There were five outstanding articles this week that thought deserved mention.
First, two on the Pacers and their demise. The first of these is an article put up on ESPN.com on Wednesday, by Brian Windhorst and Mike Wells, which looks at several important questions we have about the Pacer's season, and goes into detail in giving the answer. The questions center on two players: Roy Hibbert and Lance Stephenson.
Basically, it sounds as if Hibbert's comment about "a lot of selfish people" in the locker room was devastating to the team and may have been the tipping point at which a dip into a performance after the All-Star Break became a full-blown slide into one of the worst seasons of a #1 seed ever. It was referring, it seems, to genuine trends in performance: Stephenson felt slighted being passed over for an all-star spot, and especially concerned for his own career going into free-agency this summer. Hibbert was referring to him. And yet going public with problems affected the whole team dynamic, shook everyone's confidence that they could handle their own situation from the inside, together with Larry Legend bringing in Evan Turner literally from the outside to bolster their playoff hopes.
It's odd: Hibbert seems stupid in hindsight to have said the things, as well as selfish himself. But it also shows how perceptive he is about his own game: he seems to have had foreknowledge of some sort that the way the team was working may have been setting him up for a massive decline in performance--which he subsequently did in fact go into. So it is also a sort of Catch-22 for him: he's trying to change a dynamic that is directly making himself play badly, and yet in doing so causing that very dynamic to exacerbate itself and cause him to play even worse.
It seems unlikely that Hibbert's actions would have actually done anything, however, and one wonders what would have happened had he been more specific and more personal in his complaints, rather than actually talking about the whole team. Because it wasn't "a lot of selfish people." It was one. And the problems, as far as Hibbert was concerned, were not immediately the team's, they were his own. If he would have confronted Lance more personally, perhaps, and behind the scenes, things might have gone better for everyone.
The article is full of information about this and other things--too much that can be recalled here. But one interesting tidbit for Blazer fans is the focus of the article on how our former coach Nate McMillan fits into all of this. It seems like with his first year on the job as an assistant, the team didn't quite feel comfortable in turning to him in these matters of conflict. They had previously depended a lot upon Brian Shaw, now coaching the Nuggets. McMillan is well positioned to go to a head coaching job with all the openings this year, though strangely he has been overlooked so far. And despite his protestations that he enjoys the job there in Indiana as an assistant, one has to believe that leaving the toxic situation there would not be the worst thing in the world for him.
Next on the Pacers, a piece by Grantland's Andrew Sharp on Paul George, deals with the missing piece of the equation. If Hibbert has put himself at the center of all of the Pacers' problems, George has actually embodied the problems of the Pacers most thoroughly. His streakiness in these playoffs has been strange to watch. But when he does well, the team is doing well. We lost sight of this in following Hibbert, who is much more essential to the success of the Pacers generally. But we remembered it in his absolutely amazing Game Four of the Miami series.
Sharp comes down to two conclusions, one of which is much more narratively friendly than the other. First, a very comprehensive paragraph, which comes down to this:
He’s basically the prototype wing that any team wants to build around, and he’s only going to get better over the next few years. If Andrew Wiggins turns into Paul George in four years, no sane basketball fan would dare call him a bust.
Then another paragraph, which comes down to this:
He’s Indiana’s superstar by default, but unless he gets hot taking all of those ridiculous 3s, he’ll generally leave you underwhelmed.
It's telling that the first involves a hypothetical, and a reference to the prototypical, and to future projections, while the second involves past tendencies, habits, repeated things we have witnessed. But what's odd about George is that both of them: as Sharp says, "the more we see him in these playoffs, the more I think both of those paragraphs are right."
It's a question though of which is easier to talk about, however. And it is definitely easier (for writers other than those on Grantland, who excel at considering the fictional or counter-factual) to talk about what could have been in terms of what is, than it is to talk about the actual in terms of the hypothetical. George is not entirely like James Harden, who is a player with a lot of potential who is beginning to squander it. But he has been put in the same position as Harden, and it is not hard to see his story being framed a similar way. They may well be similar players, actually: excellent role players, on teams where more than that is required of them. Who ask, essentially, that they carry the team. The difference is that George has a much wider skill-set, and so still genuinely, whatever the narrative says, seems like he could in fact rise to the occasion; Harden, it turns out, fits the role of role-player much better than as the fulcrum or lynchpin of an offense. But the door hasn't shut yet.
His victory, too, should he rise to the occasion, would be a much more moral one than Harden's: there is nothing quite at stake for Harden if he does well, other than glamour. He's already been in some way morally compromised as far as our story about him goes--we didn't quite find it too odd when pictures surfaced of him smoking hookahs with some women in Portland the day before Game 4 in that series. George, though, as Sharp details, referring back to an excellent 2013 profile by Lee Jenkins of SI, that George from quite a young age had to deal with putting things on his back, with carrying a group of people--namely his family, after his mother had a stroke. We ridicule the fishing trip that seemed to be responsible for Hibbert's turnaround, but I would never see Harden doing such a thing. And whilst he blamed "home cooking" for some of Indiana's problems in Miami, he distanced himself from Lance Stephenson's antics in a way that was generally tactful. His success is in some way the success of a genuinely good man over circumstances that would corrupt him or bring him low--which is perhaps why we want it so badly, and are so disappointed (and even suspect him of being morally compromised) when he doesn't deliver.
Next, a great article by Kirk Goldsberry at Grantland on Russell Westbrook, which manages to provide a different and more interesting narrative about him and his efficiency as a player than the ones to which we are used. Sometimes a look at a player's development has a way of cutting through the miasma of opinions hovering about him. Goldsberry lines up the stats throughout his career, and produces his patented (at least I hope he has it patented) graphic about them, and the results are interesting.
What they show is that indeed Westbrook develops as a player, and that whatever we think of his play, it is not through being mistaken in his execution. He has willed himself deliberately into this style of player, whatever that is. Particularly his "wild" pullup three, which is so arbitrary-seeming on the one hand, and so devastating on the other, when it goes in. And that makes things a bit more interesting. Westbrook clearly has some idea of the kind of player he wants to be and look like--it's just that we actually have no clear idea of what this is ourselves, nor how to evaluate it.
It explains something of what is so arresting, disturbing, about watching him: he has a very distinct style of play, despite the randomness. His playing style might be more similar to his manner of dress than we might suppose.
Goldsberry approaches saying something of this sort, though he doesn't quite get there. His point, which is a great one, is simply that his moments of brilliance are not to be depended upon, though in a way the fate of the Western Conference depends on them: because when he plays brilliantly, there is nothing that can really stop the Thunder.
There was, finally, another interesting story on psychology and its effect in the world of sports by Brian Shroeder at Hardwood Paroxysm. Shroeder talks about Donald Sterling's alleged alzheimer's disease, and does so with a personal narrative that is entirely, sadly typical of what the experience is like. What he refutes is the idea that because the disease messes with the mind, it makes the statements that are said somehow the statements of someone who is, effectively, mad.
That is, what makes Sterling's statements still his own--besides the long pattern of racism in his policies as a businessman (and which I myself think should count most in all this)--is precisely what makes alzheimer's disease so terrifying: it is indeed you who are saying the things, it is just that you also have forgotten who you are and what has happened to you. In madness, we become a different person, or different people; in alzheimers, we forget who we are.
And, because this is all quite depressing news about people succumbing to problems, I want to include one little story about overcoming, by Andrew A. McNeil at 48MinutesofHel.com. It's on Cory Joseph's unbelievable dunk in Game 4 right on the head of Serge Ibaka. The performance of Joseph throughout the series was amazing: not only in that game, but in last night's overtime series-clincher for the Spurs in which the Tony Parker did not even play in the second half. McNeil tries to give some sense of just what it meant to the Spurs, recalling just how scared the Spurs were of going into the paint in the previous game.
Joseph's dunk on Ibaka just showed a fearlessness that the Spurs absolutely needed at that moment. And a little craziness too. It was very Manu of him: that element of strangeness that sort of disregards the machine and the system and yet only by doing something even more right and brilliant than what Pop could come up with. As McNeil put it:
The Spurs showed no hesitation in Game 5 at going to the basket and mixing it up inside with Ibaka and the rest of the Thunder. It was like your mom turning on the light in your closet and showing you there were no monsters actually lurking there. You could be told so until the cows come home, but seeing is believing.
The Spurs have immense mental control--probably the best in the league. But sometimes actions are necessary, getting a little out of the head. It leaves you to wonder how this lesson didn't stick with the Pacers. But it did work for the Spurs. For a brief moment, the could stop thinking about everything they were thinking about, and engage in the benefits of forgetting--in a way, memory to the Spurs is something it is good to lose at times, given the memories of the OKC series in 2012 and in general just all the memories floating around due to how long the core players have been around the league. Being there before should dispel worries, but sometimes it creates ghosts and boogiemen. Joseph dispelled them entirely.
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