not so great expectations

well the season is underway and hs brought with it the weirdness that we can expect from the nba. the warriors, bulls, wizards, AND heat have combined for as many wins as the new orleans hornets. now, chris paul is pretty nice and shaq is five shades of washed up, but come ON. this time of year is typically odd though; the bulls literally always suck to open the season and every year there are articles talking about how they're quitting on skiles, or they're in some kind of mysterious decline. please relax america. the bulls will be fine. after the all-star break there will be a million and one articles about how the bulls have turned it around, how they're the hottest team in the league, scott skiles is a genius &c. not to say that i support skiles in any way, shape, or form; i think he's a nazi asshole that has no idea how to run an offense or even to hire someone that does know how to run an offense. that being said, the man can flat out coach defense like it's nobody's business. and that shit is valuable in this league.

(p.s. watch out for tom thibodeau, the lead celtics assistant to get a job next year. by all accounts he's the one behind both the suffocating D the rockets had this year AND the celtics dominance on the defensive end this year.)

speaking of the celtics, they're pretty much obscene. kg is playing like the mvp that we all know he should be yearly. honestly, he kind of scares the shit out of me. he's like a convict let out right into amsterdam or something with $1 million in his bank account. he probably sits at home giggling maniacly rubbing his hands together while the five hookers he's hired are doing blow from the mountain he has covering his dining room table. i realize that i've turned kg into scarface, but at this point he's about five wins in a row away from entering a state of nirvana so profound that he refuses to leave his bed. so my point is the celtics should start sucking soon or else he's going to be way too blissed out to even play basketball. or maybe he just drunk dials kevin mchale all the time and taunts him.

it's kind of gratifying to see a hyped up team of superstars come together so sublimely, especially in boston. there are serious questions in my mind as to whether the celtics or pats will be the first to lose. but seriously, it's good to be able to hate the celtics again is my main concern. combine that with a possible lakers resurgence and you have a pretty solid matchup down the road. more about the lakers tomorrow.

it seems oddly appropriate

that the bulls are the ones to knock off the heat. apparently tired of hearing how the heat were a "dangerous" team that people should "keep an eye on," skiles n co. dispatched the heat with a reckless abandon we all thought would be reserved to the cavs-wiz and pistons-magic debacles. the bulls and heat are two of my least favorite teams, especially since tyrus thomas and dorell wright are the only players on either squad with any type of flavor.

(anyone who says dwyane wade has flavor needs to get their head checked. he's the blandest vanilla.)


the heat were the typical nba team of the 90s/early 2000s--one superstar, a supporting "star," and a lot of crappy role players who float listlessly around the court until they're asked to do something vaguely important, like wash dwyane's car, or get shaq donuts, or lube up riley's hair. the bulls on the other hand are a college team for chrissakes. they're team is a glorified roster of all-americans and "proven winners" with big bad ben wallace thrown in for shits and giggles. the only appreciable member of the team that never did anything re: final fours or championships is p.j. brown, whose presence continues to mystify me. maybe he's an expiring contract? or perhaps skiles felt that having one person who couldn't score to save his life on the court at once wasn't enough, so he decided to roll with a second? that's probably it--p.j. brown is there just to add degree of difficulty to the bulls' conquests.

none of the bulls with the noted and notable exception of tyrus thomas have the sort of fiery athleticism that people commonly associate with the association. even luol deng, who seems like the second best candidate for the designation of athletic, is curiously ground-bound and dependent on his freakish arms to retain value. what does that translate to? boring basketball. sorry, but i'm not down to watch a team run their fancy-pants version of what is basically the weave for 20 seconds and then take a jumper. that just doesn't appeal to me.

even phoenix last year, which had almost zero in the way of reliable interior scoring, played and moved so fast, with such a masterful architect at its head, that they were tolerable to watch. but they also had the matrix providing some sick slams on occasion, and he gets far more run that tt could hope for.

the bulls play such a slow tempo, predicated mainly on their defense and someone, anyone, getting hot, that they're basically unbearable to watch. their coming series against the pistons will, objectively, suck.

Coming at you like Adebisi

We shoulda seen it coming. Dude tosses down a slam to be reckoned with on Shaq-fu and then has the gall to trade elbows with Shaq on his way downcourt. This one play seems to arbit greatness more so than a single game, even more than a single playoff series. It seemed no accident that Bynum took his schooling, sprinted downcourt, and made Shaq-fu his little prison bitch.
Enter this season: the Lakes' two top centers go down with assorted injuries, leaving only the untest Bynum to man the middle. Conventional wisdom says the Lakes are in serious goddamn trouble. Of course, Bynum is destined for greatness.

The only things holding him back are foul-proneness and PhilJax' notorious fickleness when it comes to young players. Bynum is far from a grizzly vet; at this point in his life he might be too full of enthusiam to contribute to a winning effort on a consistent basis. But that enthusiasm that holds him back also drives him forward, making him the semi-unstoppable force that he now is. If he continues to mature (and calm down) he will become what the Bulls only imagined when they called the name Edward Curry way back when.
Dude has an impressive motor, especially at his size. He's 7'0" and seems to have no trouble jumping and rejumping to either board or block with the other bigs. Basically, he's Dennis Rodman in Shaq-fu's body, but without the requisite craziness of the former, or the mumbling monolithicness of the latter. His game is predicated more on the boyish pursuit of acceptance from his teammates than Rodman's Lust for Life or Shaq's big bully dominance.

Bynum's maturation may bring untold wonders, or it may drag him down into the depths of Currydom, destroying his boyish joy for the game of basketball along with its mellowing and seasoning effects. If he can find some way to convince PhilJax to play him more often, perhaps that enthusiasm will remain, though tempered by the dulcet tones of sweet experience.

P.S. Andrew is in serious need of a nickname. Comment with you ideas.

NBA Eve

On the eve of the NBA season, we witness the passing of a legend. As tragic as his demise is, I have no frame of reference other than that provided by the occasionally good Sports Guy.

The man's death is tragic; no-one has meant more (sports-related) to a city probably ever. The only one who comes close is Larry Bird. Notice how all of these are in Boston.

Is that because Boston is so depressing that only sports give it meaning?

Or is it that Bill Simmons is the only column I read that deals with this shit?

We report, you decide.

* * *

City-wide days of mourning aside, a truly joyous time is about to happen on earth. Kicking off in Miami and LA, the season starts with two tantalizing matchups. Both match Conference Finalists against their first round opponents and both involve seriously talented 2-guards.

That's where the similarities end. Miami should be (in Lamar's estimation) the most hated champion in recent memory, whereas Phoenix will be (hopefully) the most loved in the near future. The Lakers and Bulls are both former products of that 90s-Early 00s star-centric system that placed a premium on acquiring one or two players with limitless talent and surrounding them with semi-crappy but cheap players.

If anything, the Suns take the Jordan Mandate to an extreme unrelated to it and yet ultimately so. Their #1 superstar is a formerly floppy-haired Canuck obsessed with the possibility that he can be defined not by supernatural gifts of his own, but rather that he gathers his worth from making the mundane abilities of his teammates somehow transcendent of the basketball norm.

The Suns revolve around Nash, but at the same time control him. He is Frankenstein, he creates the monster, but ultimately the monster makes its master the slave.

Because the Suns revolve so much around a singular star, one might say that they fit the Jordan Mandate perfectly, but that ignores the essential reality of Sunsiness.

Sunsiness means that they are more than the sum of their parts. They assemble a whole that functions together as a whole, but to which one part is so integral that without it the entirety of the system would collapse.

Nash is not only the defining factor of the Suns factory, but he is also the one most victimized by its existence as a seamless entity. Nash is defined by the Suns system--run and shoot, shoot and run--and struggles not to overcome it. He is nothing more than a worker in the Suns farm, and yet he owns the farm himself.

The Week(s) the Earth Stood Still

Marquis: Gone.
J.R. Smith: Gone.
Ben Wallace: A Bull.
Tyson Chandler and Peja Stojakovic: Hornets.

Simmons dropped a vintage performance today, mad love for this man's inclusion:

It's getting to be that he is perhaps the only soldier left in this increasingly maddening war.

The trades and signings have been nothing if not baffling. The Bulls sign a fading Ben Wallace, then flip his equally skilled, newly found teammate to the Hornets for a FreeDarko soldier and a washed-up vet with an $8 milly contract.

The Mavericks, no doubt flush with the quality minutes Keith Van Horn supplied them in the NBA Finals (Note: Jokes) swapped Marquis Daniels for AUSTIN MOTHERFUCKING CROSHERE.

Don't get it twisted; Croshere is a wonderful person I'm sure, but how many times does one of the premier young slashing guards in the Lig come knocking on your door, only to be sent to languish in the midst of cattle and sheep while you revel in the expiringness of his replacement's contract?

Yes, maybe I am a little bitter the Lakers didn't trade for him. So, what?

Here's hoping the Hornets are launched into an ecstasy of success, led by Chris Paul and Tyson Chandler. I only wish JR was there to see it.

In Which the NBA Finals are Discussed

The Finals are a foregone conclusion. The Mavericks are running over the Heat like they should be, and anybody who thought the Heat had a chance didn't watch one of two things. Either they ignored the 2004 Monster of Loch Angeles that fell short against the New Wave-y Pistons squad, or the Heat team that looked like borderline garbage against the Bulls.

The Bulls a fine basketball team, don't get me wrong, but they're a team chock full of All-Americans who will do little until a transcendent star is thrust into their midst. Maybe that star is Hinrich, maybe not.

The Mavs will be champions, like it or not, and we will see if the rest of the league tries to copy
their formula. If they do, they will be missing the essential point: there is no formula. Time and again the Mavs have beaten squads that set themselves on one way of winning. The Spurs were gobbled up by the speed of the Mavericks, as well as their twin 7-footers, who hung on Duncan at every turn.

The Suns too were destroyed by the Mavs, by speed as well, although it was their own that did them in. The Mavericks played the waiting game, running with the Suns on the fast break until gradually Snash lost control of his Extraordinary Machine and it whirled off into the night, perhaps to be seen next year.
Hopefully, teams will take the Mavericks lesson and run with it. Really, the message doesn't even belong to its purveyor; the entire Playoffs has been nothing if not a manifesto on the success of different systems.

They have been so exciting not because of the quality of teams, though that has helped, but because of the diversity with which each attacks the Fundamental Question:
How do we win basketball games?

In Which the Relative Goodness or Badness of Each and Every NBA Player is Discussed

If a basketball player has made it to the NBA, he has proved something. Namely, he has proved that he has at least one skill that is applicable to basketball at the highest level.

So many teams make the mistake of correctly evaluating that a player is good (i.e. he belongs in the league) but do not understand the basis of his goodness. There are so many cases in point that it's downright hard to count them all, so we'll look at one man: Timothy Mark Thomas.

Drafted with the 7th pick of the 1997 draft, Thomas was drafted by the New Jersey Nets, who then flipped him to the Philadelphia 76ers. Based on what we know about draft order, 7th is very high (it is, in fact, Top 10). Because of that, we can assume that Thomas was oozing with potential. Now that we've established his potential, we must look at how it has been misused.

Long thought of as a "low-effort" guy, it is very possible that Tim Thomas never found the right system for himself. Even within the freewheeling Bucks offenses Thomas felt constricted and not used correctly.

He was then dealt to the Knicks, who spun him to the Bulls. The Bulls, who saw him as an overpaid basket case with an expiring contract, promptly mothballed him; he was instructed to stop showing up.

One of those organizations is a well-run one (Hint: it's not the Knicks).

That well-run organization ignored the meritous play of Thomas, by basically admitting that he had no use to them whatsoever. This is true-- Tim Thomas is a completely awful player. For the Bulls.

The Bulls granted him his release and he signed with the Suns, where he single-handedly carried them past the Lakers and into the Conference Finals. (Yes, he did carry the Suns past the Lakers, observe the 7/8 3-point performance in Game 1.) We can therefore assume that Thomas is a great player. For the Suns.

Very rarely is such a dichotomy observed in a single player within the scope of a single season.

(The only other that leaps to mind is Desagna Diop, who went from 1st round bust for the Cavs to dominant defensive force for the Mavs. Lesson: big Africans have their uses, always.)

However, the dichotomy wasn't a dichotomy so much as it was a realization of talent that was always there and recognized, but that had never been tapped by a team and system sufficiently equipped to tap it. Only in rare cases may a player flourish in any and all systems. For the vast majority of players, success is roughly equal to how intelligent the team is in their usage and role. Darko could not give the Pistons anything from his role as Left Out, but he can contribute shot blocking and outside scoring to the Magic, a team willing to overlook some of his flaws and love him for what he is: a big European who can stroke the J.