A. running for local political office
B. coaching basketball
C. online dating
D. going to school for marine biology
Answer tomorrow
Against Tanking
THE MORAL CASE AGAINST TANKING
Chicago’s skid
since Derrick Rose’s latest season-ending injury has drawn cries from Bulls fans to “tank” the season. Hey, maybe the Bulls win the lottery and get Andrew Wiggins or get the second or third pick, and select Jabari Parker, who, like Rose himself, attended Simeon HS in Chicago.
Deliberately losing, such as staying in bed for 20 hours each day, is a tempting path of least resistance if things aren’t going well. But using this strategy in the NBA is out of control.
The Sixers, Raptors, Celtics, and Magic, in the East alone, are throwing away today for the illusion of a glorious tomorrow. The Bucks, after their best player got injured in a bar fight, have also plunged into the tank. So the Bulls must “contend” with those teams, plus the Jazz in the West. Given that dirty half-dozen, plus squads that involuntarily suck like the Knicks, the chance that a team with a Deng-Boozer-Noah frontcourt loses enough to win is slim, present slide notwithstanding.
But, regardless, of the Bulls pickle, I find distasteful the idea that tanking is shrewd, Continue reading “Against Tanking”
Kyrie Irving and the contemporary point guard
The Cleveland Cavs season is so far disappointing and so far defined by a feud of sorts between Kyrie irving and Dion Waiters. I think this shows the limitations of the so-called golden era of NBA point guards.
Irving is averaging like six assists a game. This is par for the course in today’s NBA. Other all-star level point guards like Russell Westbrook and Damian Lillard and Tony Parker, also average like six assists a game, and get more than three times as many points as they have assists.
Things were different in the last golden era of point guards: the Magic-Isiah-John Stockton-Kevin Johnson-Tim Hardaway-Mark Price era of the late 80s and early 90s. Continue reading “Kyrie Irving and the contemporary point guard”
The Grand Meaning Of An Obscure Book About An Obscure Basketball Player
You love to hear the stories again and again. The potential of basketball players with cocaine problems or, less exotic, alcoholism or a heart condition or the victims, in some way, of something tragic.
Michael Ray Richardson could have been as good as Magic Johnson.
Roy Tarpley could have been as good as Moses Malone.
The potential of Len Bias, drafted between Brad Daugherty and Chris Washburn in 1986, grows with each passing year from his fatal cocaine overdose. Continue reading “The Grand Meaning Of An Obscure Book About An Obscure Basketball Player”
’93 NCAA Title Game Revisited, aka the ‘time out’ game
I have watched in its televised entirety the 1993 North Carolina-Michigan NCAA men’s basketball championship game, the game in which Chris Webber called a timeout that his team didn’t have with Michigan down by two with 11 seconds left. The game is available here.
Some impressions….
* North Carolina was up by three and had the ball with 45 seconds left when forward Brian Reese stepped out of bounds, giving Michigan the ball back and basically keeping alive their chance of winning the game.
That was the second big blunder Reese made in the NCAA tournament that year. Continue reading “’93 NCAA Title Game Revisited, aka the ‘time out’ game”
Chris Webber is my semi-hero
Zach Lowe’s Grantland article today is about whether Chris Webber should be in the Hall of Fame. Lowe sets the tone with some self-awareness saying that it’s difficult, even for him — someone who loses readers with semi-scientific breakdowns of why DeMarcus Cousins is bad on defense, to emotionlessly evaluate Webber’s Hall of Fame credentials.
But then he actually almost does that, even going so far as comparing Webber to Elton Brand, someone I truly don’t have any feelings toward (the quirkiest thing about Brand is that when the Bulls drafted him then GM Jerry Krause insisted Brand was taller than he really was because he had a really stout neck and necks somehow equaled superfluous height).
There are a couple of problems here with Lowe’s approach.
The first is that applying analytic rigor to a column about whether Player X should be in the basketball hall of fame is folly. There is no discernible standard to being in the hall of fame. Sometimes useful championship team role players Jamaal Wilkes and K.C. Jones are in the hall of fame. Sometimes healthy scoring small forwards Bernard King and Chris Mullin are in the hall of fame.
Ralph Sampson, a human being whose life is synonymous with such burdensome concepts as disappointment, the unmet promise of youth, the inability to adopt to one’s environment, and plain misfortune — a man whose melancholy mustachioed face and barely defined limbs scream “FRAGILE” — is in the Hall of Fame.
I mean, you talk about “star crossed” — compared to Sampson, Webber is Tim Duncan. Continue reading “Chris Webber is my semi-hero”
Quick D-Fense Of T-Mac
Jonathan Abrams story this week on Tracy McGrady implies McGrady, like George Gervin before him, was an effortless gunner who scored 30 and didn’t do much else. That’s not true at all.
McGrady was generally considered a very good, if somewhat uneven defender, between 2000-2008. He also averaged like 7-8 rebounds and 5-6 assists per game during this time span. Additionally, McGrady was singled out, like in this 2007 Bill Simmons column (scroll to the bottom), for being a great teammate on both ends of the floor and a great leader. Players and coaches generally seemed to like McGrady, and few players were spoken about as reverentially by their peers.
Obviously, McGrady’s rapid collapse as a player post-2008 and his 0-7 record in playoff series (before this season as a Spurs practice player for the practice players) is pretty damaging to his career evaluation. But he got legitimately injured and he never ‘choked’ in any of these series….In fact in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007 he memorably stepped his game up. Unlike, say, Kevin Garnett’s T-wolf tenure, McGrady did not shirk his duties as go-to playoff guy.
The unoriginal conclusion here is that McGrady is not some tragic-athlete-figure but a really, really good basketball player, probably one of the 60-70 greatest players of all-time. In the early 00’s, the best players were, in rough order, Shaq, Tim Duncan, Kobe, T-Mac, Iverson, Jason Kidd, and Garnett. Back then, few would question the assertion that Kobe and T-Mac were roughly equivalent in their greatness and that the Lakers would have been just as good with T-Mac. Perhaps that notion — that Kobe = T-Mac — was a little off, but the recent appraisals of T-Mac as having a disappointing career seem overly harsh.
Lay off Doug Collins, Man
Alpha Web site Grantland.com has recently weighed in with both a podcast and column, by the readable Zach Lowe no less, puncturing needles through the dried out skin of Philadelphia 76er coach Doug Collins. It’s year three for Collins in Philly, it is gleefully announced, and Collins is burned out again.
Look, I know all about Doug Collins burn out. I was a fan of the Collins-coached Detroit Pistons, from 95-98. And allow me to conclude that Lowe, et. al are over thinking things: The Sixers are 23-35 because they were a .500 team last year whose best player is injured this year. That’s all. Continue reading “Lay off Doug Collins, Man”
Was David Robinson Actually Underrated?
The received wisdom of David Robinson’s NBA career reads as the perils of being too book smart for a children’s playground game.
Robinson supposedly was an overly sensitive player who over thought matters on the court and couldn’t lead his team to the title. Even the most popular YouTube “highlight” clip of Robinson is “Olajuwon Dominates Robinson,” a syrupy six-minute montage of Hakeem Olajuwan carrying the Houston Rockets past Robinson’s San Antonio Spurs in the 1995 Western Conference Finals.
In his Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons rated Robinson the 28th greatest player of all-time behind peers such as John Stockton, Scottie Pippen, Kevin Garnett and Charles Barkley. Robinson even ranked behind Bill Walton, someone who played a total of 468 games, or 5 1/2 full seasons, his entire NBA career.
Simmons concluded that Robinson “failed to dominate the NBA despite having every conceivable tool you’d want for a center.”
Yet such sky-high expectations cloud Robinson’s very real accomplishment, namely that he got dog meat teams to win a preposterous number of regular season games. Continue reading “Was David Robinson Actually Underrated?”