Morning Roundup, May 22, 2014: Lingering Draft feels, The SpursMachine, a Blazer-ing summer

Morning, all.  Time for the morning roundup of interesting NBA writing.

There is still lingering resentment over the draft that has to be worked through our collective psyche.  We have to just cope with the trauma of it, and it's going to take some time.  Over at Ballerball.com, Chandler Goodman has assembled some random thoughts on the Cavs that help.  They are a mixture of pretty much all the various stages of grief.  Smack dab in the middle of it all however is what seems to me the most important thought: that basically, if they screw this up, they'll never hear the end of it.  "It doesn’t seem possible that they draft one of these three guys, become a 50 win team and fringe contender for the next decade, then retire quietly into the annals of history," he says.  This pick has brought their saga to another level.  It's no longer mid-market drama being played out anymore: it's the rest of the basketball community suffering until Cleveland gets its damn act together.  That is, it's not a local farce, it's a national disaster. We simply can't have this happen this many times and dismiss the problems of this organization as sort of sidelights: with them, the fate of many things larger than them--what it means to rebuild a team, what it means to exist as a small market team--now seems entwined.  As Goodman puts it:

"It seems like they either add a second star, sign a third in free agency, hire a Hall of Fame coach, and win 2-3 titles, or they become the first team in the history of anything to whiff on back-to-back number one picks, re-hire Mike Brown because why not, strike out in free agency, Kyrie and Dion fight to the death, Tristan Thompson switches back to shooting jumpers with his left hand before giving up on offense all together, and Johnny Manziel eventually starts running point in a marketing ploy gone horribly wrong. These are the only two ways this plays out in my mind."

In short, if they blow this, they're toast.  They're far surpassing any other team in the pantheon of NBA stupidity and incompetence and failure, and they're doing so not just on some sort of small stage--they're not some backwater anymore after getting this much luck, they're now the United States of America's small-market disaster.  And they either need to put up or shut up.  We may always remember Portland choosing Sam Bowie over Jordan, but if they make mistakes, we'll never, ever forget how the Cavs dropped the ball after getting 3 number one picks in 4 years.  I'll be doing something random a couple years from now--peeling an orange or something--and just do the biggest facepalm and curse the Cavs to high heaven for being so incredibly dumb and letting a great city (actually a whole great region) down.  And I won't be the only one.

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But the draft is the draft, and it's not ultimately as exciting as what's going on on the court in these Playoffs.  The real story of today is the Spurs, and Manu, Timmy, and Tony surpassing Magic, Kareem, and Michael Cooper for most trio with playoff wins ever.  Ever.  This is indeed historic.  And the challenge for the writers today was to somehow give people some sense of just how impressive this is.

I've been interested myself in just how we keep trying to come up with metaphors for the Spurs, and keep failing at getting at them.  Maybe that is a testament more than anything to what they are: we keep thinking we've got the right way to understand them, and then they do more and more of that thing, and it looks like something we've never seen before and have no name for.  We have the feeling continually that we should have a name for this--but find out we don't.  Machine is just about as close as anyone has gotten, and yet I'm feeling a consensus growing that the word itself is inadequate: that what they do is much more than mechanical, if it produces these kinds of results.

Over at Ballerball alongside Goodman's piece is Jason Gallagher's stab at trying to do beyond that static, mechanical analogy.  He makes a comparison between the Spurs and "24," trying to give us a sense that what we are seeing is really a form of reliability.  In this, he compares them to Jack Bauer--and I think the comparison is apt because it gets at how Jack is sort of boring, since he fills out the role you expect of him, and yet continually surprises you with his ability to insert himself at every moment he needs to be present at. The show has played on this for so long, in so many different contexts: Jack will be unreachable at some moment, we see a cell-phone dropped on the ground and someone yelling "Jack! Jack come quick!" out of it... only to see Jack break down a door and return to kick ass. You can always count on Jack--and you feel like you should kick yourself for every time you doubted him.  "It’s like we fall in and out of coma every year, completely forgetting about the reliability of Jack Bauer and the San Antonio Spurs," Gallagher says:

"Have we ever seen anything as reliable as Jack and the Spurs? Yet, we constantly doubt them, making excuses based off of false narrative for why these two have “lost it.”  It’s the same old story every season on 24, and sadly… every season in the NBA.  We doubt the Spurs. We gravitate towards cooler teams, ignoring the thing that rarely ever lets us down. We realize the Spurs are still reliable and we should have trusted that all along. Rinse and repeat.  America needs to wake up."

Matt Moore doesn't see reliability in their consistency so much as determination.  At Eye on Basketball he writes a panegyric to Tim Duncan's sweat, making the excellent point that the Spurs have never, like other dynasties, had to shake things up at some point, and shuffle things around.  They never had to, Moore says, because of the particular character of the trio's work ethic, and how it shows in everything they do on the court in games:

"I always tell friends my favorite part of any Spurs game is before it," Moore says. "Tim Duncan, NBA veteran beyond eons, comes out and goes through his pre-game warm up with an assistant. And it's not 'getting some shots up.' He's not lazily joking with staff or fans while tossing up threes. He goes into a series of blistering, killer post moves that could knock through a brick wall. He sweats. He grunts. He claps his hands and screams... when he misses a hook shot in pre-game warmups."

SBNation's Mike Prada has a wonderful little breakdown of one of the most beautiful pieces of execution we've seen all playoffs.  For him the magic word is something like rigorousness:



"Many NBA guards can make this pass at the perfect moment," as he puts it.  "Only Ginobili can make it one-handed and on target at the perfect fraction of a second. Before anyone knew it, Green had a wide-open three."  The Spurs are the entity that can push players to take advantage of that kind of skill level, can make that type of unique skill into an integral part of a consistent offensive threat.

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Finally, Joe Freeman and Casey Holdahl have post-season Blazer news for us Rip City fans!  I've been bad at representing the Blazers here recently with all the playoff action going on, and I promise a couple pieces on them in the next few days--along with a lengthy look at Wes Matthews I've been working on all this time.  But in the meantime these guys have done the work for me, making a new podcast yesterday (I should also mention that Holdahl a couple days ago also wrote a great piece looking back at the season as a whole, also very informative).  The main highlights include some great evaluations of the players and their plans for the summer given in their exit interviews, talk about where the Blazers go from here and what they do next year, and answers to readers questions.  These, strangely, have a lot to do with the draft--to which Joe and Casey just have to reply politely that the Blazers have absolutely nothing to do with this Draft, not just because they made the playoffs of course but also because they have all the pieces in place they need to move forward, and it will be just a question of adding and filling spots.  I'll make their point perhaps more directly: people, they've taken care of everything this year, and you should be thankful for that, because lord knows the Draft isn't our forte.  It's just a matter of tweaking and adding pieces.  It's only after next season that any big shifts can happen.  Thank the little baby Threesus, we're solid, finally, and on the way to something really, really good next year.

Morning Roundup, May 21, 2014: MURDER!!

So, the big story of today is, of course, that the Cleveland Cavs killed the NBA with the candlestick in the library...or that room whereever they hold the draft.

Above is Bill Simmons' reaction, which, as usual with his reactions (WOAH!), was priceless ("This is MURDER!" as Sage Steele was quick to point out).  You have to love the man, volunteering his emotions for the benefit of all of us.  Simmons had a wonderful must-read karma ranking article yesterday over at Grantland which was extremely sane, if you buy the basic premise: basically you deserve a good pick if your team worked hard, you have tried to run a pretty tight ship management-wise for the past few years, and you're due for something good happening to the team.  Based on that, if everything went right, and luck went to who it should have gone to, Simmons concluded, then the chance at a top pick would go to the Suns, Celtics, Nuggets, Pistons, Bucks, Jazz, Lakers, Pelicans, Magic, Sixers, Kings, Wolves, and the Cavs--in that order. He ranked Boston too high--I would have put the Pistons higher--but one can see something of the logic that must have been behind it: if one of the factors in getting a high pick is that you have to be in a city who is hurting sports-wise and is in need a real basketball team--and has a demonstrated record of having a really excellent basketball fanbase--then Boston definitely qualifies as up there.  Definitely much more than Cleveland.  And it probably does even though they have the Bruins--something I Simmons didn't quite factor in.  What makes up for that was simply the fact that Boston seemed like they tried this year, as he says, while it is a travesty what the 76ers did and what they ended up with (3rd)--they definitely don't deserve the karma they got. That said, everything turns on your idea of what "trying" is (if it is finding some way to keep Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, instead of trading them and sort of leaving the year to some mysterious rebuilding process--well then you may not think they deserve it); and, regardless, Philly also has an argument for being bereft of NBA action too long over Cleveland.  Well, I can't keep using Cleveland here--pretty much everyone now deserves a shot over the city of Cleveland.  I think he ranked the Bucks too low, but he factored in how they basically got to keep their franchise rather than getting it shipped over to Seattle, so that seems fair.  It was a complicated system he worked out, really it was: the key for Simmons is he is also looking at what provides the best situation from a fan perspective--and the fun thing about this is it basically produces wacky, polarizing results which are, however, incredibly civic-minded and prize local connections. I think though with that taken seriously, ultimately Detroit was ranked too low too, along with perhaps Sacramento--two teams that have turned it around and tried really hard to do so (though the Kings pretty much have already been rewarded a little too much), and who have amazing fans.  In the end though, the reality of the situation is that the actual results we got were much more dissatisfying than anything you could say about his list: Cavs, Bucks, Sixers, Magic, Jazz, Celtics, Lakers, Kings, Hornets (because the Pistons didn't get a high enough pick, so that their pick gets swapped with Charlotte), Nuggets, Wolves, Suns--this isn't too great.  The Suns got screwed, the Sixers were undeservedly rewarded, and Denver also got screwed.  Overall, though, the best thing about this, as some people are saying, may be that now, instead of the Harden trade, Simmons be crapping on just how freaking horrible the Cavs are for the next year, and how much their fans deserve better from their management rather than the NBA as a league (which they do).  In the end, the article was too fascinating really for me to sum up here--I think I'll write something on it separately and on Simmons in general.  But it is a must read.

Jim Cavan at Bleacherreport also has a must-read collection of player reactions to the draft.  Highlights: Brandon Jennings in disbelief and befuddlement, with the quick retraction along the lines of, well, you can't hate the Cavs really once you think about it (which is true--you can only hate their management); Kendall Marshall with the outraged confusion, which produces eventually the speculation that the Cavs practice black magic; Demarcus Cousins with a cynicism it has been somewhat surprising and depressing to see him exhibit recently; Austin Rivers asking Kyrie Irving blatantly just how they do this--not to be snarky, just in a kind of wonderment and genuine desire to actually learn what on earth they do so that he himself might take it to management and prescribe it; Quincy Miller with the far-reaching storyline projection that this means LeBron will go back to Cleveland; and Dahntay Jones with the devastating reflection that "all that tanking was for nothing." For us Portland fans, Batum had simply this to say: "Again?!?!"

But it may have been the most apt comment, the most generally felt sentiment--though Simmons' reaction also ranks up there.  It was certainly the reaction of everyone at the Lottery itself, it seems, as Zach Lowe reports in his great dispatch from the event.  "People just kind of laughed when they won the no. 1 pick."  What's most interesting is this tidbit: "I am almost frightened that Cohen might be a warlock, and I asked him after the lottery if it is tempting after all these wins to believe he can influence events that would appear beyond his control. 'I’ve always believed you create your own luck,' he said."  This seems like a semi-reasonable response to such a question, which already is not entirely rational.  But as soon as Cohen expanded upon it, things began to look quite odd: "'Luck just isn’t sitting there. You have to believe you are entitled to it. You have to see it, to visualize it. It doesn’t always work, but three years out of four, I mean, that’s pretty good.'"  Cohen talks as if the result were a result of some kind of effort: "that's pretty good," is what you say if you've made some sort of attempt to win what is a random event, and not just this year, but EVERY YEAR.  It focuses on the failure, as if that one time they didn't get it, they were doing something wrong, which they could correct.  And that's just weird.  That way lies madness, one has to console oneself in thinking.  But that just seems also to be the attitude of each of the teams, really.  The Sixers really sound like they think they deserved the number one pick, and that they were disappointed with number 3: Philly took the slide back to no. 3 in stride. 'I guess part of you wants the no. 1 pick, just to have the option,' O’Neil said. 'But having two lottery picks, plus Nerlens coming back to join the Rookie of the Year — I’ll take that every day and twice on Sunday.'" This somewhat makes sense--the expected number one pick, Joel Embiid, is a huge deal, and would instantly change the dynamic of a team for the better.  And indeed there is much more that goes on in working towards success than just winning games: these are effectively media empires, these franchises, each one of them, and the work they do is noble, even if their team tanks in the actual contests.  They are a part of the cities they play in, they are a part of the communities of fans that they build.  At the same time, shouldn't these people just be thankful that they get a chance to be really close to the number one pick at all?  As we found out, we really have no clue what will happen.

Finally, a very good article by Mike Mayer at the SBnation Cavs blog, Fearthesword.com, going through all the implications of the no. 1 pick.  "The draft and the lottery are about hope: the hope that our team might get back to that place again, sooner rather than later. Hope is a powerful thing, especially for fans who have rooted for a team near the bottom of the conference for the last four seasons. Hope is all we've had. But it won't be enough anymore."  This hits the nail on the head.  Sports ultimately, as I said in another column, are about results, not hope.  They model for us what excellence in productivity looks like, the translation of effort and practice into reality (pace Allen Iverson, who was absolutely right about this, as with many other things).  They don't model hope for us, yearning, all of that.  At least professional sports don't: college sports can do the dirty business of monetizing those types of things; the pros are cleaner than that, more transparent.  And so a city and fanbase absolutely is more in the right in wanting results, always, than in wanting things more abstract: they therefore should, this year, absolutlely it from management, and be up in arms at every single moment in which the organization fails to live up to their expectations.  If the Cavs don't turn things around this year, they need to take a cue from the Knicks fanbase, and start making signs and posters.  This is a real opportunity: scrutiny will be on the organization--as Mayer points out--and in a way the fans now have the chance to, by way of changing expectations, change the type of product that they are getting.  This is what I take him to be claiming when he says the following: "Plenty of people have said that this organization doesn't deserve all of the luck they've had. Maybe that's true. But I know this: Cavs fans absolutely do deserve it."  Essentially, the fanbase simply has to get its confidence back and learn to demand the excellence that before i silently hoped for.  Key to this--which Mayer doesn't mention, except in passing--is getting over the whole Lebron thing.  I'm speaking of a Portland fan who is absolutely frustrated at all the talk of Oden and how that worked out.  They need to envision a future where they build a team that can actually win against a Miami Heat team with Lebron still on it--not keep wishing for someone to come back.  Get over it, people, and look towards the future and what can be done now that the situation is different, or simply not the same as it was.

Morning Roundup, May 20, 2014: Shameful extroversion, DiaOWW, terrifying complex organisms, Hibbert a PR genius?

Danny Green's shameful display of extroversion courtesy of Hardwood Paroxysm

Well, it's morning in Hawaii still, I think.  Got around to this a little later than I wanted to.  Will be a bit smaller than usual, hopefully, because I got a lot of other content to put up here (game recap, that analysis of The Hand article I promised yesterday, plenty of gifs), but here you go:

Trevor Zickgraf at 48MinutesofHell has a wonderful collection of the twitter comments as the game unfolded last night.  There were several discursive regularities the debate in the public sphere raged on, and out of this the collective will of the citizenry expressed itself in a few consensus-built proposals.  They were: That Serge Ibaka's absence from this series will make it a sweep.  That Danny Green's ta-da pose (see above, and also the shot, which deserved such a reaction) signals the immanent corruption of Spurs internal culture, and leads one to speculate their atrocious lack of discipline, if it continues, may threaten to doom the franchise.  That Boris DiaOWWW's eyeball is made of adamantine, since it was apparently strong enough to withstand Steven Adams trying to gouge it out with his massive steamshovel fingers.  That Aron Baynes is the best person on the planet.  That small ball doesn't work for OKC. That Charles Barkley doesn't know what the hell he is talking about, as usual.  That Tim Duncan in the postgame continues to make fashion statements that would make Russell Westbrook blush.

J.A. Adande has the leader of the day (well, sorta yesterday, but I'm counting it as today) at ESPN.com: "We've been suckered by the San Antonio Spurs. We spend so much time hammering on the "Team, team, team" concept that they preach that we forget they can present some hellacious individual matchups."  His great article explains how this 2013-14 Spurs team is far from being the team-centered sort of "machine" we all talk about--something I myself have been harping on continually this year to friends until I was blue in the face (thank you, Grant, for getting me to the emergency room all those times).  The truth is it is full of players who are so good at what they do, in so many ways, that they produce huge matchup problems.  The team concept produces the roles for the individuals, and the individuals that fit the roles become something better than the team concept.  Ken Berger's great, thorough article in April got at just how productive this "adaptability" of the Spurs is for the development of individual talent.  You heard it here first, folks: the right metaphor for the Spurs system is not a "machine," but something more along the lines of a complex organism.  It's less like a machine than one of those transcendent freaking self-aware blobs that will eventually become our overlords.  Specifically, in one aspect: individual elements produce fields of action within which the individual effort becomes more effective than if it were working by itself.  Then, in turn, its collective contribution then becomes through feedback more than the individual actually could produce.  The upshot?  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Harvey Araton in the New York Times has a nice good article on how Hibbert is "stabilizing" the Pacers, not unlike what Tom Ziller said yesterday.  Except this dwells on his "sensitivity."  There are some good quotes: "He wants to be a guy we depend on," David West tells Araton.  This is significant, coming from West--who really is the guy the Pacers actually depend on.  That "wants" contains a lot of ambiguity.  It's interesting to speculate on whether West thinks Hibbert has actually become that guy yet in a positive sense.  Because in a negative sense, it's certainly come true: essentially, the Pacers now do depend on Hibbert, in the sense that if he doesn't show up, they don't win games.  Maybe threatening the team in this way, was ultimately Hibbert's only way of really sort of attaining something of that role.  Obviously this wouldn't be conscious--it's just the fact that sometimes human behavior takes a pattern whereby it gets a result along lines that in retrospect look like they achieve their goals less directly than indirectly.  Of course, that hurts his career in the future, but for now, it definitely secures for him what he wants.  This, however, contributes to a stranger impression you get after reading the piece and thinking about the whole arc of the Hibbert story, and comparing the attention Hibbert is now getting to the relative lack of attention that Paul George--by far their most essential player--receives.  At the beginning of this whole situation, some writers noticed that it was Hibbert who was becoming the scapegoat of the team, and speculated this was because of something unfair.  But maybe it was sought out (mostly unconsciously, of course).  Because in the end, by doing so he also risked something that George didn't risk: namely, the glory of ending up being the "savior" of the team.  George puts up 20-30 a night semi-consistently now and we don't say a word: he is averaging the highest field goal percentage and (in so many games this has been crucial) the highest three-point percentage of his career in the playoffs (44% and 42%, per Basketbal-reference.com); in the Washington series he put up 18, 11, 23, 39, 15, and 12 points, and in the first game against the Heat he had 24, together with 4 rebounds and 7 assists; he has been positive in the plus-minus category in 10 out of the 14 playoff games played already--not too bad given how cruddy things have been.  Hibbert puts up 10 and we freak out.  It's the wrong sort of risk to take, morally speaking, but it was a risk nonetheless that George didn't dabble with.  And now Hibbert seems to be reaping the rewards from it, becoming the "erratic" team's stabilizer.

Morning Roundup, May 19th, 2014: Hands, Turbo Meters, the Pacers' ADHD and more

Every morning/early-afternoon I'll be gathering together a set of interesting links to whatever is happening in NBA coverage and analysis:

The best story of today is by far Scott Cacciola's profile of Kawhi Leonard's hands.  Sam Manchester's brilliant graphic will hopefully save Kawhi from any more of those encounters where people want to compare their hands with his.  "Fans have been known to stop Leonard to take photographs--not necessarily of him but of his hands with their hands," Cacciola writes. Either that or it will only increase demand...  I'll have more on Kawhi and Cacciola's article myself in a little while here, but for now perhaps this only adds to my case that "The Hand" is really his true nickname, however sweet "Sugar K. Leonard" may be.

Tom Ziller at SBNation has a very rich article on how essential Roy Hibbert was to the defense of Indiana last night in their victory over the Heat.  It doubles too as an explanation as to why Hibbert was so inessential to the games against Atlanta and Washington, and how he got beat there.  Essentially, he says, he had to contest or come out on so much shooting, that he couldn't establish himself in the paint and could get beat.  Here's where that stat "feet traveled" or whatever it is will come in handy once they import it from D-League to the NBA: we really do underestimate just how much doing one or two things extra can tire a player out or effectively, not just through positioning but through effort, disable him for the rest of the play.  News flash: players really do have a version of that "turbo meter" you always minded so vigilantly in video games. It also speculates on Hibbert's inability to "compartmentalize" the efforts of his game, as one of the origins of so many of his struggles.  This is definitely right, and worth noting, because we don't bring enough attention to it as it applies to defense (just like we don't bring enough attention to defense in general, really): if what defines your game, if what makes you an All-Star, is your defensive capabilities, and they get shut down or taken away, it can become hard from an effort standpoint to find the motivation to contribute in other areas.  If your chief talent isn't working, your whole game suffers.  This, according to Ziller, definitely is what happened in the first two series of the playoffs.  It is the type of drama that was entirely absent last night, since Miami is just built to involve Hibbert on defense and essentially give him a lot of opportunities to shut them down.

James Herbert over at CBS's Eye on Basketball has a good little piece on Lance Stephenson's importance in the last game, which was simply amazing.  He in particular pays attention to the Heat's reaction to Lance's little joke that he wants to make Wade's knee ache in guarding him. "Reporters tried to see if the Heat would make it a war of words," Herbert says, "but they weren't having it."  More interesting are the Pacers' reactions to Lance: "Instead of settling on offense... they asserted their will," Herbert paraphrases Paul George as saying.  The impression one gets from all this is that this team is truly a bizarre entity: they need to continually slap themselves in the face, douse themselves in cold water, remind themselves they are playing a basketball game. It's as if they're little kids with ADHD running around on the court, and need to distract themselves out of their distractions. You can call this "asserting your will" if you like, but it sounds more desperate.  It also seems to get at what Lance is all about though, and why he might be hugely valuable to this team.  George Hill, insofar as he approximated Lance in this game, and kept pushing the ball at strange moments, definitely helped them out.  Bill Simmons has been stressing how thoroughly Lance is a wildcard this year: maybe the opposite, Herbert speculates, is the case.  "The Pacers offense looked as smooth as it has in a long while, with Stephenson's controlled chaos unleashed in bursts."  That's a sentence full of, like, two or three self-contradictions and a couple oxymorons: we have controlled chaos, bursts unleashed, smoothness through disruption.  But it's perhaps getting at the complicated, backwards nature of how the Pacers work: Lance is maybe the shot in the arm that makes their jerky system flow.

Finally, getting ready for Spurs vs. OKC tonight, we have Project Spurs' Jose Grijalva's great, great article on why Tiago Splitter will be the X-factor in this series.  And it turns out this is not just because he has the best name-that-is-also-a-job-description in the NBA.  Basically--what the Spurs still can't believe--Serge Ibaka won't be there, and this gives Splitter everything he needs to dominate in the paint.   Ibaka's not just effective and dominant, Grijalva says, "he's also been their most intelligent player:" "his smarts to not give out unnecessary fouls and not get frustrated when guarding the rim has been an important and underrated part of his game. Now the Thunder put their hopes of three big men to protect the basket who really have no experience at it."  And this is important, Grijalva says, because the Spurs are just too good now on the pick-and-roll.  Ibaka could effectively show on Parker and not give up the quick shot, and get back in time to Splitter to give him a tough time of it going to the basket--and if he didn't, you could absolutely depend on him to get a hand up to try and block the shot from behind.  Without Ibaka, Splitter can put up huge points, because the Thunder will have to work all the harder to contain Parker.  Behind this story lies another major point: namely that Splitter is not only hugely better this year than he was last year, but also more coordinated, more physical, and more balanced.  He uses his body on the pick-and-roll with much more effectiveness than anyone saw last year, indeed in a very Robin Lopez like fashion.  That Lopez himself had such troubles defending him (though the Blazers were horrible at their pick-and-roll defense against the Spurs), speaks to this.  "Whether they put Steve Adams or Nick Collison on him, [Splitter will] have the edge after playing against Robin Lopez and Samuel Dalembert taking care of the basket," Grijalva says.  "This may be the most wide open the basket has been for him this playoffs."