fun. The NFL Draft? Not really. The NBA Draft reflects the fluidity of basketball: point forwards, flex offenses, and “we like his athleticism so we took him.” The NFL Draft, meanwhile, reflects the rigidity of football: set positions, arcane formation rules, and “signability.” To be honest, it sucks.



First, think about the NBA Draft. No, wait. First, let us just get this out of the way: yes, the NBA Draft is an event, or a process, really, riddled with problems. As Hubie might warmly acknowledge, “We know this. OK?” You’re right, teams can make horrible decisions. They seem to emphasize nebulous notions of potential to the preclusion of rational thought. They ignore known entities to roll the proverbial dice on only partially formed athletes who can’t shoot but can move in multiple directions once airborne. They confuse priorities, they overly rely on individual workouts, they insist that kids who don’t care about college attend it for a year--we know all of this. ESPN even has the temerity to post graphics that say things like, “Needs to Improve: Athleticism,” as though you can just buy some at a flea market. The whole thing can lend itself to easy lampoon.

The NBA Draft is undeniably about playing basketball, though, and that redeems it. A sports fan can see this. (A sports fan stupid enough to watch Charley Steiner and Mike Patrick on a loop can see this over and over again.) The way it’s covered, the way it’s structured, the culture that surrounds it--basketball is the thing. More precisely, the focus never moves away from the on-court product, wrongly landing on the draft process, itself. Columnists and reporters frame the draft by highlighting what teams need to improve. There are pre-draft camps where prospects--brace yourselves--play the sport! Teams evaluate their needs and the available talent with immediacy. The idea is usually that the right player can make a meaningful difference, and the priority is finding the best basketball fit. Again, you can fairly criticize how these evaluations are made and where they net out, but it’s hard to impugn the motives behind them. Everything about the draft carries this air of renewal; everything acknowledges that improving the basketball is paramount.

Not unimportant, I should reiterate that the tone of the entire institution is optimistic: from the workouts, to the assessment of needs, to the handshakes with Commissioner Stern, the draft encompasses positivity about the game. Everyone is the next someone, and that someone to whom a given player is compared is rarely any old humdrum player. Parallels are drawn in the sun, with the glow of hope brightening prognostications. Further, front-office personnel, players, and fans are allowed, if not encouraged, to have fun with the whole thing. It is uncommon for a team to draft someone and foster an ensuing dialogue that bemoans how little things will change. There is a baseline understanding that the team is likely to become more competitive, even if a given draft cannot fully satisfy all needs. Enthusiasm is no stranger to the NBA Draft, and no one seems to be bothered by this. Heaven forbid that we enjoy ourselves while celebrating a game.



The NFL draft may be fundamentally about all of this, too. I’ll be fair and allow that this may be the case. Those yahoo Jets fans who show up certainly are into it. Nor will I deny that the denizens of America’s favorite gambling habit surely want to find the safety required to win a Super Bowl and help their fans feel the excitement that should come with successfully executing this search. But…it certainly doesn’t seem that way to an outsider who is very much attuned to sports culture. Instead, everything about the NFL Draft feels different: the way it's discussed, the way it’s administered, the way it’s approached by its participants. In patriotic, nationally aggrandizing Cold War terms, the NBA Draft feels like America--cheerful, excited, warm--while the NFL Draft feels like the Soviet Union--stern, severe, cold. Put another way, which event’s tenor would best accommodate Ronald Reagan eating his jellybeans and smiling with his vacant veneer of senility, and which would better serve Nikita Khrushchev as he pounded his shoe on a desk? That’s what I thought.

Peter King wrote a column this week that captures so many of these differences. Trumpeting that the Detroit Lions, picking first, will focus on "signability" when making their choice next weekend, King easily rattles off 1,000 words about how the Lions will sort out whom they draft. It’s Peter King, so it’s overly moralistic and very much written by a middle-aged white guy from New Jersey knowledgeable NFL writing, but, strikingly, it has so little to do with football. Instead, it’s about business strategy; it’s about what the Lions are supposed to pay a top pick; it’s about a historical analysis of “what happens in the draft,” so to speak. King’s story presumes a certain kind of draft formalism that not only shifts its natural focus--shouldn’t it be about improving how the Lions play football?--but also illustrates what the NFL Draft is really about, namely the theater of “playing draft.” Football is almost secondary, and that’s neither fun nor sports, really.

Before we go on, I’ll again attempt to be fair: Maybe another team coming off a historic failure wouldn’t focus on “signability,” and instead would try to get the single best player. This could be a problem with the Lions (entirely possible), and not with the NFL. Further, the NBA doesn’t contend with signing drama because it has a rookie salary cap, so this could be an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, the NFL salary structure is fairly rigid, albeit non-codified, and the variations from year to year are not so vast. Were they, professional draft blowhards like Mel Kiper, Jr.--something else that, thankfully, sets the NBA and NFL apart--couldn’t shriek with such certainty about which players deserve “fourth-pick money” and which picks are good values. It wouldn’t make sense if everyone didn’t already know the stakes.



You can likely sense my skepticism that the absent rookie salary cap is the dispositive issue that separates the NFL Draft from its NBA superior. I am similarly skeptical (read: convinced in the opposite) that only the Lions would be choosing a top pick using actuary tables because, well, we go through this every year. It’s seemingly always about factors that are not directly connected to who runs faster, hits harder, and, ultimately, wins more. I don’t suggest that NFL teams don’t want to play better football. Rather, I’d argue that this unavoidable imperative, somehow, gets lost in the draft process itself. Not really a “sports” weekend, the NFL Draft has taken on this weird, meta component that seems to fuck up the thinking and the dialogue. The football draft is treated like a series of business transactions, and teams appear to lose sight of just picking the players who will make them best at playing football. NFL teams come off as more preoccupied with "drafting the right way," or carrying out some process preserved for its own sake, rather than the foundational issue of just improving the team. (For now, we’ll leave aside the much, much larger conversation about sports as business, which I acknowledge renders this post an incomplete exploration. I am OK with that.)

That’s not fun. Nothing about this ritualism is fun. It’s weird, and frankly annoying, that as early as February, people seriously argue about who the Seahawks should draft. Similarly, there is something nonsensical and antiseptic about the premier pre-draft event comprising Wonderlic tests, World’s Strongest Man simulations, and seemingly everything but actually playing football. The entire ordeal--and that’s what it is--feels insincere and disconnected from the sport.



Instead, the NFL Draft, not in organic harmony with the sport itself, seems to most directly connect to the larger NFL Industrial Complex that enjoys a suffocatingly tight grip on America. Everything about the NFL is taken oh so seriously, and discussed with such synthetic urgency and significance, that actual football is almost a secondary concern. Violence and primal physical competition may forever hold sway over the imagination of humanity, resulting in an evergreen appeal for the sport, but the Business of the NFL obscures this simple, innate appeal. It’s like when you apply too much dressing and drown out the natural flavors originally meant to be enhanced. Far from a compulsory exercise meant to showcase the product, improve how it’s played, and preserve the latent appeal of sport--a description which I’d ascribe to the NBA Draft as a compliment--the NFL Draft is its own industry, in effect. The draft is just about the NFL--the crest, those beer commercials, all that tailgating, and everything else that was once an attendant circumstance and now an equal to the football.

That is not really sports. That is marketing, or popular culture, even. The Masters, the Final Four, the divisional football playoff games--those are sports weekends. Those are mirthful, exciting opportunities to celebrate sports. As is the NBA Draft, a process that never loses sight of basketball, of the NBA’s loose rhythm, or the hope of the offseason. The NFL Draft, on the other hand, is an event that’s not really about sports. It’s about itself, and the self-involved seriousness of the NFL. Football becomes almost incidental as the NFL Draft drones on, polluting a perfectly innocent spring weekend with consternation about tenths-of-a-second differences, stern treatment of depth chart minutiae, and self-righteous indignation arising when teams “get it wrong.” As though the goal is to draft a certain way, not win more games.

As I said before, that sucks.

You're Podcastcic!

You can't handle it. New episode of "FreeDarko Presents the Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast" that feature appearances by myself, Dr. LIC, and our good friend Joey, who hid from his heritage by refusing to reveal his last name. Topics covered include the good and bad of the Bron/Wade/Kobe triumverate, other examples of the Beijing Effect, how pleasant it is that no one's tanking, and LeBron's disco essence.



As a public service, here's a playlist of the music used in the show:

"Everything's Ruined" - Faith No More
"I Really Love You" - The Ambassadors
"Assassins" - Geto Boys
"Dr. Handy's Dandy Candy" - Jim Ford"
"Nothing Comes to a Sleeper (But a Dream)" - Sam Dees
"Duel" - Madlib
"If You're Ready (Come Go With Me) - Staple Singers

Oh, and them DoC boys can write a little, too. Check out this extensive post on a playoff scenario that now won't happen, which caught my eye immediately with its 1980's DC reference in the title. Also, if you're in Chicago, go see Dan's play.

-Some other odds and ends: Not much to say about Garnett. I don't want to say he's dead to me, but I've got zero emotion invested in him or his career at this point. And I like the idea of the Celtics falling out of the picture early, not out of bitterness, but because I don't want to have to hear about them. That said, this makes Round One into THE RONDO/ROSE SHOWDOWN TO END ALL AGES AND FOREVER, which oddly has me stoked about a Boston playoff series.

-I only found out today that the playoffs actually start Saturday, not Sunday. As I mentioned, I'm co-giving this paper at EMP on Saturday (panel is "Disembodiment," where Dave Grubbs will upstage the fuck out of me, I'm sure). However, on Saturday there's the aforementioned Chicago/Boston intrigue; our chance to see just how hard Bron brings it from the first possession, against the Pistons, no less; Dallas/San Antonio I'm find with missing, but I have all sorts of obligations to pay attention to Portland/Houston, where there's oh so much at stake. While I just happened to cop a DVR this week, I'm still a little overwhelmed. Help me deal!

-And yeah, the store is on fire, sales abound, and our hella fresh Kevin Durant tee should be flying on a flagpole somewhere. Play us a visit, you won't be sorry.

Can He Get a Witness?

Right before the regular season ends, FreeDarko pays cloth-y tribute to Kevin Durant's mammoth sophomore campaign . . . and the relative obscurity he's toiled in. Maybe if we move enough of these, he'll get on national television for 2009-10.

Some other store news: Based on popular demand, we've done up limited prints of a few more portraits from the book: Kevin Garnett, Lamar Odom, Ron Artest, and Joe Johnson. We're offering two special deals with these: if you buy two, you get a third free. Or, for those with an excess of wall space or love for the NBA, there's the option of all nine portrait prints for $250.

Be sure to weigh in on the latest version of the Z-graph, and tune in Thursday for another episode of our brand news joint venture podcast. I feel like a fucking octopus right about now.

Turn Your Z Around: The Ways of Wade

First there was the Z, then 2.0. A scientist cooked up the team version.

Now we bring you a re-imagining:

Soon, we will release the statistical baselines for skill qualification. Until then, an example:

Death to America

I attended the Hoop Summit earlier today. These pictures, and the short captions I have managed to muster, should be of interest to readers here.



It is almost impossible to explain how awesome John Wall is. He's like a more athletic, less selfish, Derrick Rose. Like LeBron if he hadn't been made in space and was crossed with Chris Paul. Like that column someone wrote during Wade's championship about how no one saw Jordan coming, either, and the Messiah is supposed to be unexpected and organic. I have absolutely no idea how someone can be both so freakishly dominant and yet so comfortable staying within an offense. Did I mention he has at least five "extra gears," like a series of increasingly explosive first steps that happen within mere feet of each other? When asked about a fall he took that would've made Wade or Gerald Wallace proud, insisted it had to be that way because "you never know which game might be your last." He also has the uncanny ability to cock his entire body in mid-air for a block, only to abruptly staunch all his momentum and float back down to earth if the angle's not there. I have never been more impressed by a high school player. I very nearly blurted out "just stop fucking around and go to UNC" while he was taking questions about his ongoing college search.



But it was the international team that won, for the first time in eleven years. Here's where it got decided, as Milan Macvan celebrates a long three and possibly several other things that might shock and surprise you.

Photos by Alex McDougall, for Blazer's Edge.

SUPER UPDATE: If FreeDarko is your favorite blog, well, bump it down to number two. This masterpiece of high-concept psychedelic caveman prayer turned up while I was looking for John Wall ish. Ty Keenan thinks it's a dispatch from another planet, several decades down the road. I like to believe it's Calipari himself, releasing an excess of basketball thought and emotion in a manner that just might keep him from 1) getting noticed 2) violating anything more than usual. So he runs it through Babelfish and back. There's also the possibility that it's an ESL scout/agent who refuses to acknowledge his limitations, or a member of some dude's entourage hoping to come out of this spring with a creative writing scholarship.

Enter the Podcast

Major announcement to make right about now. Some months ago, the The Disciples of Clyde podcast mentioned the Almanac in an episode on what makes a truly great sports book. We found it sufficiently compelling, irritating, and in some ways correct that we struck up a conversation, stayed in touch, and then came to a momentous decision: We've decided to join forces.

What does this mean? Well, if you were a fan of DoC before, not much will change. Dan and Ken are still the hosts, and will set the tone (which is pretty much in line with what FD's internal phone chats sound like, anyway), hold the editorial reins, and handle production. But if you enjoyed FD on The Sound of Young America, get ready for a regular dose of myself and other FD operatives showing up as featured guests. We'll also have a hand in the musical selections and what myself, Dr. LIC, or Silverbird5000 are coming in to chat about. Also, look forward to guests from inside your computer and beyond, as well as a war of zero forgivance with The Jones.

To get even more nuts and bolts about it, DoC will keep their own site, and post the podcast there, but you'll also be able to find it embedded here. It will also be available on iTunes and in feedy form. Oh, and the official name is "FreeDarko Presents the Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast," which would be really unwieldy if it didn't sound so much like our book's title. In the future, we'll post music playlists, but we didn't want to busy this post any further. So, without further ado, here's episode 50/1 of FreeDarko Presents the Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast. Enjoy and remember.



ELSEWHERE:

-I wrote a piece for ESPN on why the Thunder won't make the playoffs. It was hard for me to stare one of my favorite teams in the eyes and say it was doomed to fall short, but instead, I think I ended up with a realistic, yet ultimately optimistic, picture of how the Thunder could move forward while maintaining some of their personality. If you've got Insider, you can check out the Bucher column I'm responding to.

-Intense Shoals Unlimited on the current status of Arenas, and why we shouldn't be sick of him quite yet.

Z Index + IVERSON

This song is actually a sonic response to the thought-experiment that is the Z-graphs. A brief recap:

1. As a response to Westbrook, Iverson, and Odom, the Z-graph emerges from the mist to suggest a new way to represent/conceive of positional roles.

2. Tom and I revise the model, fixing some problems while causing some new ones. Though for what this is supposed to show—continuous vs. discontinuous modes of positionality—this one works a lot better.

3. Reader Greg K. blows everyone's mind by showing how the Z's can illustrate a team dynamic. Click to enlarge.

BUT

Perhaps even more notably, FD originator Shoefly (he wrote the original petition), penned a truly momentous meditation on Iverson and boxing on his side project Boxiana. An excerpt:

Personally my feelings about Iverson have never been constrained by any team, or game, or victory paradigm, but more on a moral, religious level. His is a will to overcoming that has long left me with the feeling that, had things been different, he might very well have been the modern day Ray Robinson, all the tools and spirit to be a welter and middleweight destroyer. There is something about what he has done, that, like a great boxer just past his prime, makes one hope he steps away, so that his will can be preserved, perhaps as a gentleman farmer, world traveler, and a collector of orchids.

You would do well to read this one, even if I am slightly salty that he didn't even tell me it had happened.

Dream Angels: Z The Return

Structure (debuted Monday) now revised to be more precise. Here is the starting line-up for the 2010 Golden State Warriors. (UPDATE: Jax fixed.)

You've Been Scared

First, the widget: I think I've finally quit for good, which has me returning to Cigarettes Are Sublime and its effort to get at what, beyond tobacco, makes smoking great; Miike's remake of Graveyard of Honor is one of the few DVD's I own, and I find it as moving in its own way as The Wolves; since I'm going to see Leonard Cohen later this month, I've decided to conclude that New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which I listened to on repeat the only time I wrote a short story; a couple years back, Dr. LIC and myself randomly found out we were both huge fans of Israel Rabon's ultra-bleak The Street, about a homeless Jewish soldier in 1920's Poland; Charles Shaar Murray's Crosstown Traffic is like Greil Marcus if he actually liked music; I'm routinely amazed at how many people, myself included, have long been in the dark about Playing for Keeps, Halberstam's long-ass Jordan bio.

At many times in many hours, we have brought forth the notion of a Positional Revolution. These have been near-utopian ideals, which mostly involve either an entire team structuring itself around a single, atypical player (or as a series of interdependent roles that buck convention), or a bunch of do-it-all weirdos whose contributions shift from possession to possession. Old news for anyone who has read this blog before this year, which has been remarkably devoid of advances on that front.

That is, until about a week ago. That's when the Thunder signed Shaun Livingston, I remembered they had Thabo, and I started to wonder, what becometh of Russell Westbrook? You want to talk about Rondo as a PG lacking in jump shot? Westbrook is the point equivalent of a dirty bomb. He's so unpredictable, and riotously imperfect, that you really have to wonder how teams scouting him managed to keep any stable future hologram in front of them while taking their notes. It's not just that he lacks position, but that he undermines, even threatens, the stability of those around him.

No, this isn't that same old combo-itis again, or the curse of the tweener. I think it's pretty much established that this cliche, conservative as it may be, rings damningly true except in the case of certain active backcourts where two guards overstep their bounds just enough to mesh (this year, it's Williams/West). I see Westbrook as too unstable, divergent, and fundamentally bugged-out to fit into that synergistic relationship; to a lesser extent, I think this applies to Jerryd Bayless, which is why I tried to get Golliver to ask Pritchard just what they saw in Bayless. Did they think of him vis a vis a template, and worry about his imperfections, his tweener-nes, or see him as a singularity that would really put some balls back in "best available. "Best available" as a way forward, not a cop-out. FYI, that's kind of what I think the Thunder are doing, and I applaud them for it.



Yet so far, all thinking along these lines has been in the context of a system. The redemption of such players comes when, organically, they fit into a plan. They are, in some sense, without form until they fit. Or, no matter how sympathetically, they're bent and warped slightly to work well within whatever normal, or abnormal, system they've been cast in. They could be tweeners well-coached, multi-purpose threats, or guys responsibly down for whatever (Hedo!!). But what of the Westbrooks, possibly Bayless and Barbosa, maybe Tyreke Evans—all minscule heirs to Dwyane Wade, a player who at every turn has resisted pigeon-holing and even too much law and order from possession to possession. Not because he's selfish, but because he works best when set loose and asked to explode. With that will come equal parts individual and team, but you can't see it coming and planning for it is something of a fool's errand. Compare that with LeBron's "allow me to be all pillars of your temple" functionality.

You wonder, then, what's the way to describe Westbrook? I've written previously about a redistribution of labor, either on the macro or micro level within a team. Are there not, though, players most suited not to responding to these signals from the realm of ideas, but to serving as catalysts in their own right, whose mismatched, or garbled skill-sets is proof not that they don't fit in, or are to become lepers in the taxonomy of scouting (I love Jamal Crawford, but we're not talking about his kind of limbo here). We still think of these players, and even superstars like Durant, in terms of how they might best be used to make sense of the usual slate of basketball responbiltiies. Durant can, in a sense, become a position unto himself. But either through their relative insignificance, or sheer, explosive weirdness, there's a whole class of smaller players who are best served as fields of probability, abilities that cohere more as a mess of intriguing tendencies than a CV-ready mission statement. This is nothing less than the difference between believing in skills and being cowed by the notion of responsibility.

(Graphs by Ziller. This is the spectrum of positionality. Blue dots are continuity, red ones isolated occurrences.)







I want to step back here and nod in the direction of a conversation Silverbird5000 and I had the other day concerning, on some base level, stats. We eventually returned to the question of whether, in the most crude sense, something like adjusted +/- presumes (as Berri certainly does) that it's better to have a team full of players equally good at offense and defense, at perimeter and the paint, than a collection of folks who excel at some things but suck at others. Forget for a second that what I've just described is pretty much the way teams are built, since the game is as much a series of encounters in the moment as an overall flow of data, and dominance gets you more mileage than playing it close in all departments. But it also dawned on me how much this ultra-conservative version of basketball (where, say, you'd take two players that are 5 in all categories as opposed to two with a wider range of "scores") resembles a team like the Warriors of legend, where even Baron Davis could blur his PG's role with Jackson around, or the Amare-less Suns, or that ideal D'Antoni team mentioned in the press at one point of "all 6'8" guys who can run and pass."

Here, of course, is where the ultra-right and ultra-left unwittingly crash into each other, when Communism becomes Fascism, or communes giving way to cults. I doubt it ever works the other way—a sinister consolidation of power and crushing of all opposition giving way to egalitarian sunshine and light? But certainly, the nexus is both unlikely and potential ammunition for both sides, even if it's that moment where you look across the battlefield and realize your enemy is human. We all want the same thing, sometimes.



And now, we come to what should be the topic of the hour, Allen Iverson. I find it fascinating that, ever since the 2001 Finals, even those who decry ballhogs and bemoan the death of the league have a soft spot for the guy. He's heart personified, guts on a stick, a performer whose sheer visceral and emotional impact on fans is like being hit by an unshorn tidal wave. He is, in short, a stone classic, a Hall of Famer, and one of the most important players in the game (even if you want to argue over whether he's one of the best). But he's been both ahead of his time and, in his uncompromising version of the Wade philosophy, a prototype that could not move forward without reforms. It's a given by now: AI can't play any other way. Even with Melo, when he racked up assists and worked well with another scorer, he set the tone and rhythm of every possession, and forced all around him to pick on his idiosyncratic sense of timing, space, and cues.

We can argue over whether or not the 2000-01 Sixers were effectively built around him, since no one else on there even needs to touch the ball. I'd say, though, that in retrospect, Iverson isn't the man who wrecked the guard position, but a phenomenal talent who can't help himself—actually, can't help but transcend the very notion of roles and responsibilities. As irresponsible as it sounds, Iverson only works when you give him the ball and let him improvise. Let what come may. Not because he's a ball-hog, but because the game only comes to him on those terms. Just as, for the guards discussed above, there's too much going on there (and sometimes missing there) to try and assign them clear-cut responsibilities. We're talking about a stylistic profile, a new way of mapping an ordinarily maddening kind of player. Inconvenient truths, but ones that have yielded fruits at times. Iverson is perhaps too extreme to even fit this model, but what he would need is a team built to respond to his disproportionate hits and misses—not a normal one that pretends he's a point guard, or even one where he's paired with a complementary player, as if Iverson were merely singular, not totally fluid.

All of which brings us to Lamar Odom. At this point, the "could've been Magic" has turned from regret on fans' part to a kind of background myth: "That Lamar Odom sure is good, did you know he could've been Magic?" I'd say, though, that at this point in his career the Lakers use him precisely as this kind of x-factor. I'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the coaching staff, but allowing Odom to shape-shift within the triangle, as opposed to cast him as KG-esque New Synthesis, is exactly what's allowed him to finally gain legitimacy. We can only hope that, whatever happens to Iverson next, in cast more in the light of forward-thinking strategy, rather than the Angel Gabriel handing out pizzas in the Stone Age.



ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS UPDATE:

Per audience request, here's Anthony Randolph's profile. We flipped it on its side and added some pentagrams to make it even weirder than it already is. However, also take note that we've added "handle" and "low TO's", so when you're looking at the other graphs, imagine those on there, too. They should only further affirm what we have discovered to be true.