No Boulder Too Vague

Hey, it's me. I'm back again. The video above is how I feel when my sick comes back, like it just did after a morning of relative lucidity. I have seen every Jekyll & Hyde movie and this is my favorite. It also made it very hard for me to believe that Spencer Tracey was not in some way related to the Martin Sheen clan, at least when he turned into an id-fueled monster.

You probably wonder why I'm posting, given that I'm writing like a happy seminar on text messaging. It's because, as you probably all know, THE WARRIORS ARE FOR SALE. No, not the team, but for all intents and purposes, the team. If you want to trade for anyone on the Warriors, you can. It hurts to see Nellie go out like this, the limits of his imagination reinforced so gravely. He has no idea what to do with anyone tall, no matter how multi-faceted they are. We all have our limits, and I suppose blind spots are part of true vision, but his inability to make Randolph work is just dumb. At least D'Antoni can plead "system." However, it heartens me that Curry can be had, too. I was worried we'd have to wait till this summer, when they draft John Wall and have to bring him off the bench (thus precipitating a sit-in by every local broadcaster around the league).

It's strange and possibly emotional, but most of all—and speaking of D'Antoni—the stage is set for forever. Have you ever heard of the Braves/Celtics swap? Here's an ESPN article on it. Walter Brown bought the Braves after taking cash instead of that crazy St. Louis Spirit settlement, merger blah blah blah. He was governor of Kentucky at some point and had a friend who died when he parachuted out of an airplane with too much cocaine strapped around his waist. It was in front of the governor's mansion. The parachute malfunctioned. But enough about him. In 1978, Brown sold the Braves to the guy who owned the Celtics, and bought the Celtics from him. Also, they traded the core of each team across state lines.

The analogy doesn't work perfectly, but for the sake of the living, let this happen with Golden State and the Knicks. What I mean by this is, if the Warriors want to lose everyone and save money, and the Knicks (as we know) have no one good and aren't getting LeBron, why not send D'Antoni someone to love in the form of Ellis, Randolph, Curry, and Morrow? That's like the absolute primordial super factual D'Antoni team! Sure, there's no PG, but it can't be worse than what they've got now.

I am going to lie down again. Think it over and write some open letters!

Why Is It Gnawing on Arkansas?

Not so long ago, I was out at a party, and I met a Dallas Mavericks fan from Eudora, AR who closely follows NBA basketball. We shall call him Frank. Frank professes no extraordinary fondness for any other team, though he does hate Kobe Bryant. Frank is twenty-three, and he has spent his whole life in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri. Frank turns twenty-four this fall, meaning that he wasn't yet nine years old when the New York Knicks lost to the Houston Rockets in the NBA Finals, wasn't yet twelve when the Knicks and Heat first fought, and hadn't yet reached high school when the San Antonio Spurs' dynasty dawned at the Knicks' expense in 1999. By the time Frank had finished high school, the Knicks had begun their steady recession into functional obsolescence. As things currently stand, the New York Knickerbockers haven't been basketball relevant for almost a decade, or about as long as Frank has known enough to really know anything.

So, then, why is it that Frank and I could speak at length during our first conversation about seemingly every transaction, farce, dip, and rise that the Knicks have experienced this century? How could someone who has spent his entire life wholly beyond the East Coast media bubble, consistently amidst a television landscape from which the Knicks have been quickly exterminated, and generally insulated from a miserable foreign-market team know so much about a franchise so insignificant? The only memories of worthwhile Knick moments, to the extent which they exist at all, should come from a time of preadolescence that is often hazy and imprecise. More recently, through tests, high-school social drama, prom, and all of college, the decrepit Knicks were important enough to distract from the immediacy of that life? Even the most devoted Knicks fan, one who is blissfully absorbed in a New Yorker's unique geocentrism, would find this difficult to believe. Trust me. Not least of all because actual Knicks fans have hardly been able to keep up with all of it.

Maybe it's Frank. He is smart, and he has demonstrated impressive recall of sports-related information. He used to work as a radio broadcaster calling baseball games while in college. A self-proclaimed NBA fanatic, perhaps his lifelong passion naturally led to a special interest in the Knicks, even if not wholly conscious. This is somewhat reasonable: I recently made a reflexive reference to Beno Udrih based upon an obscure SportsCenter highlight from several years ago which I only recalled processing after I had invoked Beno's name. To the contrary, though, Frank is quick to admit that he remembers far more about baseball than basketball, and that he isn't always so good with the NBA minutiae of teams not from Dallas. On the surface, nothing about Frank suggests he should have a special affinity for the Brickers.



A more plausible explanation is that in an age of league-wide cable highlights, League Pass (which Frank has never owned, however), and internets, staying up on any team has become dramatically easier. Someone like Frank can follow the Knicks almost inadvertently, merely by seeking out basketball content provided by the leading sources which are now functionally ubiquitous. Further, despite its on-court decline, New York enjoyed special notoriety during the Isiah Thomas years due to the ignominy of paying so much money for so little production, and due to Isiah's almost inconceivable incompetence as a coach and personnel merchant. Ardent NBA man Frank may have been forced to keep tabs on the Knicks, even if he weren't already titillated by the spectacle of an ongoing disaster.

Sex-scandal aside, why the Knicks, though? Other teams have been serially, comically mismanaged. Teams such as the Clippers, the Grizzlies, and, until recently, the Hawks. These are franchises which have served as league-wide jokes, their names mocked and transformed into code words among sports fans at times. Yet, Frank's recall of the macabre details surrounding those teams lags far behind what he knows about Knickerbocker basketball. And he is not alone. The number of sports fans, in general, and basketball fans, in particular, who have no discernable connection to New York but nonetheless speak at length about the team's fortunes and history always surprises me. Something about the Knicks appears to matter more.



New York City is among the older places in the United States. Like many American things, with age comes advantage. Harvard is Harvard, in part, because it was Harvard before other places were anything. Previously, higher education hadn't existed here. Same goes for today's rich people whose families have just always been rich--they got a much earlier start watching investment opportunities come along and interest compound, so they had some distance ahead of would-be equals. New York is no different. That's not meant to minimize Harvard's academic rigor, the hard work which served as the kernel for a family fortune, or, in New York's case, desirable factors including an inviting harbor. But being old has helped to amplify certain intrinsic benefits and conferred upon New York lasting relevance and a presumed meaningfulness.

As the financial industry is realigned and the general American economy is overhauled, New York may lose this rarified profile. For now, though, the presumption is strong: most people don't seem to question that New York is a special place. I was not a history major, but the United States can feel as though it grew up with this understanding, as though appreciating New York's importance were an inherited value.

Regardless of its beginnings, enough people seem to embrace this curious ethereal sense that New York is supposed to be special. And New Yorkers love feeling this way. The architecture, the culture, the shops, the restaurants, the fashion--everything must be the best because it is of New York, and, naturally, it is of New York because it is the best. Tourists have bought into this idea as though it were a marketing slogan; millions of people visit New York under the assumption that they will spend time among something different and largely better. Beyond lofty markers like marble columns and outrageous dresses (some of which connote elitism), pride in exceptionalism permeates even quotidian aspects of New York life, like riding in a subway car loaded with people of every ethnicity imaginable. For the most part, New Yorkers relish these sorts of things about themselves.



I grew up in New York, I lived there as an adult, and I always felt that a majority of the local sports culture was informed by fomented entitlement. The Yankees had always been good, and New Yorkers deserved for them to remain good was the rough reasoning which seemed to fuel the regular fits of Yankee hysteria. Any free agent in any sport was grist for the rumor mill because no person wouldn’t want to live in New York City. Escalating ticket prices to everything were collective validation that New York sports really were just that special. And so forth. The City’s preeminence as a media and commercial capital was wedded to self-satisfaction, and this consummation yielded the perverse climate of impatience and impulsiveness that is manically self-reinforcing. Everything has been infected by the corrosive notion that New York’s teams must be the best because New Yorkers won’t stand for anything less.

(One note: The NFL may have created a safe haven amid this storm, because the league’s ruthless insistence on parity has forced liberation from this lunacy upon the Jets and Giants. The culture of those teams, surely not without insane people, feels more universal, organically connected to the larger national football pastime that has supplanted seemingly everything else. Maybe that is the ultimate triumph of the Shield--it made New York relent.)

The Knicks have a special form of this disease. Unlike the Yankees and Mets, the Knickerbockers are impeded by a salary cap that magnifies mistakes. Unlike the Jets and Giants, the Knickerbockers do not benefit from a countervailing, nearly religious belief system that excuses failure, however disappointing, as part of the natural order imposed by its governing body. Unlike the Rangers, the Knickerbockers are important to more than just a dwindling niche audience. They’ve enjoyed none of these protections. Instead, they are left exposed to the ills of mismanagement; to the ill-advised insistence on mortgaging the future for a passable present; to the ill-tempered response from an expectant fan base. Knicks history in recent decades has been one full of questionable personnel, awful contracts, a strategy which eschews cultivating a sturdy foundation, and a group of fans left to seethe in anger. The Knicks have devolved into the worst of New York.

Underneath these many problems lies one other debilitating symptom: shame. And it’s a shame which stems from something else unique about New York that might help to explain why the Knicks resonate well beyond the area to which they might be--here’s that word again--entitled. Basketball’s home is New York, and the Knicks have desecrated the City’s game.



The Knicks haven’t won an NBA championship since 1973, the most unstoppable player on the planet grew up in Akron, and college basketball’s leading orbits lie elsewhere. It would be easy, upon cursory glance, to survey this landscape and disregard as hubris the claim that basketball belongs to New York. Only, that would be wrong. Almost every basketball institution--UCLA, the Celtics, Marv Albert--owes a debt to New York. Yearly, New York City’s high schools replenish the talent in towns like Storrs, Lawrence, and Chapel Hill. Madison Square Garden remains the most sacrosanct stage for the game’s great performers, all but demanding timeless efforts that can often feel supernatural. To sit among the crowd at a Knicks game is to be immersed in a level of basketball erudition uncommon to any other arena around the league. And then, of course, there’s the street.

Celebrating schoolyard basketball for its soulfulness has become almost trite. One could build a mountain out of the magazines, movies, books, paraphernalia, and web writings dedicated to definitively capturing streetball. The entire And1 brand may have forever destroyed this romance, and some point in our recent past surely stands as a moment of demarcation when the supposed innocence of grassroots hoops was lost. There really doesn’t remain much room for reverie. However weary we may be of this commodification, though, it is no less true that schoolyard games retain the quintessence of the sport. Without the hip-hop montages and corporate sponsorships, pickup games are still exercises in egalitarianism, athleticism, hard work, and determination, set on top of asphalt. The same is true of New York: look past the oligarchs who keep the tallest buildings smooth and shining to see the many other everyday folks who know the rough edges and confer upon the city its creativity and vitality by working jobs, raising families, and hoping to carve out some success.

In this way, New York is the true capital of basketball. Beyond the dizzying array of connections to the NYC that unite almost all of the game’s denizens, New York’s primacy as a streetball center keeps the sport anchored in the five boroughs. Basketball embodies New York’s spirit, and New York embodies basketball’s. Appreciating this dynamic explains why places like West 4th Street are hallowed proving grounds; why the history of the game was likely altered the day that Black Jesus came forth from Philadelphia, held court in Harlem, and dazzled Lew Alcindor; why a palpable chill descends on the building when Kobe shows up to drop 60.



Now, about that shame.

The Knickerbockers are New York’s most visible link to the sport with which it shares a soul; the Knicks are a proxy for the City. And the Knicks, of course, play in the National Basketball Association. NBA basketball is the best-known, best-played form of the sport. A sustained championship drought, therefore, has bedeviled New Yorkers because it has challenged a shared sense of identity. Even if this discomfort is not always articulated as such, the Knicks’ failures have struck at what New Yorkers are about. The place of basketball should field a team which can play it as well as just about any other.

The angst that has accompanied New York’s decades-long run of futility has built ever stronger as years have accumulated. Do not forget that more than any other area team, the Brickers are infected by the warped New York insanity. Patrick Ewing’s arrival in the 1980s was supposed to cure this disease, restoring order and elevating the franchise to its deserved place. That didn’t happen. Instead, he and his charges spent the 1990s annually gearing up for another assault on the title, always falling short, usually in spectacular fashion. A wounded host, Ewing’s teams attracted the illness and provided it with nourishment to grow. A tragic legacy of the Ewing Knicks is that they inadvertently perpetuated a sports culture they were intended to eradicate--or at least satiate--and unwittingly initiated the ugliness that followed.

As Frank can recount with disarming specificity, here’s what came next: foolish hirings, crippling sums paid to worn-out players, desperate attempts to cure the present by hurting the future, largely fruitless drafts, widespread mockery, and steady losing. Steady, outrageous losing--by forty; by accident; without offense; forever without defense; through suspensions; through fistfights on the team plane; through truck parties. All of it brought on by the warped New York reality that was closing in faster than ever and making demands even louder than before. And so, the shame. New York, a place of exceptionalism and basketball capital, was represented by a team which directly defied both.



One of the first questions Frank asked me when I shared that I rooted for the Knicks was, “Are you excited about Donnie Walsh and Mike D’Antoni?” I nodded and said that I was, however it was far from a ringing endorsement. I was being honest; I wasn’t entirely sure.

The new Bricker leadership has restored professionalism to the franchise, one of the many ironic deficiencies previously afflicting a team which has such an active corporate following. And D’Antoni offers the promise of a system which requires discipline and practice, but not at the expense of creative freedom or entertainment. It’s a daring concept that is exciting and engrossing, though not yet proven to be a championship schematic. That, honestly, is the cause for concern. NBA championships are won with defense, and D’Antoni has not yet demonstrated that he can teach it or, more importantly, get his teams to play it well. Further, Walsh and D’Antoni’s first trip to the draft lottery yielded an unproven European who may be too slow for great defense and too frail for great anything. Not exactly the dawning of a new day.

Walsh and D’Antoni’s next opportunity to prove themselves comes in nine days, when they’re back in the lottery at the Draft. Rather than the team’s current players or most recent season, discussion of the Knicks will likely be framed by LeBron James, who, of course, is a Cavalier. But there are few NBA topics as popular as the insinuation that LeBron will sign with the Knicks in 2010. Whomever is traded, or signed, or figuratively told to start looking for a new house, the media will speculate about LeBron. The Knicks took Stephen Curry because he is friendly with James. The Knicks want to trade up for Ricky Rubio because they like his potential alongside James and think that will appeal to LeBron. They took a big man to pair with James. All of this will be said even though there is hardly a preponderance of evidence to suggest that James-to-New York is an actual possibility. So, then, why does everyone keep saying it?

For the same reasons that Frank remembers the Trevor Ariza trade and that people pay so much money on Fifth Avenue for things they can buy at home: the Knicks matter more. The Lakers and the Celtics and the Bulls matter. So do the Pistons and the Spurs. But the Knicks matter more. They carry with them New York’s prestige and the soul of the game, two wholly unique qualities. National media, whose satellite and internets arms reach into the corners of Arkansas, recognize this, and so the Knicks remain a story even when they aren't. This may bother people, but it's the truth; if people didn’t care a little more about New York, the Today Show would spend far less time out in Rockefeller Center. LeBron is viewed as the man who can stand up to the New York insanity, if not cure it. He is viewed as the man who can restore the Knicks to the position which their city demands. And he is viewed as the man who will reward Frank for his continued attention and encourage it through the next drought. That's why everyone keeps saying it; in some ways it feels right.

Think about all of this and prepare accordingly, because the LeBron gossip is going to stop just as soon as New York stops being old, basketball leaves the City, and he signs anywhere else. Frank will surely keep track of that.

SELF IS THE NEW STATS

Tune in elsewhere for Dr. LIC's Black/Jew essay and a truly epic Shoals Unlimited (BOTH UP NOW!).

I really don't like to go back and do an entire post on something from another post that I failed to clearly explain the first time around. It smacks of self-obsessed perfectionism, which is to say, it can obscure whether or not the material really matters that much. But like most of you, I am mortal, impatient, and occasionally busy, which means that my favorite part of yesterday's post got condensed—maybe compressed—into this impenetrable passage:

The challenge, then is to somehow quantify stupidity on both side. Wide-open lay-ups, drives into four defenders, cherry picks, full-court drives, gambling for the steal on every play. . . these are the markers of deviance, and big surprise, the ball I love. Remove them, and pace could truly be universalized. I wonder, though if there's not a slippery slope, or two of them, on either side of an equilibrium forever in question. Where you set it, what represents the mean, is strictly a matter of preference.

To review, the purpose of yesterday's post was to address "D'Antoni inflation," and determine if such a thing were truly statistically possible. Such an investigation would help us all better understand just how to view Kobe's 61-point game; like, if the numbers were completely inflated, then how much of a statement game could it have been? Ziller proved that adjusting for pace alone yielded no conclusive difference, so we delved into the possibility of a qualitative difference. The anecdotal evidence for this is rich, if a little perverse: Namely, players suck after leaving D'Antoni. This feeds into Simmons's claim that D'Antoni screws with the game's collective brain, the LSD of its sporting era, and some never quite recover. To actually "deflate" stats requires some standard by which we filter out "good" plays from "crazy" ones. Simmons suggests no such things, but unlike home runs in baseball, here we are talking about a difference in style—something that clearly manifests itself on the basketball court. One could conceivably draw distinctions, as opposed to estimating, via advance trigonometry, which balls wouldn't have gone the distance if struck by a non-roided up batter.

I was not, however, endorsing this sorting of play-by-play data, because applying the kind of criteria Simmons hints at is both totalitarian and self-defeating. For one, as you can guess, the line between stupid and inspired is preciously thin in the NBA, or at least the NBA as I prefer it to be. When you start to judge plays based on how rational they are, or whether they represent the most efficient form of execution, then you end up fast in Dave Berri territory. That's not to say that D'Antoni teams, or Nelson's Warriors, aren't at the far end of that spectrum. A normative basketball, though, would force you to pass judgemnent on individual basketball acts, regardless of context, overall flow of the game, or symbolic pay-off. Not exactly friendly soil for revelation or transcendence. This also raises the question of whether all basketball contains such imperfections, and thus the goal would be to adjust teams for their relative "stupidity", or punitively hold them all to a single standard.



The latter seems downright evil. You could end up with very, very strong teams punished for not being sufficiently perfect, or not pursuing a single-minded approach to the game. In an even yuckier version of things, the standard is not any particular team that season, but a nameless, faceless archetype, such that the players and teams that have come to define "smart" ball would still have to measure up to an ideal. It goes without saying that truth lies in creation-through-example, not a coach's imagination. The former brings up the question of where exactly you put that mean. Would it be based strictly on that year's numbers? Or is it inserted arbitrarily, a reflection of one's own stylistic preference? In both cases, deflation becomes an essentially political act.

To bring it back to reality, we are on some level talking about the primacy of identity-through-style. Is the game not defined by particular players and teams, the limits of the reasonable charted anew each night? If a man finds himself through "foolishness," well the, who plays the fool? There is only a "wrong way" or "bad plays" if they result from clear misapplication and lead to indisputable wreckage. So what if the Suns screw with people's heads, or there are clear-cut "D'Antoni players?" It's like acid casualties from the sixties. Are we really suggesting that era should've stayed clean, so it would be easier to compare with those that preceded it?

Oh, and only because it can never be said enough: The Suns didn't win any titles, but they have changed the definition of "stupid." Point guards now matter more than centers. Every team plays some small ball now, no one milks the clock. Phoenix itself ran away from the very low rumble of change that they set into motion. Perhaps the right thinking here is that D'Antoni's stats are ahead of their time, and those who emerge from his teams suffering from a permanent time-travel hangover. I've had those, and they suck. Maybe we should be looking at inflating former Suns' numbers so they accomodate a greater amount of "stupidity."

Note: Al Harrington is the Rosetta Stone of this shit.

STATS ARE THE NEW SOCIAL NETWORK

Behold, the new Black/Jew dialogue starts today at We Are Respectable Negroes. Look for myself and Dr. LIC later in the week.

I don't know if the intertwub'ns (catch the slang!) is supposed to make me feel perpetually included, or forever alone. Certainly, blogger and Twitter can go either way, mostly depending on my mood. How you make a straight social network anti-social—not in the "Joey never goes out anymore," but actually encouraging narcissism and absence of any form of interaction—is beyond me. I feel the same way about sports sometimes. So Kobe goes for 61 while I'm busy taking notes on the Blazers. I've watched the highlights. I knew it was happening. I'm writing about it. And yet this morning, I can't help but feel like I'm out in the desert with all the wrong memories. You'd think that the power of modern communication and computing could provide a reasonable facsimilie of first-hand experience. Instead, all of this build-up seem like that much more mockery. I missed it. All the catch up, prying, or immersion in the world can't get me any closer to that basic, visceral event, which provides the spark for all the web-borne reinforcement going on this morning.

But fuck it, dude score 61, it was a modern miracle, and I have something to say about that bare fact. For firsts, I know this will repercuss back onto the way this Bynum-less team is perceived. I trust a lot of these reactions will be stupid, so please refrain from airing them out here. I swear to Hoth, I will delete them. This has also allowed me to deconstruct the myth of the Garden, to which I welcome angry, or empirically sound, objections. Yes, I do equivocate the visitor's record with the all-purpose record, with the latter raising all sorts of questions about how the Knicks feel about the Garden, or maybe real evidence of a franchise style that abides throughout the ages (oft-referenced, rarely proven, truism). Or maybe I just don't understand how uncommon 50-point games are.

In Kobe's case, though, even as it was happening you heard mutterings about D'Antoni inflation. This theory holds that playing for or against Mike D'Antoni leads to a stat explosion. Therefore, any and all numbers achieved in that context deserve disdainful raised eyebrow. It's also been brought up in reference to David Lee's numbers, which because they're distorted cannot gain him entry into the All-Star Game. I'm by no means well-versed in the advanced statistical community, but it seems like we could adjust these numbers to determine just how many "real" points Kobe scored, or how many double-doubles Lee would have elsewhere.



ENTER TOM ZILLER

The so-called Mike D'Antoni Inflation Effect is wildly overstated. I can't really delve into the philosophical question of whether the mere existence of D'Antoni magically makes every player's heart swell to the point of scoring explosion (read on for Shoals' opinion), but I can strip pace from the equation, something a hundred amateur statisticians have done since the birth of SSOL.

D'Antoni's Knicks play at an above average pace, giving the players more opportunities to score and rebound and so on. The Knicks average 97 possessions/game, league average is less than 93. So adjust David Lee's 16/12 down 6% to account for the extra team possessions, and he's really a 15/11 guy. Quel horreur. (This is a quick and dirty [emphasis on the dirty] calculation; this assumes no other affects on Lee or the team if the team were to be forced into league average pace suddenly. That assumption at a team/player level makes me anxious, but so does Francisco Garcia. But you don't see me discounting Francisco Garcia's existence.)

As this chart -- the Knicks' per-game scoring figures at real pace and league-average pace -- shows, the Mike D'Antoni Inflation Effect as it pertains specifically to pace is wildly exaggerated.



In a equipace world, Brandon Roy would be the league's #7 scorer instead of his current #11. LaMarcus Aldridge, Rudy Gay, David West and Rodney Stuckey also get love in a land without D'Antonis and Nellies.

ZILLER LEAVES

This assumes, though, that the difference is a purely quantitative one. Bill Simmons's asterisk argument, I take it, is that there's also a qualitative shift, a suspension of all common sense that gives way to numbers that are not merely inflated, but also empty. I wonder, then, if there's some way not just to fix numbers according to pace (or paceless-ness), but to also quantify the amount of irrationality or impetuousness that a team like the Knicks or Warriors brings to the game. It's possible to play fast and smart.

On the other hand, when a D'Antoni or Nelson team is intent on sowing the seeds of mayhem and disrupting all basketball order, the opposing team is either tricked or forced into following suite. They are the proverbial serpent 'round the hoop, and dude, we kind of needed to listen to the serpent to so we could one day build our own zoos. I don't believe that there's no such thing as a bad shot or poor decision against these teams, just that you can get away with things—maybe even have to get into them—if you can't outright shut down these offenses. The challenge, then is to somehow quantify stupidity on both side. Wide-open lay-ups, drives into four defenders, cherry picks, full-court drives, gambling for the steal on every play. . . these are the markers of deviance, and big surprise, the ball I love. Remove them, and pace could truly be universalized. I wonder, though if there's not a slippery slope, or two of them, on either side of an equilibrium forever in question. Where you set it, what represents the mean, is strictly a matter of preference.

ZILLER RETURNS

(We considered also adjusting for the team's own defense, with the idea that D'Antoni teams don't care about defense and can thus reserve all energy for offense, thus inflating their production -- as in, on any other team, the players would produce less because they'd get tired on defense. But this is stupid and a few steps too far. Your top scorers list would just be Celtics and LeBron. BOO.)

ZILLER LEAVES; SHOALS CHOOSES IMAGE

Donnie Walsh/D'Antoni = Evil Obama/Biden ??

Ok, I finally get what basketball players mean when they use the cliche "It's a business" to respond to questions about trade rumors, contract extensions, and free agency. The recent overhaul of the New York Knicks by Donnie Walsh has been praised by those such as Stephen A. Smith as a spectacular deal for the Knicks, giving them cap relief and prime positioning for the LeBron-centered free agent market in 2010.



I understand that. For all intents and purposes, this was the right move. Clear out Isiah's trash and start fresh. Plus, give your franchise hope for landing an established young player instead of some crapshoot like Galinari that you can only acquire through draft picks. Textbook rebuilding.

But as a fan of basketball, this concerns me. The Z-Bo-Crawford-D'Antoni mashup was something extremely strange and a spectacle to watch. They were putting together solid games. Randolph was finding some redemption, and Crawford seemed like he would have the best year of his life. Plus, D'Antoni was really having to prove his worth. Make 7-seconds-or-less-ball work with Isiah's castaways, all the while keeping Marbury on the bench and keeping the NY media in check. For the first time in years, the Knicks fans I knew tasted the audacity of hope.

Now, the plan I guess is "wait a couple more years." If I were a six-year-old Knicks fan I would be confused as hell. "Dad? Why did the team get rid of its two best players for a couple of has-beens and Al Harrington's withering soul? It's just like little Minnesota kids having to wonder why Randy Moss, Kevin Garnett, and Johan Santana disappeared from my great home state in the blink of an eye. And the dreaded answer, of course, is that "[sports is] a business."


This whole way of doing things leaves a bad taste in my mouth--not just for "think about the children" reasons.

1) It makes the Knicks less fun to watch. I pretty much covered this above. Also, peep the world's ugliest boxscore:



2) It allows Mike D'Antoni to be completely free of accountability. Screw up this year, and it's , "What did you expect? We're rebuilding." That type of Charlie Weis good-ole-boy-ing will lead to nothing but complacency and lowered expectations.

3) It allows gets Donnie Walsh off the hook. Say the Knicks suck this year AND don't get some dream free agent in 2008 -- Oh well, he tried! And Shoals wisely brought up some quote from an ESPN article that I don't have time to search for where one team exec said a lot of teams are pulling the "we're going after LeBron" trick when it's really just an excuse to cut cap--this very well might be what's going on.

This whole situation recalls this Onion article , with Isiah of course playing the W. role. The Knicks hitting rock bottom means that anything that Walsh does is automatically an improvement.

4) It again puts the lunging for Lebron back into the spotlight. This sucks for Cavs fans who have suffered enough during LBJ's short time in the league. It also comes at a time where FINALLY Danny Ferry has made a serious positive addition to the team: Mo Williams on the Cavs is an infinitely better move than any of that Larry Hughes/Damon Jones/Donyell Marshall/Wally Szczerbiak garbage in the past.



This is just another chance for a smaller-market team to get screwed out of a prized possession, with the help of media-maggots who love to see good players in big markets.

I feel for Toronto fans (Bosh), Phoenix fans (Amare), and to a small degree Miami fans (Wade) as well.

Look, I understand how this goes. I suppose the way the salary cap/free agency system is set up is helpful in that it rewards teams that are smart (Pistons, Spurs) and has done a pretty good job of preventing dynasties from forming over the past few years. At the same time, I hate how it has made teams so future-oriented. Like, every year you can mentally eliminate the 10 or so teams that are building toward a future that may never come, and the Knicks added themselves to this group far too early in the game this year. The East is wide open. Marbury could have provided a valuable chip at mid-season. But no, let's all pat Donnie Walsh on the back and praise him for positioning the Knicks for 2010. Also, Knicks fans don't get too excited by the possibility of LeBron. I have a feeling Bron's going wherever he thinks he can get that ring. Even Phil Knight money isn't worth that much.

Let Us All Touch Feathers

Storm brewing, one that will, for reasons I don't quite get expect for the world's need to make my life a better place, flip Gerald Wallace to Oakland. Let's not even get into why Wallace helps a team, why Brown should like him (I did that last week, and felt dirty about it), and what a putz Jordan is.

Just cross your fingers that, by Monday, the Warriors will be looking ahead to a starting line-up of Monta/Wallace/Maggette/Jackson/Biedrins. Wright's ready to play, and my fascination with Anthony Randolph has now progressed into Dunwich Horror territory. In the last two days, I've both suggested that he's pulling the strings in Golden State's personnel moves, and convinced myself that he's too bizarre to ever engage the political process. Not in a harmless, kooky way, but something about his deformity as a player and single-mindedness about destroying the world. I fucking hate Family Guy, but that baby in there comes to mind.

But increasingly, the dopest thing about all this seems to be Don Nelson's attitude about all this. It's amazing how effortlessly he straddles the wide, wide borderland between absurdist provocation and Zen-like organics. That's always been his style as a coach, but talking about personnel, it's the same. Nelson's dangling Harrington out there like trash, which is of course exactly the wrong way to put a guy out on the market. He claims to be largely indifferent to whom they get in return, as long as he's good. Is he daring other teams to bid low, or just confident that he'll get talent regardless of the usual hoops he's supposed to jump through? Never mind that he's working with a failed front office and is forced to dictate moves from the margins of resistance.



When this new player shows up, does Nellie anticipate just throwing him out on the floor, gauntlet-like, and demanding everyone respond to this new stimulus? Or is this the "give me athletes with some skill and they will conquer the world" credo that fuelled the 2006-07 team, the one that makes him even more elemental than D'Antoni and more hands-off than Phil? The ultimate test of this might be, with a super-charged line-up, saying "fuck it" and installing Monta at the point whenever he gets back. That could either force everyone to adjust in creative ways, perhaps with Nelson's input, or burn the building down and leave no other option but to gallop through the ashes and send a message through the hills that way. It could well be his defining, and most triple-reverse masterful, hour.

I don't get why Harrington is so attractive to New York, except that he's better than Curry for D'Antoni's system. It gets tricky if the Knicks have to part with, say, Lee or Chandler to get this done. Given what I know about the team's plans, that seems like a deal-breaker. Could Wallace end up on the Knicks somehow? I'm not about to break out the Trade Machine, but dare I say that D'Antoni's more interested in passers and shooters than another Amare-like hell-raiser. Although, to be fair, Wallace is more like an Amare/Marion hybrid; still, his overall impact on a system would be more like Stoudemire. Plus, I'm assuming this is the kind of D'Antoni team that players have to assimilate, rather than one that assimilates them, and that's not Wallace's strong suit. The Warriors, on the other hand, would be miles away from even considering that fine distinction.

Apologies if this is stuff you've already. Here's a new Quotemonger. Also, R.I.P. to this dude:



I would include an obit, but they all mention the Black Keys. And my special bond with him lost just a little when I realized his surname wasn't "Meyer." But whatever, that first LP is getting buried with me.

UPDATE: Is it preposterous for me to think that, after Tuesday, sports/politics might be forever changed?



(h/t Shanoff)

Peace Detects You

Admittedly, my plan was to live-blog Heat/Knicks last night, and the Obama infomercial, at the same time. I have a bunch of notes from the whole thing. But then I got bummed out at Beasley's errancy—in part because it's not like he was helpless, just off—and then got lost in a sea of League Pass and fantasy moves that had me thoroughly exhausted by around 10 my time. So instead, some brief thoughts on the Knicks.

Let's be honest here: A lot of us, even (or especially) Knicks fans, hate a lot of these current players. It could just be the stain of those last few years, or maybe the fact that some of them need only the slightest shove to inspire disgust. Marbury and Curry are beyond rescue, but I remember the young Zach Randolph, and Jamal Crawford is unfairly crucified by us all, at every opportunity, just because he happens to have shared a backcourt with Steph. Nate Robinson is equal parts lovable and detestable. Quentin Richardson is, as I've said before, someone a lot of us once jocked, though unlike Z-Bo, Q just kind of disappeared. It's embarassing to fall out of love with a player like that.

So that leaves what, David Lee and Wilson Chandler as unspoilt? Neither of them could be a figurehead for goodness. Which is why I was worried that the Knicks, no matter how D'Antoni-y they got, would still be a fundamentally gross team. And pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to get excited about them during that first half, when they really seem to have taken that (Obama rip-off?) meme of newness, change and freedom to heart. Maybe it was the fact that Q-Tip gave them an original song to hammer home that meta-point.



This left me with one, possibly disturbing, conclusion: Mike D'Antoni makes players easier to root for. It's top-down identity, which violates everything I stand for, but I like to think it's a little more subtle than his system imposing character. More that, in the same way that certain borderline players could be trasnformed into mucky pariahs by the Isiah Knicks, playing for D'Antoni, coming into his sphere of influence, brings out their potential to be both more exciting and less retarded. What's more, he transmutes the imperative of style; when the team's goal is to get up and down fast as possible, move the ball three steps ahead of the defense, and dribble only if you get a note from teach, you have to use your imagination.

From this site's perspective, D'Antoni brings out the best in players. This would be disturbing if he didn't offer such open-ended directives; I also don't know if I like saying, "oh, those Spurs, they keep Manu from being a player I would totally love." Giving players a framework in which they have to think for themselves can have snazzy results; a team where discipline is less abstract (admittedly, San Antonio's looser than it was four years ago) isn't going to give a ton of minutes to someone whose game has no predilection toward this within it. Remember, Argentina is a part of Europe, genetically speaking.

The third quarter didn't have quite the same feel to it, and I felt myself seeing the Knicks through more jaundiced eyes again, even as they failed to throw away the game. Skipped the fourth; maybe they took a good, long stare at D'Antoni during a timeout and returned to the first half's sense of purpose. You could hear this in the announcing, too, which always seemed on the verge of going back to the same old griping. One night is a crappy sample, but if I stay interested in this team, and Wilson Chandler starts to warrant repeated consideration, we'll have found an important role for the coach in facilitating style—at least this particular madman in charge.

STORE UPDATE:



Tracy McGrady print now available due to popular demand. If you've already bought a print and want the new T-Mac instead, just drop us a line at freedarko 'at' gmail 'dot' com, and we'll swap your order.

You Sometimes Just Find Yourself

Read my TSB column, where I insist that the future is here (again), if only the Knicks would release Marbury, bench Curry and Randolph until they're traded, and Pat Riley would let this Heat team emulate the 2003-04 cult faves.

On a similar note, and related to Dr. LIC's "little things" spree: I love this quote from Posting and Toasting's coverage of Knicks camp:

Q's intensity is almost frightening. He's clearly feeling the heat of Wilson Chandler reaching for his starting 3 spot. Richardson was animated all night, screaming, spiking balls, and throwing towels after any miscues in the scrimmages. You can tell he sets the tone for the younger guys by taking practice so seriously.

I think we've all already bled enough over where Darius Miles has been, and what we all lost in the fire. Him and Garnett joining up is an oldies package tour, not destiny at last. And I can't say I'd be thrilled to see Miles vindicated in life by backing up Leon Powe on a championship team.

About Richardson, though: I only just realized today that Q and D'Antoni are being reunited. Is this a good or bad thing? Quentin's most consistent season came with Phoenix, but all he did was jack up threes. He probably went to the basket once all year, and overnight stopped being one of the league's better rebounding guards. With the Clippers, he often looked like an exciting young player trying to get steady, bring his skills into focus and define his role (like Miles, but not so grotesque an undertaking). The Suns were his undoing, since they asked him to turn long-range gunner and lose all perspective on the floor. And then abruptly, D'Antoni didn't need him and decided his triggermen had to be a little more steady, less outrageous. Whether D'Antoni ends up having much use for Richardson, and if so, what kind of game he expects of him, will tell us a lot about the evolution of the coach's thinking, as well as of those Suns teams. And if—when the Knicks give him acceptable raw material to work with—he'll move into a new phase, or pick up where he left off pre-Shaq.

I also wonder if Richardson ever thinks about the effect D'Antoni had on his career arc. And whether he's out to prove to his teammates, D'Antoni, or both that he counts among the enlightened in this new era.

An Economy of Sprinkles

Links to elsewhere today:

-Sporting News column, all about a new D'Antoni theory. Not sure what the Marbury for Diaw and Barbosa rumor does to this. You thoughts?

-Quotemonger, for all the marbles.

-My latest anti-Celtics tirade. FD, but might have been missed.

-More Celtics bitching, about how their city poisoned the Hawks on the eve of Game Seven.

That's the Name I Was Given

READ SHOALS' analysis of last night just below this post. I, on the other hand, will acknowledge that I didn't really watch the games yesterday because I'm prescient and I don't like to watch games that I don't like the outcomes of. Am more interested in this D'Antoni to the Knicks thing, because I might be the only person on the planet who thinks that it might work out perfectly. Look, the Knicks' players suck. I'm finally going to admit that. And no amount of fastbreaking will change that. But there are some important similarities between Mike D and the Knicks that bode well for the future.

They don't like to play defense. He doesn't like to coach defense.
They've never won anything. He hasn't really won anything either.
They're tremendously overpaid. He is tremendously overpaid.

All of this results in the perfect cocktail of something to prove mixed with a sense of entitlement that may give New York the exact type of swag they need. D'Antoni's rep as a coach players like is also important for facilitating the jettisoning of the Knicks' deadweight players. To put it simply, if you don't jibe with D'Antoni, it's YOUR FAULT, so leave. The only thing I really didn't like about Isiah's hateable-ness is that it gave his crappy players a free pass. There was too much attributional ambiguity. Oh, Zach Randolph has a bad attitude? Blame it on Isiah. Stephon Marbury is nuts? Must be because of Isiah. Eddy Curry is lazy you say? Isiah's fault again. For better or for worse, D'Antoni is so likeable that the players should feel a renewed sense of personal responsibility.



ON TO MORE IMPORTANT THINGS (taking the long road there). You know when you grow up "doing some sort of art." Say, rapping. If you do it for long enough, you reach a certain level of maturity where two important things happen: (1) You realize that you are actually now as smart or smarter than certain people "in that artform" that you formerly looked up to. Like, why would I look to Grouch & Eligh & Sixtoo for insight about life? I've had enough interesting life experience to know that this stuff isn't really that deep. And then (2) You realize that certain people are so good at the particular craft and you admire them so much, that you've actually just been a crappier version of (Posdnuos/Breezly Brewin/Andre3000,etc.) this whole time, and you need to do some serious soul-searching to do something that is specifically and originally YOU to really do good art.

Well, just as I've had these experiences on the music front, the same could be said for my "sportswriting." Similar to rolling my eyes at indie rappers' life insight, it's like, look, I've taken enough stats and methods courses over the past few years to know that John Hollinger's propaganda is essentially a lot of pseudoscience, and at a basic level inferring causation based on correlation. Had Hollinger been around when I was 13 years old, though, I probably would have thought I was reading like, the Steven Pinker of basketball. At the same time, there are those (an ever dwindling number) who get this shit so right, that it makes me rethink my whole agenda in this hoops blogging game. For example, prior to this past weekend, the passage below, from Bill Simmons in response to Ralph Wiley, during one of their legendary conversations, was probably my personal hoops-writing Pledge of Allegiance--the most important thing to me:

You asked why I love the NBA so much, and if it bothers me that some of my readers don't want me to read those columns as much. My feeling was always this: if you write about something passionately enough, and you know what you're talking about, I think most people will want to keep reading no matter the subject. Sometimes you can go too far -- like John McPhee writing about rocks -- but I think there are enough diehards out there, as well as people following the NBA on a rudimentary level who could be coaxed into following it more. So that's always been my hope. I would rather write about something I love than write about something I don't follow.


(Note: One of the biggest problems with the NBA is that there aren't enough quality writers involved. Think about baseball and all the wonderful writers that have tackled that sport -- Updike, Talese, Angell, Cramer, Halberstam, etc. -- along with the dozens and dozens of baseball books that come out every year. But the best NBA book ever was "Breaks of the Game," and that came out more than 20 years ago. In my case, I grew up reading Bob Ryan in the Globe -- his passion made me like basketball even more than I already did. He's always been the role model for me when writing about hoops, as well as for how to get away with a cheesy blazer and khaki pants that are two sizes too short on national TV.)


The biggest obstacle for the NBA has always been the black-white thing -- marketing a league full of mostly black players to a country filled with mostly white people who can afford the tickets. This almost killed the league in the late-'70s (detailed extensively in "Breaks of the Game") and reared its head in the post-MJ Era (and I'm not counting the Wizards years, because they never happened). I always thought Iverson's career was a fascinating litmus test. Here's someone who was clearly the most exciting player in the league from post-MJ through 2002, but he also represented everything that Generic White America hates about the NBA: Tatts, cornrows, in-your-face, loose cannon, the background to match. And I'm not sure how this dilemma is solved.


Yes, the NFL is the best product. Yes, baseball has the history. But I always feel like the NBA should be more popular than it is, and I think part of the reason is that enough quality people aren't writing about it. What other sport combines this much athleticism, drama and unintentional comedy? What other sport has Calvin Murphy's kids, Doctor J's sex tape, Mrs. Christie, Mark Cuban's Weblog, Barkley and Kenny making fun of Sam Cassell in code, the completely insane Ron Artest, J-Kidd trying to seduce the NBA trophy and everything else? Hot damn I love this game.


It still holds up 4 years later, and that was pretty much my inspiration for years, what made me tell my friend Pete in Berkeley in 2004 that I wanted to write a book of the type that Shoals, Recluse, Silverbird, Big Baby, and I just completed. To me, it was pretty much the pinnacle of encapsulating everything I wanted to say about basketball. Until I read this. And this. Many of you may have already seen these pieces (evidently there's one more coming today), but if you have not, drop your Sudoku puzzle, and take some time to read these insane interviews with Britt Robson. I really can't describe the level that this dude is on, and would prefer you just hear it from the man himself. I was lucky enough to grow up in Minneapolis and read his stuff in the City Pages, but it wasn't until I actually moved out of state that I became a regular reader.

Robson, to put it similarly to our friend Kelly Dwyer, is the next epoch. As many of you know has been the beat writer for the Timberwolves since forever, and is pretty much the sole reminder of the fact that Minnesota professional hoops doesn't end with Kevin Garnett. The guy wrote multi-thousand word tomes after every single Wolves game THIS PAST YEAR (can't think of anything more Free Darko than that), discussing the intricacies of Chris Richard's helpside defense and Ryan Gomes' confidence with Coen Bros-caliber intrigue. Just read the amount of truth and substance this guy is dropping and you will remember why you get out of bed in the morning. For me, it's time to reinvent myself.

When All Glare Fizzled

If you watched last night's Suns/Spurs welt-farm, you felt the omen. The Suns have not only died as an idea; they've even ceased to matter, vestigially, as the nut-case whose sober child grew into a prince. That team was just plain trounced and flummoxed, by a Spurs powerhouse that, were Phoenix the powerhouse they'd supposedly become, wouldn't have had it so glibly.

And now, D'Antoni's leaving town. We can argue for days about who defined the Suns, but it comes down to D'Antoni, Nash, and either Marion or Amare. There's probably some sort of father/son/ghost thing going on here, but if you had to pick the one essential element, it would no doubt be Coach. Before Phoenix, Nash was breezy and occasionally possessed; here, he flourished as the practical hand of D'Antoni's vision. Amare and Marion were symbolically important, and made the contours all the more fantastic. In the end, though, it was Mike's team.

So while we always heard that D'Antoni pushed for Shaq—a betrayal of self? bottom line over idealism? function over form?—he both pushed himself out of the picture and gave himself the high road for exit with that deal. The night they drove old Phoenix down might have shown that Nash was finally fading—where was his venom down the stretch? But that was no longer a team that needed an idiosyncratic vision or direction. Go ahead and buy Larry Brown from Charlotte. Big man, slowed PG, scoring machine, shooters.



It was only fitting that D'Antoni would exit now, since Kerr and Sarver have all but robbed that team of its original god-head. Now they can be the brains, having underestimated how far-reaching D'Antoni's influence was across that operation. It was coaching, and personnel, and making certain players, like Diaw, what they might otherwise never have been. You see dictator-ship, I see the old-style guru, or the kind of visionary to whom smart people defer and let run a little amuck.

What now for D'Antoni? Please don't let it be the Bulls. The Knicks would be no less painful. Remember, he inherited a young, inexpensive mess of a team, then got a chance to bring in Nash and let the gossamer empire rise. Both of these teams have clumps of intractable personnel who, frankly, will only ever give us a rough approximation of D'Antoni's idealism. And maybe, because he's only had this one big moment under the coaching sun, I like to think he's got that much integrity, or that irrepressible an ego.

I nominate Miami. Riles can't be bothered to buy the team toothbrushes anymore. Arm D'Antoni with old pal Marion, and what's left of Wade, and either Beasley or Rose. And oh yeah, that Wright guy could fit in well. Watch them instantly create a tiny temple in the East and then set their sights Westward?



But for now, let's admit it: An era has passed, and the team that created this site has ceased to matter. It's only fitting, then, that amidst all the "West is a letdown" chatter we're hearing a new generation definitively assert itself. Nash and Kidd are dead, long live Paul and Williams. Dwight Howard might be better than Shaq in his prime by the end of this summer. And while the odds are still against Atlanta marching on, they've got the kind of subversive, utterly flabbergasting vehemence that makes you think change might be in the air. Or at least rearing its bejeweled, strange, and confounded head when, with us all now adrift, it's so badly needed.

So stay still. Breathe deep. And remember, tonight is for everything. Everything we've lost, and everything that's still yet to hit us down the road.