It's Judgment That Defeats Us

A profound believer in liberated fandom, djturtleface loves the worst or most peculiar teams in the league. In third grade he listed Rasheed Wallace as his idol, and currently writes for TheGoodPoint.com. He just started SB Nation's Memphis Grizzlies blog Straight Outta Vancouver, which is an exercise in pain, misfortune, and hope for a better tomorrow.

Like virtually all of his ‘We Believe’ teammates before him, turns out that Captain Jack was never quite as happy with being an act in Donnie Nelson’s circus as we once presumed.

Bear in mind that this is a player-coach combo once thought to have built the best rapport in the league. When on Oakland’s local sports-talk radio they would regularly call in as anonymous listeners to pose goofy questions to each other. Nelson gave Jackson more minutes and more regular minutes than any other player on the squad, which is actually quite an accomplishment since Nelson benched players like Jamal Crawford, who should nicely compliment his system, and the Anthony Randolph, who should be a fucking thunder-lizard or something, for the bulk of the season. Point is it’s becoming rather obvious that Don Nelson is to the NBA as Colonel Kurtz is to Vietnam.

Nelson is a man tortured and ruined by the combination of his own genius and the impossibility of his circumstance. Donnie can turn some undrafted kid out of the Georgia Institute of Technology into an explosive scorer in his rookie season, but couldn’t have cultivated a healthy, professional relationship with Dikembe Mutumbo. And while this phenomenon might be endlessly interesting to a casual observer, it seems to be particularly frustrating to those living the dream.

In the most FD of ways, Nelson’s dementia is clearly reflected by the style of his system, which makes his insanity almost a necessity. As I’ve written about in the past, teams that play asymmetrical basketball can be extremely effective, but are still extremely uncommon. This is because there are three enormous roadblocks that tend to prevent the more sane coaches in the association from being given a chance to prove their genius.



While Don Nelson has broken the mold by simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of any societal norm, most of us prefer not to have conversations with the demons inside our skulls, so front offices tend to get stuck on these worries:

Social: Lots of people pretend like peer-pressure isn’t real. Lots of social scientists know it’s an incredibly powerful force in decision making. Lots of professional sports teams have fans, which provide an enormous social pressure. NBA front offices trying to build unique squads have to make unique, sometimes questionable roster moves. Since lots of the fans aren’t members of the front office, it’s incredibly difficult for a franchise to teach them the rationale behind their action without alerting every other team in the league. And that kind of defeats the purpose of running a sneaky strategy the other teams aren’t built to counter.

Unless you’re Chris Wallace, chances are you don’t want to be perceived by your fans or the national media as like Chris Wallace—not to insinuate Chris Wallace is covertly building an asymmetrical team, just to insinuate most teams would probably rather hire Isiah Thomas as their new GM at this point. Some franchises manage to answer this convoluted equation, normally by branding their style so fans and media understand their personnel decisions. But most franchises find it much easier to just remove the whole unique squad part from the equation, then all you need to do to quell those incessantly riotous fans is trade for Shaq.

Cultural: This equation is much shorter. Coaches and GM’s aren’t always on the same page. Because of the ‘No Championships’ propaganda and the reason above, GM’s resist making particularly creative roster choices. Coaches need to win, or they get fired. So if the coach has a traditional lineup, there is too much pressure from the NBA’s win-or-burn coaching culture for that coach to tinker with the way the lineup is constructed and utilized. Who really wants to save a world that is destined to die?

As evidence I would like to submit that coaches using a unique system typically have nothing to lose because of their status (read: large and long contracts, or exceptionally short leash): D’Antoni, Nelson, Adelman, Karl are the legends; Stan Van Gundy and a bunch of interim coaches are the outcasts who need to show sparks of genius to have any hope of staying an NBA head coach.



Economic: Common sense would edict that a team using its personnel in unique ways to maximize their ability and minimize their flaws would get some serious discounts on players. In theory because they’re getting the maximum value out of each players skills, these teams could get by paying less for players who are seen as flawed in most systems. Sadly because of the branding issue even the most innovative team needs to have some semblance of consistency in player roles. The more unique your team becomes, the more unique skill-set necessary to make it work, thus the rarer the player that will plug into your asymmetrical system.

Since players and agents aren’t fucking morons, they know their team’s unique needs and use this as an advantage in their negotiations. How does a dude named Andrea makes $50 million over 5 years from a team bidding against itself, despite failing to contribute for a bad team over his entire career? He is seven-foot tall and can shoot on a team that’s trying to build the NBA’s closest approximation of Euro-ball. The Raptors have the opportunity to emerge as the strangest team in the NBA next season, but had to pony up serious cash to make it happen. I’m not exactly a trained economist, but common sense tells me that if supply equals one, it doesn’t take tons of demand for the price to rise.

Like most systems that persist over time, team development is well reinforced by structural forces that are perpetuated from Grand Minister Stern all the way down to the most ignorant of fans. There isn’t even an ounce of hope for Reformation at this point. Nelson is too egomaniacal to lead the revolution, the Magic are too repentant for their loss, and D’Antoni is too not in Chicago.

So where, precisely, are we, the fans who want nothing more than to just see something fucking new and different, to go from here? Well it looks like in the foreseeable future we’ll just have to keep on elevating our heartbeats over the positively titillating news that flawed dunk specialist Hakim Warrick will be joining the incredibly raw rookie Brandon Jennings, who might not even start over Luke Ridinour. And we will keep watching insufferably ugly, slow Bobcats games just to catch the token Gerald Wallace highlight. Or maybe we’ll track a Suns team that is a ghostly, back-from-Siberia version of its glory years. Crazy Donnie, you are a much stronger man than I.

Big Bucks on Astral Plane

At this point, we should probably just ignore Wade, Bron, and Bosh when they're asked about the future. James just messes with reporters, Wade's the good soldier, and Bosh is too polite to regularly let it smolder like he wants. For the record, on intuition and common sense alone, I figure James stays, Wade too but only after JO's replaced with quality, and Bosh might even be traded to Cleveland by next spring.

That said, I was struck by this Marc Spears Durant piece, which includes the following quotes:

"But after coming here and seeing the city, I love Oklahoma. The fans have been with me every night. What more can you ask for?"

"I like the nucleus that we have," he said. "I'm excited. I want to be here as long as possible. It's like family. I love being here. We're going to get better. We can get better.

"Hopefully, we will make the playoffs next season. That's what we're fighting for. We'll have a good chance."

Fine, maybe your standard clap-trap from a young, upbeat athlete not looking to make waves. But unless I'm just really stupid, Durant and Uncle Jeff will be looking for extensions next summer. So it's not like he's talking to thin air here. More importantly, though, is the emphasis on 1) OKC being a viable home for Durant's prime and 2) how impressed he is with the team around him.

The first point relates to both LeBron's supposed predicament, and possibly, the economy. I've written previously that James doesn't need New York or Miami except as lifestyle accessories; and hell, he can Gulfstream it out there whenever he feels like it, or buy a mansion for weekends. The Knicks, even the city itself in these troubled times, need brand LeBron, not vice-versa. And at the same time, he's elevating Cleveland, turning it from the butt of jokes and flaming rivers into the home of King James. Durant has more of an uphill battle in this respect, since despite his college hype he's been all but invisible this season. Still, this can't last much longer, and if next season the recognition comes, and the fans flock, by 2010 OKC might not be a joke any longer.

But more importantly is Durant's conviction, even good-natured shock, and just how brilliantly-engineered this team's future is. Sam Presti is smart. Sure, being surrounded by bikinis and beaches is nice, as would time spent in a national spotlight you don't have to earn. And yet we've seen that the Knicks can tumble into oblivion, even before the economy collapsed. Presti will not mess up when it comes to developing this team and its players. You could say similar things about Pritchard. If team markets are becoming more and more negligible, and the perilous state of all things financial makes the astute GM more precious than ever, how far are we from Presti being what keeps Durant in OKC?



P.S.: Because I am serious about those Amazon recommendations, the current ones: Eros Plus Massacre is the book on Japanese New Wave and such; The Street of Crocodiles an obvious influence on FreeDarko's prose style and worldview; On the Rainbow Road, the cheap way to some essential Southern soul; Sherman's March is my favorite documentary ever, except for maybe his Bright Leaves; The Wizard of Odds is FD itself; All Things Must Fight to Live will change your life.

Through Flesh and Of Soil

After having spent much of the morning trying to convince people that Shaq-to-Cavs would suck, I've given up and decided to seek refugee in the realm of abstractions. Who among us loves not to spend a good twenty minutes in a crowded coffee shop pondering the nature of time in today's NBA?

I'll keep this brief, but think about it: Only a few years ago, time barely existed in the Association. Market value for players was relative, and set each summer. GM's threw out huge deals, rarely considering how they'd hog-tie the team down the road. Max extensions created the illusion of franchise guys, though it was never quite clear who feted whom. Then came the mini-max, which urged teams to win now, and at the same time, opened the door for players to be free of a huge deal sooner rather than later (who knows, we might yet see that side of the coin). 2010 had everyone thinking about cap space two years down the road. And now, with money dearer than ever, suddenly dumping Brad Miller's contract—which expires in 2010—is worth it just for one year of savings.

No one trend brought about this shift. And who knows if it will continue once 2010 passes, or the economy recovers somewhat. Still, there's no mistaking that time is now urgently, anxiously present, part of the fabric of this league, in a way it hasn't been before. Perhaps it's overcompensation, but how blind, weird, and weightless things were before. I think it's a good thing.

Now talk about rumors.

What If Dazzler Had Become the Herald of Galactus?

The Warriors are dead as we knew them. Baron is gone to LA to play godfather to Jessica Alba’s offspring. Gilbert Arenas, whose pairing with Don Nelson would have set the comments ablaze with new algorithms to calculate FD quotients, looks like he’s going to re-up with the Wizards. Yet, for a few glorious hours this morning, we had to entertain the possibility. Moments of this magnitude cannot be cast aside as soon as they become impossibilities. We must imagine what might have been.

For all his bravado, Baron is, in simple terms, one of the most complete point guards in the game, the kind of guy who finishes with a near-triple-double on an off-night. Guys like that are obviously rare, but they still conform to accepted notions of what constitutes a franchise cornerstone. On the other hand, building a team around dual 6’3’’ combo guards is basically unheard of, the sort of mad scientist decision that we associate with a team that relies on transition threes and refusing to guard at least one player on the floor at all times.

Then again, from a standard basketball view, this would have been Mullin’s worst move since he decided to pay a bunch of role players like they were lynchpins. There were certainly some stupidity afoot in the decision to lowball Baron; after all, Gilbert always said he was probably going to return to DC if Grunfeld brought back Jamison. Even if Arenas had surprised everyone and moved, regular basketball analysis would paint this move as a major miscalculation: Arenas is being paid max money after two major knee injuries, Arenas and Monta are both scoring guards without top-shelf PG skills, and this deal would tie up the organization’s finances in the long term without doing anything to shore up the team’s massive rebounding problems or compensate for the loss of Baron.



But the Warriors of these last few years have never been the kind of team to pay much attention to conventional wisdom. If Mullin had pulled this off, he would have succeeded in marrying the front office’s philosophy to that of the team on the court, even if he’d have done so without intention. Arenas would replace Baron quite cleanly in a philosophical sense, but not in terms of on-court abilities, bringing a change in the specifics of Nellieball while not denying its fundamental principles. Mullin would therefore bring about an entirely new method replacing players within a system: one that conceives of on-court changes as secondary to philosophical continuity.

Organizational unity can mirror what we want to see in the on-court product. Philosophical through-lines do not have to lead to orthodoxy, just as a team’s system doesn’t have to keep each athlete from playing a constrained role without room for individuality. The franchise’s worldview must still be interesting on its own and allow for a certain degree of personal freedom -- the Spurs come closest to this unity in the current NBA, and that doesn’t automatically make them electric eels -- but, with the Arenas offer, the Warriors were on their way to becoming a team that demands something without precedent at every level of the organization.



Unfortunately, this antiestablishment philosophy does not easily translate to the suits. For one thing, NBA salary negotiations exist in a near-utopia in which employers compensate their workers with some attention to the revenue that they produce. When everyday people complain about a lack of respect at work, they’re talking about the difference between comfortable living and getting by; when basketball players complain about the same thing, it actually is about the lack of respect relative to the marketplace, because there’s no necessary reason to complain about a difference of a few million dollars when it’s just a small fraction of the total contract. When a general manager offends his franchise player with a low offer, he changes the conversation between management and player from one of respect and shared involvement to a salary cap issue. Basketball becomes a business.

An MBA doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for enjoying basketball, but what if ideology defined the business end of things, too. Our dearly departed Suns could have used some daring in their recent financial dealings. To take another view of it, does anyone think that the Blazers would be as promising as they appear if Paul Allen didn’t give Kevin Pritchard license to deal second round picks just for the hell of it?

But possibility can’t sustain itself without a basis for hope. Arenas would have replaced Baron as the Warriors’ building block, allowing fans to look to the future while not fretting too much over the lost past. Looking at the current roster and cap situation, I defy anyone to predict what this team will look like next year. Will they just be a more frenetic, less effective version of the present-day Kings? Can Monta Ellis really carry a team at 23? Can Stephen Jackson possibly play the same way without Baron by his side? Will CJ Watson get legitimate minutes at the point? Is Mullin secretly a liberated fan who wants to put Monta and J-Smoove on the same team? Will they score more than ten baskets in the halfcourt offense per game? Am I going to have to shave my beard?