Positive Uncertainty

Bio: Rough Justice guarantees he would pass a doping control urine test, but only because they haven't invented a drug that could give him Andrei Kirilenko's hairdo yet. Check out his other work over at his blog There Are No Fours.

Doping suffuses professional sports. Ask almost any fan, athlete or talking head how they feel about performance-enhancing drugs and you’ll get an earful of righteous judgment, but drugs are part of the sports landscape for good because they work and because the money at stake overwhelms the various reasons why players might abstain.

Dopers aren’t acting out a set of beliefs contrary to the masses; they’re acting out their desire to win the fame and money that success will bring, or simply trying to win. The margins between pro and failure, between starter and backup are often slim enough that the extra boost chemistry can provide will bridge the gap for someone who can’t quite make it. Authorities can try to stop use with penalties, but testing doesn’t eradicate illicit PED use; it creates an arms race between the chemists creating new, subtler drugs and the chemists inventing new tests to sniff out those new drugs.

The NBA has so far avoided a large dustup about drug use, with a few isolated incidents that were explained away easily enough, but in light of OJ Mayo’s suspension it’s worth taking a look at what PED use in the NBA might look like.

There is no sport immune to chemistry, but individual sports are affected differently and to different degrees by doping. At the far end of the spectrum, any sort of racing is completely vulnerable to drugs. Cycling is the sport with the biggest drug problem precisely because a bike racer engaging in oxygen-vector doping will beat a similarly talented non-doper every single time. The NFL, where speed and strength are the main currencies for position not named quarterback, showcases defensive ends faster than the defensive backs your father watched, but skill position players need to be able to read defenses and run routes as much as they need to have a good time in the 40 yard dash. Still, in a sport where brute strength is a key asset for 80% of the players on the field, steroid use will always be a huge advantage.

The breaks built into the game also provide enough rest that the stamina problems bulking up might cause don’t undermine effectiveness. Shawne Merriman’s suspension and subsequent accolades and blowback strongly suggest the sport isn’t clean, but also that the NFL views this primarily as a PR problem. No one needs the baseball doping conversation to be rehashed. Basketball, hockey and soccer have remained largely incident-free; that doesn’t mean that they aren’t being affected by PEDs, but their structure and play limit the effect drugs can have more than other sports.

Simply put, the precision of the NBA game means that doping isn't a direct path to success. Being bigger and stronger helps, but good players marry that to the finesse to finish plays or the jumpshot they've honed since childhood. If physical ability alone determined success on the court, Gerald Green would be thinking up the next cupcake dunk, not plying his trade in Russia.

The NBA is a second-order sport for PEDs, one where doping can aid ability but not generate it. As a fan of both baseball and professional cycling, I’m cynical enough about the issue to assume that some non-zero percent of NBA players are doping. Older guys trying to eke out a last season or two, injury-prone players trying to get/stay healthy, skilled but underathletic players trying to make it, second-tier guys trying to break through into stardom, there are plenty of reasons why a professional basketball player would turn to chemical assistance.

But the best players aren’t the biggest or fastest, they’re the guys who are best at getting the ball in the hoop and stopping their man from doing the same. Physical shortcomings matter, but skills that are forged by time in the gym do too, and there’s no chemical shortcut to Ray Allen’s jumpshot or Kobe Bryant’s footwork. LeBron is the best player in the NBA not just because he’s 6’8”, jacked and quick, but also because he can shoot, pass, defend and position himself at an elite level. There are only a handful of players who can succeed in professional basketball without possessing an NBA body, but there are also countless players who couldn’t succeed despite having that body.

At the end of his response to O.J. Mayo’s suspension, Henry Abbott said “Players are bigger, stronger and faster than ever. Many of the world's finest enhancers are impossible to test for…Is it really smart to stick with the theory that performance enhancing drugs are just not a problem in the NBA?” It’s true players are bigger and faster than ever, but that’s not any evidence of drug use specifically. It ignores the fact that NBA players strength train and condition in a way that was unheard of a few decades ago, and the current generation is the first to have such methods available throughout their youth careers. NBA players used to smoke!

Players are taller than ever before, but the NBA draws players from a larger genetic pool, both because the sport is global and because the US population has continued its steady climb. Medical advancements mean MRIs and new surgeries can let players continue playing after what would have been career-ending ten years ago. PEDs may well have a part in the physical talents on NBA rosters, but it’s not like the physiological changes we’ve seen can’t be explained without them.



The NBA has a testing policy for a reason. It’s not there purely as a PR ploy; if there were no reason for basketball players to use PEDs there would also be no need for testing. But if you paid much attention to how baseball players explained their steroid use you learned that most users got started by following the “here, try this” plan offered by a teammate. Professional athletes operate in a bubble and don’t by and large have sophisticated knowledge about biochemistry, so they would have to rely on others to introduce them to drugs.

I don’t doubt that some players have followed this route, but unless players are doing a fantastic job of conspiring to keep a league-wide habit secret, the users are likely individuals injecting or ingesting at home, clinging to the edge they’re giving themselves over their compatriots. Morality isn’t the only impediment to PED use; acquisition isn’t necessarily an easy task. I’m sure there are players in the NBA who would take a drug if it were put in front of them but don’t have the first clue where they would go to get it.

Not only that, but there’s no one drug that would benefit every player in the league. Part of the reason for steroid ubiquity in baseball and football and EPO ubiquity in cycling is that those PEDs help every athlete. Baseball and football are all fast-twitch actions that are over within ten seconds. Steroids make everyone faster and stronger. Everyone can benefit from hitting a ball farther, throwing it harder or running faster.

Similarly, every cyclist will be better at his job if his circulatory system does a better job of delivering oxygen to his muscles. But the different roles and skills of a basketball team make it unlikely that any drug, other than HGH, would benefit everyone. An shooter who makes his living running his defender all game and curling around screens would gain from taking a drug that aided his stamina. A post player would do well to bulk up so he could push people around. A slasher could exploit a few more inches of vertical leap. But if different players on a team would benefit from different drugs, they’d all have to find them via their own routes unless a drug culture was truly pervasive or a team was actively helping its players dope.

Players might take the risk of exposure inherent in sharing drugs with a teammate for team gain, but given the variety of body types and skill sets you find in any given locker room, NBA doping would have to be more diffuse than the doping is in any of the sports that have established problems.

O.J. Mayo claims the DHEA in his system is from a supplement he vetted poorly. That’s an eminently plausible claim. As far as I can tell, DHEA isn’t a masking agent or precursor for anything else, and it’s currently legal to sell it over the counter. It’s possible he was using it as a steroid, but unless he had very high levels of it in his system, it’s much more likely he did a terrible job reading labels at GNC. It’s possible he’s a cheater, but it’s more likely he’s a knucklehead. This isn’t Mark McGwire with Androstenedione in his locker.



If I had to guess, I would say NBA doping is a low-level phenomenon. I would be shocked if use were higher than one out of every ten players precisely because the returns for doping are more limited in the sport than in others. I would be even more shocked if no one in the NBA were using PEDs. But in today’s media environment, where baseball dopers have been excoriated in the press for their “crimes”, a basketball player who is regularly drug tested would have to be careful about what he was doing and to whom he mentioned it. The tacit approval that aided steroids in baseball does not and has never existed in the NBA.

A player who was doping would use HGH, EPO or some other drug that is undetectable in a urine sample. If OJ Mayo were a serious doper, you can be sure he wouldn’t risk exposure by having something as easily detectable as DHEA in his system. If we’re going to have a serious conversation about performance-enhancing drugs in the NBA, I’m all for it. But OJ Mayo almost certainly has nothing to do with it.

To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Basketball

Note for those of you who have ordered a shirt: There has been a delay with the screen printing, so none of the new shirts will be sent out for at least a week or two. Thank you for your patience. Carry on.

First, make sure you check out Shoals and Ziller's psychoanalysis of the NBA in The Ziller Sessions: Edition 8.

Today’s guest lecture courtesy of Mark Pike, law student and author of “Green Building Red-Lighted by Homeowners’ Associations”, 33 Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol'y Rev. Vol. 3 (forthcoming Spring 2009). He is a DJ at WCWM 90.9FM and sometimes plays Free Darko’s “The Macrophenomenal Anthem” on his show.

During a recent Local Government Law class my brain started short-circuiting information I had just read on ESPN. I began fusing basketball recaps with the concepts of zoning, land use, architectural review boards, etc. It’s not too difficult to gently stretch the metaphor.

If the Sonics departure from Seattle was, more or less, a repudiation of the principles of publicly financed stadiums (cf. CLEAN v. State of Washington), is David Stern essentially concurring with Kennedy's opinion in Kelo, crafting the NBA's version of eminent domain for private benefit? Is the rise of guard-forward hybrid players, such as Kevin Durant, indicative of a larger movement which mirrors architecture's increasing acceptance of mixed-use facilities as an example of progressive efficiency? Could Brandon Jennings and Josh Childress' exodus to Europe be comparable to the "Offshoring Audacity" of "starchitects", lured to the desert of Dubai to pad their resume or just build their own empire? Is Gilbert Arenas, a geometric savant known for his unique expressions through populist mediums, ostensibly the athletic incarnation of Antoni Gaudí?


As I marinated on these thoughts, I decided to run it by Matthew Yglesias, a basketball fan who happens to frequently write about transportation and city planning issues. He responded with:

Surely there's something about building height and player height. Skyscrapers and big men. DC with its height limit is like Don Nelson's small ball lineups -- Andris Biedrins is the Washington Monument. Maybe that works?

I would counter that Don Nelson strikes me more in the mold of a Western-libertarian reaction to restrictive contemporary city planning: if a player of any given height is best for utility, efficient breach theory suggests a Coach should insert them into the lineup instead of following the traditional G-SG-F-PF-C architecture that GM’s dictate by covenant and contract. Yglesias’s reference to Andris Biedrins as the Washington Monument is particularly insightful. Many citizens criticize the DC height-restriction as crippling to the city’s ability to obtain critical mass while artificially boosting rental prices due to limited space. The height-restriction is legislated proportionally to the width of the roads and not to the symbolic Obelisk, nevertheless resulting in both wide lanes and epic aerial vistas (i.e. dunks). Not surprisingly, a negative externality of this civic decision is that DC has some of the country’s heaviest traffic congestion.

Once again, if we superimpose this logic upon the discipline of basketball management, it counterintuitively suggests that teams spreading the lane with small ball lineups will end up having increased traffic in the paint, resulting in maximum points off of inside shots. Would you be surprised to learn that the Warriors lead the league in this statistic last year? Thanks, 82games.com! Daniel Burnham, father of the City Beautiful movement and architect of DC’s Union Station is famously quoted as saying: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” As applied to athletics, focusing on statistics while ignoring the aesthetic is simply hemostatic.


As a discipline that focuses on human interaction with spatial and social elements, it is no surprise that the concepts of urban planning and architecture translate quite well to basketball. Accordingly, a few more brief attempts to synthesize these ideas might yield some interesting results and help us understand the continuing evolution of the League. But, first, we should familiarize ourselves with some historical context to better understand the juxtaposition.

In its infancy, basketball was actually a low-scoring (9-3!) game played in armories, smoke-filled halls, and barns. There were no 7-footers. Interestingly, the 3-point line was first introduced in a college game in 1945 in order to limit the effectiveness of taller players. The rule adjustments were voted on by the crowd at halftime. In general, the rules, though basic, were applied inconsistently from court-to-court, thereby discouraging interaction on a wide-scale basis. Basketball had not yet become civilized, but rather existed like isolated hamlets. Such inefficiency significantly thwarted the transcendent communal aspect of the sport, and caused an alarming number of injuries to players. Theodore Roosevelt was concerned about this and suggested the formulation of a governing body in 1910 to standardize the rules, thereby giving birth to the modern basketball era. The parallel developments of architecture and basketball in the early twentieth century, though somewhat non-euclidean, suggest that we could possibly anticipate future movements of the sport by analyzing the history of innovative building schemes.

Le Corbusier, a founding father of the modern architecture and urban planning movement, actually enjoyed playing weekly games of basketball as early as the 1920s, suggesting that the game had begun to go global. When he planned cities, he envisioned towers. He once proposed razing much of Paris and replacing it with 18 sixty-story buildings. He disliked congestion and preferred hyper-focused, specialized, regimented zones. Le Corbusier would have drafted Shawn Bradley.


Ebenezer Howard had a vision at the beginning of the 20th century for “Garden Cities”, which essentially lead to the conceptualization of suburban society. (As an aside, Howard enjoyed giving speeches in Esperanto, an invented universal language—which seems extremely Free Darko. Although, that might kind of be like if Phil Jackson insisted that the Lakers played FIBA-rules basketball just because). Howard illustrated his idea in a famous diagram titled “Three Magnets.” These “Town-Country” cities would combine the benefits of Town (opportunity, crowds, amusement, wages) and Country (beauty, fresh air, low rent, lack of society). Similarly, the NBA features a triangular tension between purists, innovators, and hybrid strategies. I would venture that the attributes of both Town and Country translate fairly well when describing basketball.

An imprecise proximation of the embodiment of Town, Country, and Town-Country for those subscribing to the Free Darko ethos might be transliterated a bit like the following:

TOWN: Kevin Garnett, New York Knicks, Vince Carter, Los Angeles Lakers, Baron Davis, Allen Iverson

COUNTRY: Kevin Durant, Memphis Grizzlies, Tyrus Thomas, Portland Trailblazers, Gerald Green

TOWN-COUNTRY: Amare Stoudemire, Chris Paul, Phoenix '04-'05, Josh Smith, Gerald Wallace, Dwight Howard


At the very basic level, both basketball and city planning are typically governed by rules— limitations agreed upon by lawmakers. Some rules are functionally utilitarian (e.g. green lines and 3-point arc placement, the 3-second rule and rent-control, the hand-check rule and city bonds), while the excessive arbitrariness of other rules can frustrate and undermine the very purpose of the establishment (e.g. the NBA dress code and Post-Giuliani Times Square). Nostalgia persists throughout many circles of NBA fans, a zeitgeist for consistent and stylized triple-digit scoring. A livable city. A productive society.

Progress has been made. The previously mentioned 3-second rule and the hand-check rule have been tremendous innovations for the League and enabled not just a transformative style of play, but statistical efficiency as well, thereby pleasing traditionalists and basketball modernists. In an extremely informative 2007 interview with Stu Jackson, Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations for the NBA, he explained precisely how such rule realignments calibrate the entire system:

Because our rules are more focused on keeping the middle open and offering more opportunities for players to cut and penetrate the basketball in the middle of the floor, the quality of our perimeter shots has gone up and we’re also getting more higher-percentage shots inside.

Field Goal Percentage increased steadily from 2003-2007, and we assume there was a direct correlation to these executive planning decisions. The logical extension of this analysis into the realm of urban planning and governance would be to consider rule changes like fuel-efficiency standards, building code regulations, tax breaks for developments achieving LEED standards, etc. In an artificial market, being an early adopter to such progressive innovation before government dictates your competitors to comply significantly decreases your overall potential for success; however, if you can foresee sudden shifts in the market, you sometimes stand to win as a first-mover. I would contend that teams like the Memphis Grizzlies and the Atlanta Hawks that have focused on an untraditional and potentially cost-effective approach of versatile and athletic players could benefit greatly if their vision of the League materializes; otherwise, pictures of their rosters could appear on paleofuture.com.

(photo: Jill Allyn Stafford)


It doesn’t take a social scientist to figure out that the way in which Howard’s vision was applied in reality was extremely flawed. Le Corbusier’s “modern” architectural work, in retrospect, has been criticized as isolating and monolithic. New urbanism is on the rise, and coaches will continue to experiment with lineups to achieve pareto optimal results. This is not the death of the big man, nor is it the birth of a new guard.

This is athletics as architecture. Sport as city.