-For TheAtlantic.com, a piece titled, simply, "Deconstructing Jimmer".
-The formidable Jonah Keri had Eric Freeman and me on his podcast, and we brought with us some haunted spirits that messed up the technology. Nevertheless, a spirited (ha!) and thoroughly enjoyable conversation.
For All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, the folks at UNDEFEATED commissioned our very own Jacob Weinstein to do an artistic interpretation of the Blake Griffin Experience. Look for it above the Undefeated store on La Brea if you're in LA. If not, cop the print, in one of three colorways, at the newly re-opened FreeDarko Imperial Outlet. Buy some other stuff, too!
A few links:
-If you haven't already, take a look at GQ's Guide to the New NBA Golden Age. Yours truly files a feature on the Thunder, the result of a ten-day stay in OKC; there are also contributions from Eric Freeman, Billups, and oh yeah, more Jacob art. That Thunder illo should be available for sale down the line.
-Maybe you heard, I wrote a little something about why I don't enjoy watching Derrick Rose. Yes, I saw last night's game, and yes, a lot of it was awesome to me. So we're making progress. Really, it's comes down to whether we have to jock every good basketball player just because they're good, or whether we're allowed to have preferences and ... taste!
-Check out Yago Colas's piece from yesterday on teaching the seventies Knicks to the kids.
Here's a piece I did for The Good Men Project about what I like to call "sports criticism". That would be the intersection of sports and criticism. I wrote it a while ago but couldn't get it published until now. You can tell that from how heavily it leans on a long-ago Simmons column. Enjo!
UPDATE: This video is new to me. Thanks, Extra Large!
The latest Outside the NBA/FD joint venture. The punchline is that it takes forever before Marvin actually sings the hooks.
Also, I'm posting a link to this Jewish Exponent column by Andrew Sherman.. It beings "Cliff Lee is more than just the modern-day Sandy Koufax. At least to Philadelphia Jews, he is." You can read the rest and judge for yourself, but I feel like it belongs here.
Calm down, no sex or death in here. Just a friendly note, for those of you who don't read the Works, or use Twitter, that I did in fact weigh in on the big trade.
PLUG FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S BOOK: I like Zack Carlson a lot, even if I probably can't call him my friend because we failed to get his current address when sending out wedding invitation. But his new book, Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film is totally fucking awesome, whether or not you like movies, punk, bathrooms, or any combination of the three.
For your pleasure, JaVale McGee and Henry Threadgill in our latest video collaboration with Outside the NBA.
Also, big news that's not such news anymore: Ziller left the Works and we cried, but Eric Freeman showed up to replace him. Our first week has been lots of fun. Samples:
-On Monday, John Hollinger, Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook, Black Swan.
Thanks to everyone in New York for making that so great. Thanks to Portland in advance for making it hot on Friday. Thanks to Hanukkah, even though I forgot it was coming.
And thanks to Tablet, who worked with FD to put together an illustrated computer-module doodad that allows you to select, and test the mettle of, your very-own all-Jewish basketball team. Related reading: Marc Tracy's interview with Dolph Schayes, the Greatest Jew of Them All. He'll give you his picks, if you want to cheat.
For the first time in years, last night around 8, I shut my laptop and said loudly to no one in particular, "I can't write about basketball anymore tonight." Which is a shame, since I have tons of things I want to put down in this space, including Dr. J's pre-career and nature of corrections; one final consideration of the Bron ad; and those Warriors, who filled my heart with love when I woke up this morning. If you're going to point out that the previous sentence sounded kind of homoerotic, well, religion does lots of time, too. Leave this site forever.
However, I would seriously advise you to listen to the latest FD Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast episode. Not only is it the first-ever one-on-one meeting between myself and Kenneth Paul Drews -- it's probably the most raw, uncensored, uncut, and potentially damning interview about the book I'll ever do. Fun fact: I first got in touch with Ken and Dan after I listened to their discussion of the Almanac, where Ken spent the whole time questioning whether or not FD wasn't just one big elaborate con. Now, we're having a cozy conversation about the new joint.
Because it must be said: if you listen to one really long podcast about the new FD book, it should probably be this one. LISTEN.
The excerpt widgets (like the Celtics one below) can be embedded and passed around like so much hard candy. They also get bigger and easier to read, if you click around enough. Pretend it's an iPhone.
Other big news: THE STORE IS BACK. We've got prints from both books, limited and otherwise, as well as the shirts we've got left in stock. There are so many bargains to be had that you might break down and cry. We've got some new shirt ideas kicking around, so look for those soon, too. Oh, and there's a contest. Whoever creates the best Allen Iverson paper doll meme image collage gets a free print. For every end, there is a beginning. Tweet them, email them to us, stick them on Tumblr, just make sure we see them.
Here's the deal: I'm back from vacation, and telling you to go read The Works today. I weigh in on Casspi, anti-Semitism in America, and what it means that Nate Robinson likes the WNBA. Ziller explores the concept of defensive hangtime. It was a lot of fun and now I need to hit the gym.
I am left wondering, though, if the swastika somehow "belongs" to anti-Semitism above all other forms of bias. Minus Casspi, it certainly connotes all sorts of hatred. But it's very difficult for it to, ahem, transcend its historical significance and express, say, some asshole's dislike of blacks or Latinos.
This is understandable; it's pretty hard to dispense with the enormity of WW2 (note: I didn't say "the Holocaust", because deniers happen all the time). Yet it also shows just how potent (and striking) Nazi iconography was. I almost think that a lot of Jew-hating is just an excuse to sport swastikas and lightning bolts. Who wants to wear a stupid white robe and drag around burning wood? Flip, I know, but obviously Hitler was far better at "branding", which is why his evil racist movement has had more staying power, in terms of look and rhetoric -- even if this means getting caught up in a cloud of translation.
Fun fact: Tris Speaker was a member of the Klan, but later went on to be the most important mentor Larry Doby had as he adjusted to life in the (white) majors.
You would know about my new music blog, which contains no sound-files and is only barely about music. Another post later, this one on Yahweh ben Yahweh might be of special interest to you readers.
Also, check out the latest The Works, especially for the words on the Atlanta Dream's Angel McCoughtry, who could change the league as we know it. That's a theme QMcCall picked up on early this morning, wondering if McCoughtry, as currently constructed, wasn't at once revolutionary and regressive. Assuming, of course, that you consider all of basketball one big conceptual continuum. And ignoring, for the moment, the "WNBA is like classic NBA" trope (trope or meme? is a trope a grown-up meme? is a meme the destruction of all possible tropery? do you want to see my hands?), which otherwise raises the question of whether the NBA itself hasn't regressed, on and off, ever since the dawn of the Celtics, Wilt, and Elgin Baylor. I wonder if there's a way to place prop bets on the currents of history. That's some online betting I could get down with!
Hoping to get a post up here later and underdogs vs. fledglings.
As usual, here I tell you to read The Works. It cooks and is evil fun. But, harkening back to the posts we used to do about the post we had just done for McSweeney's, here are some further thoughts on Kwame Brown, who figures prominently in today's column.
I took this unique opportunity to plumb the depths of Kwame Brown, mostly to determine why he was drafted number one. In the column, I compare him to a Euro, except with Darko, there was at least a cloud of mythos. Chandler and Curry were much better known, but then the lowly Kwame murdered Chandler before MJ in a workout, and the die was cast. Yes, back then it was assumed that Jordan knew something we didn't. But more interesting to me is the idea that workouts -- held up today as the ultimate form of wishful thinking -- were then the latest thing in empiricism. To see was to believe; reputation was propaganda and mistrust.
What makes the story even more serpentine is that this fairly insider-y moment at once decided the pick, and placed it sorely outside the reach of anyone who wasn't a total draft nerd. The draft was, during the workout era, rendering wholly inaccessible, because workouts sought to disprove everything we thought we knew, or make unknown players into late-risers. Darko, in that sense, is more like LeBron than he is Kwame; Pavel Podkolzin or Skita are his equivalent. It makes some sense: high school competition, no matter how camped-out, is still far from perfect. You can't put the player through the paces you want see. You don't push him to max. And yet there's a reason that, today, we speak scornfully of "workout wonders".
So Jordan had a reason, just not when that really resonated enough with the public -- at least not enough to be repeated ad infinitum until it grew into its own justification. To some extent, the Wizards knew that would have sounded crazy. With this realization, they -- and every other NBA team -- opened themselves up to ridicule. Scouting being hermetic because it knew better; it also recognized its own limits, its own specialization and micro-standards, and thus resigned itself to a public face of farce. In any year but 2003, Darko wouldn't have fallen so hard. With LeBron screaming through, it was just too late to try that crap. By the next year, Euros were receding, and high schooler players measured more on the kind of pro they would make. Not, to paraphrase a paleontologist I saw on NOVA last night, looking at funny bones and delighting in what they could be. That's not science, no matter how brilliant and inventive it feels, or how badly it wants to supersede the burden of what came before.
At the time, though, NBA teams thought they had hit on the magic method. It was just a different kind, a new method adapted to a low-info climate. There were glees and squeals over finding brand new types of players; hence the emphasis on all sorts of Next Kevin Garnetts, the ultimate position-buster. Let's not even try and catalog all the absurdities passed down from Europe -- which, ironically, were suggested in play and then fleshed out in workouts. The rumor was hypothesis, the workout the experiment. Sounds perfectly reasonable, no?
Except, as we know today, workouts are even more skewed than whatever players do in flashes abroad, or in the fatuous playpen of high school ball. For one, international leagues and preps play have both raised their levels. You can see a player, if not for who he could be, at least reasonably well for what he is. If that's a conservative backlash against the speculative dreaming of the workout days, when front offices sought to have their wildest wishes confirmed and conventional wisdom struck down, it's the current climate. Hyped players have it for a reason. Colleges works alongside pros to generate a reasonable facsimile of who prospects are.
Where they are headed, no one knows. But the present, en masse, gives rise to high expectations, that perilous thing we call hype. Certainly, this kind of hype is preferable, more rooted, and more realistic than what workouts produced. The new science has been proven fraud; its attack on common sense and accessibility the ultimate hermetic gag. Populist hype has gone from laughingstock to an important partner in the deep thinking of the draft. Perhaps it has been improved upon; perhaps these things just go in cycle. Regardless, today, we are all scouts. And the sport is probably the better off for it.
In case you don't have Twitter, here's the most FD video ever:
List your favorite moments below! Believe it or not, my favorite shit is DJ and Russell's "interview" about defending Bates. Oh, and I was nearly on the verge of seeing Bates's PBA sojourn not as squandered promise, but exactly the kind of magical ending this barely-real figure deserved.
Oh, and some get-shit-off-my-chest I haven't been able to do elsewhere: I don't claim to own the Positional Revolution, whatever any of that means. It's an idea we've toyed with for years, spurred by changes in the league. Like, since 2004. Certainly, I would never copyright it like I have Liberated Fandom, or Libated Fandom. But, at the risk of making everyone hate me, this latest round of Positional Revolution "discussion" strikes me as a little late in the game. It reminds me of how the advanced stats people must have felt when me, Ziller, Eric, Silverbird, and others engaged in a battle over PER years after the fact.
So, to address some points made by Rob Mahoney as he sums it all up ... I apologize in advance if you hate me after this:
1. Jesse Blanchard explains the futility of matching up players by similar positions. I don't see this as requiring a new set of terms, or even universalizing themes. Players switch up, or take unorthodox assignments, all the time. It's a matter of being able to cover the team's collective ass elsewhere. If Rondo takes a shooting guard, there had better be swingman or PG able to stick the opposing PG. This isn't just heuristic on a team-to-team basis -- i.e. who can guard what other positions -- but on team vs. team. Eric Freeman says that, if the other team is running out unorthodox players, it really makes no sense to label anyone. You look at the match-ups and devise a strategy for it. It's about a more heady gameplan, not a new theory of classification.
2. Matt Moore caught a quote from Kobe that suggested he would play anywhere, as a result of Euros (and his waning athleticism). Money shot, right! I hadn't heard that line before anyone else is, but I'll leave it up to you to determine how much of his totalizing has been handled in FD many times over the years.
3. One of the several times that Ziller and I addressed these posts, from a more dignified pulpit so I wouldn't flip out. But Rob, come on. I'm not "taking Moore's point and running with it." For one, it's just weird to say that I'm following Matt here. I'll leave that there. More to the point, though, I'm trying to contradict him to prove a point. Moore questions whether we need to label Tyreke Evans; I say that, if you look at the NBA today, point guards are rising at the same time as flexible teams. This means that, yes, the Kings still would like to know if Evans is a point guard, or something else. If he's a PG, capable of orchestrating the kind of complicated system the 21st century has developed, good for him. If not, he's still amazing. Height and power still matter, but as teams grow more fluid, it's more and more on the point guard to track this stuff and make sense of it. That's important; they make it possible. THAT's why I said point guards were the gateway.
4. I am pretty sure I agree with Kevin Arnovitz, namely, that discussing this in the abstract misses the point. You adapt, or re-determine, based on either need, want, or what resources you have at your disposal. Ideally, it's a team like the Thunder, building a weird squad around a weird player. The bootleg version of that are Rob's Mavs, who should have done the same thing with Dirk a long time ago. Now, they find themselves with enough unusual talent that they can devise these schemes on the fly, or maybe even in camp. Then there's also the most prosaic version of this, alluded to by Blanchard: in a game, you make adjustments. That's easier if players are versatile. Granted, that's only revolution on a micro-level, maybe even not at all -- since it's done already. I prefer to think that it means the future isn't as far off as we think.
I know you're all sick of my shilling for FanHouse, but I have your number. Ziller and I now have a regular column. Today's romp discusses McGrady's exile and how it had to be; ref bias, but not like you think; more and more Positional Revolution, including a nod to Total Football I swore I wouldn't make; and a soccer-based race for the top at the bottom.
The Works airs every morning, no matter what happens in between. As its name suggests, it is somewhere between a mess of ice cream toppings and a drug delivery device.
My eyebrows are in one time zone, my legs are in the last one, and my torso shut off. I also don't think I got much sleep. So apologies if I don't give these bullets points the lengthy treatment they deserve.
-Amar'e, Amar'e, and more Amar'e. At the Awl, I turn the looking glass back on myself. I somehow neglected to mention the issue of conversion, something Eric Freeman and my brother have raised previously. They point to the convert's over-enthusiasm for ritual and all else that belongs in Judaism for Dummies, much like what we see with Stoudemire (albeit less cryptically). As well they should; it's their job. Here's the thing: conversion is a process, a course by which one arrives at the right to call himself a Jew. Amar'e ignored that part—the whole humility, learning and growing part—and has gone right off the deep end. So no, not the same thing.
-Yesterday, Henry brought up his year abroad in Tibet, and suggested we view Amar'e's summer fun in the same developmental light. Since, after all, Amar'e never went to college and had a chance to grow. Now, I don't see any one-and-dones taking a semester abroad, or necessarily getting all they can from the college experience. But certainly, some guys—Kevin Durant, for instance—have shown enthusiasm for their courses, mixing with students, and just generally getting something out of a year on campus. Jay Caspian Kang would like to nominate John Henson for this honor.
Pacific Rims reading and book signing Tuesday, August 3, 6:30 pm Eastwind Books of Berkeley 2066 University Avenue, Berkeley, Calif.
Don't forget, Pacific Rims is the basketball book of the year, and Rafe seems like quite a hoot in his videos. I can also attest to his skills as an email correspondent. Show up or regret it forever!
I finally say something about LeBron&Gilbert&Rhoden&Jesse&you. Or the Heat as uprising and upheaval, louder than I had before. Wasn't writing because others had already nailed it, but there were so many people out there missing the point, I figured the reinforcements couldn't hurt.
Favorite reactions so far: @bmicheal recommending Marxist Kojeve (whom I don't know)as a better point of reference than Hegel himself. And a FanHouse commenter asking, simply "what the hell are you talking about?"
Oh, and very trivial, but if this Boston thing is going to happen it will probably be the last week in the month. I have no idea how to successfully organize something like this.
is totally fucking awesome, whether or not you like movies, punk, bathrooms, or any combination of the three.
