I'm Judging Me

With Odom continuing to play the best basketball of his career (42 and 43 in two days against the Warriors) now seems like as good a time as ever to revisit something Shoals mentioned a couple months ago: the dream of what Lamar Odom could be. Now I don't feel capable providing a fully satisfactory response that question at the moment, but I do hope to at least address why the question itself fascinates me as much as it does.

Few players in the NBA inspire pundits and scribes to search for excuses for his inadequacies quite like Lamar does. "He needs the ball in his hands to be effective"; "he's better as a third or fourth option"; "he just doesn't mesh well with Kobe"; "he's not a good fit for the triangle"; "he's more comfortable on the perimeter because of his frame"; "he needs to work in the post to be efficient"; and so it goes. The debate over whether or not he'd be more productive as a 3 or a 4 (designations which, as well as I can tell, don't actually exist in Phil's system) highlights why discussions revolving around him inevitably drift towards unimaginative terms like enigmatic and confounding.



This impulse to rationalize his disappointments and to create alternate universes for his potential to reside in fascinates me, both because it's a pretty absurd thing to do and because I often find myself submitting to it myself. The consensus seems to be that he is failing to live up to some considerable potential but also that his potential is not only indefinable, but very likely unattainable. Which creates an odd tension: the gap between potential and performance typically bears with it the assumption that it could eventually be crossed. With Lamar, I'm not sure even his most ardent supporters believe he could ever actually reach the idealized perception that some of us imagine he could reach if only given an ideal scenario that none of us can really describe.

When Lamar showed up to training camp with a star etched into his hair the explanation was that his barber believed this would be his breakout all-star season. Upon hearing that I thought both, 'OK, that makes sense, there's no reason he couldn't be in New Orleans in a league where Mehmet Okur can be an All Star,' and 'That's going to be embarrassing when February arrives and he's still wearing that ridiculous star.' Sure enough, when he returned from the break, he was back to his pristinely bald head. I imagine there was quite the awkward moment between him and his barber as they were forced to finally concede that this wasn't going to be the year he made the leap.



Over the summer I wrote a fairly-derided post aimed at tearing down Hollinger's numbers, in part because they failed to depict Lamar in a positive light. Looking back on that it strikes me that most people missed how self-consciously questionable my decision was to question the system rather than the player that struggled within it. It was and is much easier to critique an equation rather than accepting that Odom just isn't capable of being as productive as I want him to be. Having an incredibly rare combination of skills, immense physical gifts, and style to spare should be a recipe for success. That Odom's freakish ability to rebound the ball in traffic on one end, push it up the floor, and finish single-handedly at the other doesn't in itself translate to victories, independently of the maturation of Bynum or the acquisition of Pau, is frustrating. I don't want to admit that retrofitted cliches like "winner's mentality" actually hold water on some occasions. I don't want to see Odom retreat into a well-paid rebounding specialist who has occasional flourishes. Conceding that talent alone isn't enough to win basketball games opens the door to the necessity of the Bruce Bowens and Shane Battiers of the world.

Even more troublesome for me personally, sentences like the one above force me to confront the fact that I have the tendency to denigrate things like desire, hustle, cleverness, and work ethic; virtues I would typically applaud in non-basketball settings. Confronting that personal contradiction isn't something I'm exactly prepared to tackle just yet though; this is still ostensibly about Odom and my desire to believe he can be (is?) a star on this stage.

This latest spurt of awesomeness, while causing me to grin from ear to ear, also has me worrying a terrible thought: what if Lamar's much-celebrated versatility is somehow directly related to his much-lamented inconsistency? As though his ability to do various things in a way that few others are capable of actually makes him an impractical player in this league. While the eclecticism of a Marion or a Rasheed works in mysterious ways, the equally irregular puzzle piece that is Odom fails to fit in for equally inexplicable reasons. This is a depressing thought that I choose to reject on emotional grounds, even if my mind is gradually coming to accept that Odom will never be the transcendent star I feel he should be capable of becoming.

Henry Chinaski is not Spider-Man

The NBA All-Star Weekend is, as much as anything else, a sort of Topsy-Turvy celebration, where traditional roles are set aside and the hierarchy of the league is put in reverse for one glorious weekend. In the three-point contest, specialists dominate MVPs in a supposedly objective contest. (I don't really acknowledge the presence of the other two All-Star Saturday events, but if you wanted to stick with the theory, the skills contest is a measure of the individual abilities of those whose best attribute is making their teammates better, and the Shooting Stars Competition is basketball as a boring and miserable exercise.) The dunk contest has come to celebrate something wholly different from what it claims to be, celebrating style and creativity rather than showcasing the pure awe that MJ, Dominique, and Vince were able to instill during their reigns over the contest. Consider the post-Carter dunk contest champions: Jason Richardson now leads the league in threes made. Fred Jones, Desmond Mason and Gerald Green are in various stages of irrelevance. 0% of Nate Robinson's shots in games are dunks. (I'll get to Josh Smith later.)

This year, of course, was the exception. Dwight Howard is the most functional dunker of my lifetime, and while I was 7 years old when proto-Shaq left the Magic, I can't really imagine making more impact by dunking the ball than Howard is now-he's a legitimate top-10 player in the league and a full third of his shots are dunks, and even when he doesn't dunk he changes the defense, as they must keep someone between him and the basket at all possible times in fear of the alley-oop. When he plays, the court pulsates with the power of dunk. And yet his dunk contest was marked by triumphs of style rather than substance, with his signature dunk being a show of smoke and mirrors while THE BIRTHDAY CAKE was, like Howard's tragically futile sticker dunk, a demonstration of substance-as-style, and the contest ended with Green doing a ridiculously difficult dunk that didn't photograph well (seriously, try jumping off a hardwood floor in socks), while Howard did a two-handed windmill using a toy hoop.

When a guy who just got waived rides for degree of difficulty while an MVP candidate goes for style points, it just tells you that All-Star weekend is a distorted time. (Disclaimer: In no way did that paragraph mean to deprecate Howard's deservingness, mainly due to the Inverted Windmill and the Ambitastic Tappy-Oop, it's just saying that Howard based his claim on style while Green dealt more in degree of difficulty, which is odd considering their relative ability.)

Of course, the game itself is the greatest example of All-Star Weekend's spirit of casting aside the shackles of team roles, as players, especially for the first three quarters, govern their games by what they feel they should be instead of what they are told to be. Watching the All-Star game often reminds me of the story in The Blind Side where Michael Oher, the 6-7, 280-pound future offensive tackle, showed up to play basketball for his tiny high school not with the game of a banger who lived in the paint, but as a shooting guard who preferred to gracefully handle the ball and rip threes off the dribble, because he'd learned the game by practicing alone on the street and had never even seen himself in the mirror.

In other words, he played like a guard because nobody had ever told him that he was a big man. This is reflected by The All-Star Game's freeing nature; we get to see Dwight Howard only taking dunks, Rasheed Wallace popping left-handed threes, Yao launching threes himself, Jason Kidd getting 10 assists but only shooting twice, AI dishing out 6 assists and only shooting 7 times, 'Melo shamelessly gunning, VC treating basketball as aesthetic exhibition as opposed to athletic competition, and the like.

But look at the MVP of the contest. He went for 27/8/9 on 12-22 from the floor and 2-7 from deep. His season averages are 31/8/7 on 22 shots and 5 threes. In other words, for LeBron, the All-Star Game, when players can do as they feel, was exactly like any other game. Even his signature play, the game-sealing dunk, was a slashing dunk through traffic instead of a VC/T-Mac show, the kind of highlight he generally provides within the context of a game.

It's not even that LeBron is the least inhibited superstar we've seen since, like, ever: it's that it makes sense. At the highest level of basketball LeBron played before the big show, he took the tip, brought the ball up, hit the boards, slung dimes, just generally did the whole thing up, and now he's more or less doing what he feels in the pros. Some will tell you that some Coach K in LeBron would have done him right; footwork down low, form in the mid-range game, etc. This is untrue. Sure, he might have some fundamentals, but would they have come at the cost of the freedom that makes him as he is? That's a rhetorical question.

Several folk have noted that the best players in the league are from the high school cloth; according to Race For the MVP, the best player in the L has been McGrady, Howard, LBJ, Kobe, or KG for all but one week, and Amare remains the unsung MVP candidate. What stands out about these players is not just how good they are but how unique they are, with the possible exception of Kobe, who didn't go to college but did intern at the Zen Academy.

LeBron is a dominant big man who plays de facto point guard on the perimeter. Howard eschews traditional big-man offense and instead just finds creative ways to use the power of dunk. KG has struck the elusive balance between "little-big" and "big-big" skills. Amare makes his office not on the blocks but by catching passes at he top of the circle and thundering downward. T-Mac works the point forward. (Even before the class of '95, the guys blazing the trails were from the closest thing to high school ball, the land of the small college, which gave us Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman in their unconventional glory.)

Even the non-all star HS guys work in powerful and mysterious ways; Josh Smith might be one of the best defensive players in the league as a shot-blocking shooting guard. The Warriors, the league's most unconventionally fantastic team, employ only two rotation players who have ever set foot in college, and one of them is demi-god Baron Davis, who played to his own beat even at the Church of Wooden. (Unrelated note on the Warriors, prompted by the Mavericks losing Nowitzki and still yet to beat a winning team after their panic trade: not only are the Warriors capable of beating anyone, at any time, essentially based on the health of their spirit animals, they are perfectly capable of claiming a team's soul as part of the transaction.)

Last time I talked about college basketball, I advocated for the value of a good role player coming out of college, as many of the guys laden with "upside" and expectations end up falling short, while guys who know how to do their jobs are overlooked and cause chagrin among all when they continue to do their jobs well in the NBA. Upon further review, I've pretty much decided that college basketball's system of assigning roles is purely and simply evil no matter what. Players like J. Smith would be shackled to the confinements of being a traditional shooting guard, robbing us of his high-flying exploits at power forward. Monta Ellis would be told to run the point. Amare and Dwight would have been told to quit their flights of fancy and stick their butts on the blocks. THIS WAS DAVID LEE. Josh Smith is not effective despite his rawness: He is effective because he is allowed to be raw.

Even those given absolute freedom in college end up shackled by their role as savior: Instead of being allowed the key to unlocking his talents at his own place and find his game, Durant was thrown into the role of savior and is now being forced to suffer by a team whose only move to develop him in any sort of positive way was to trade for Donyell Marshall, who shall serve as a vivid and horrifying reminder to Durant of what he could someday become. Hell, look at AI; every time he's had talent around him, in the Olympics or the All-Star game, and to a lesser degree with Denver, he practically aches to show the world he is not a ball-hog at his core, but has been shoehorned into being one by the likes of Kevin Ollie. (If you want my take on B-Easy; I fear for him as well. A fast power forward who can take big guys off the dribble from the free throw line and become a bigger David West, a faster Carlos Boozer, or Super-Bonzi? Good Policy. A guy who's slow for an elite NBA perimeter player and favors fadeaways from 21 feet and turns the ball over twice as much as he gets assists given 20 shots a game and told to make it work? Bad Policy.)

For all the noise about HS guys being thrust into the limelight too quickly, coming into the NBA incomplete and mercurial will always be better than having to shoulder the burden of perceived completion; by being allowed to find the music of their own games, the HS guys eventually found an off-beat form of truth as yet unrivaled by any other category of player. Even LeBron, who came in wearing savior white, was allowed to find his way in Cleveland, who experimented with him at the point but eventually stuck him on the wing, took Ricky Davis and D-Miles out back and shot them, and allowed him to run things as he always had and shall continue to do.

The age limit is an affront to what makes basketball great; basketball-as-jazz is something we refer to as little as possible here, but the age limit puts Coltrane in a symphony. But it's not going away, and it might even get raised soon, so we should make the most of our chance to appreciate the rare and off-center diamond that is the High School player while we still can, who base their games on what they are rather than what they were told to be, and find greatness where they could not be shown to look. And if the age limit applied to sports bloggers, you'd be reading this in The Daily Trojan. The age limit sucks.