Misc - NBA

Who you gonna believe?While the NBA is focused on beginning another NBA season (and by the way, the TV ratings for the opening night were through the roof) former league referee Tim (the worm) Donaghy is doing his best to con unsuspecting lemmings out of another million bucks with his would-be book. If you want to understand my rant, simply read (please read) these excerpts.

I’ve already indicated which teams I think will be the top three in each Conference. But, what about the other 24? This is not intended to be an analysis. Unless you are a particular fan of one of the 24 second bananas, you probably don’t care. So, my reason for posting this is so that at the end of the season, I (or you) can go back and see what a moron I was. And, as always, there will be a team or two that will make me look like one.

Best in the West?If you are an NBA fan, you know the season started last night. Yesterday, I previewed the East. My pick? Cleveland. They were at home Tuesday against Boston who I said were “just too old”. Of course, the Celtics won. But, the beauty of the NBA is that they play 82 games. Boston started the last two seasons at a blistering pace – 27-2 and 29-3. But, age and injuries slowed them down. Expect it to happen again in 2009. As to the West…

Life as a Clipper fanWhen the Clips won the lottery, I wrote… “Griffin Doomed”. I proceeded to list all the problems LA’s top draft picks have had in Clipland. Of course, what brings this up is that hours before the NBA season begins, the overwhelmingly best player in the draft, the #1 pick of the Clippers, Blake Griffin, is diagnosed with a stress fracture of the left patella (kneecap) and could miss the rest of 2009.

Beast in the East?As you know, if you are a fan, the season starts tonight. Like any season, there are favorites to win it all. Like most seasons, the most likely candidates have improved their teams on paper. Like all seasons, most of those teams will do worse than they did the year before. The problem for us is trying to figure out why they will do worse. It’s odd, but that’s how it works.

Not a bad starting five.As I mentioned yesterday, I've gone through dozens of mock drafts. The consensus was based upon that. However, I decided to concentrate only on the best known for this report. Nobody cares about “NBA Basement Draft Analysis Part Time On The Weekends”… dot com, but Yahoo, CBS, NBC, SI, S-News, etc. are likely to get the average fan’s attention.

2009 NBA DraftThere are a lot of “gurus” out there making their predictions about who will be picked at what place in the draft tonight. After reviewing dozens of these lists, I could probably make at least an equally educated guess. Rather than that, I figured I would simply report. One question is whether the consensus will be more accurate than any individual list.

Red Auerbach - Coaching LegendUnlike my Kobe versus Michael discussion yesterday, this one at least can be argued either way – although I lean toward Jackson. The thing about coaching (unlike playing) is that almost any coach can be seen as great if he has great players. There is no particular reason to believe Jackson or Auerbach are better coaches than a hundred other people. They just happen to have had a tremendous roster. I’m not even sure but what I couldn’t have coached a few championships with the likes of Jordan, Pippen, O’Neal and Bryant. But, like anything else, it’s not about what might have been, but rather about what was.

There IS only one!I’m sorry if this is too adamant for your tastes, but anyone who thinks Kobe Bryant is in Michael Jordan’s league needs their head examined! There’s no way. Now, having said that, a legitimate question can be asked – that is whether Kobe will ever be in MJ’s league? That’s still open. Anything is possible, but I doubt it will ever come to pass and I think the reasons are obvious.

2009 ChampionsThere has been a lot of talk about how this Lakers’ team isn’t that good – and I’m not foolish enough to try to argue that they are as good as some of the best teams in NBA history. However, a valid argument can be made that they are in the group just below them. The question, as always in my world, is how do you measure something like this without personal bias or subjectivity? Here is a relatively simple way to do it.

Bryant Wade Paul JamesI’ve been hearing this for 25 years and I’m sick of not being able to argue against it. You hear a lot of generalizations about the NBA compared to most sports – everyone travels, nobody plays defense, the last two minutes take a week and a half, etc. And, as to those three things, two of them are definitely true. However, the “stars getting the calls” has always bugged me because I’ve never thought it was particularly true and I’ve watched many many hundreds – if not thousands - of NBA games in my life.

Clash of the TitansDo what Orlando did Tuesday night! No seriously, you can’t expect to shoot 70% from the field and you can’t expect to get 18 points out of Pietrus and 20 out of Alston. You can’t expect to be at home every game. And, forget about the fact that the Lakers won 65 games this season when Kobe was obviously coasting (by comparison).  Nevertheless, there is a secret (sort of) and I’m going to tell you what it is.

Two for the title.I don't spend much time on the NBA in this forum, as there is a limited audience for it in KC, what audience there is I serve by writing for the print edition and my NBA writing Jones is satiated by my work for Basketball Prospectus. I've been immersed in Finals talk all morning in a series of radio segments for Fox News Radio -- a geographical melange of experiential discovery. What I've learned: Nothing. Anyway, I wanted to link up to some of my NBA work on the Finals and if you would like to discuss anything NBA-related, drop a comment and we'll do it. Also, give your pick. I'd like to see a sampling of KC opinion on this subject. OK: Here is the preview I did for this morning's Star. Here is a discussion I had with my colleague at Prospectus, Kevin Pelton. And here is the leaderboard for the playoffs in WP82 (wins produced per 82 games), which is the core metric in my NBA evaluation system. This is the statistic I used through the season in my weekly Fastbreak feature for the paper.

Far more believable!Now that I have your attention… It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise rational people can be so irrational about conspiracy theories. I don’t know if they all began with JFK or if that just happens to be the oldest of them which blossomed in their internet minds a few decades later. Either way, if we were living in the 1890’s, the buzz would be that Lincoln shot Booth, ran into a movie theater and had plastic surgery. The whole mindset of these people is bizarre, to say the least.

"Sheesh! Not THEM again!"I started becoming a big NBA fan around 1983. By 1986, I had written my first book on the league. In those days, of course, the NBA truly was FAN-tastic. A lot has changed over the years – some rules here and there, a few new franchises, the scourge of the defense-dominated post-Pistons’ championships, etc. Only three things have not changed – David Stern (the Good), LA Clippers (the Bad) and LA Clippers (the Ugly).

The Apex of a CareerOne of my first entries on UFR was a recap of Paul Pierce’s NBA career. At the time, he was the biggest star of the defending champions. I don’t think anyone realistically considered him in the Bryant/James/Wade category, but he was certainly in the next group. Now that he has completed 11 seasons, I thought it would be appropriate to measure him by a variety of ways. Between MU, KSU and KU, there really aren’t any present players who can compete with Pierce based on what he has accomplished in the NBA. So, it’s primarily on that score (not KU) that I’m going through this exercise.

Did Moses work as hard in the regular season as he did in the playoffs?The folks at Slate wanted me to investigate and, more importantly, quantify the answer to the question posed in the post title. Here are the results of my effort. My analysis aside, I don't think it's necessarily true, at least in the sense that NBA players don't turn up the volume any more than they do in any other sport's postseason. However, the NBA has more of a reputation for players slacking off in the regular season. Not sure why that is.

King JamesIn case there was any remaining question about who would be voted NBA MVP, that was laid to rest Monday. LeBron James was overwhelmingly voted the league MVP. The voting was even more dominant than my MVP formula projected a few days ago. James is easily the best player in the NBA. The proof is plain as day. He has the best stats (#1 by EFF and by every other formula I recently compared EFF to). His team had the best record in the NBA and he was basically a one-man band. One should wonder whether or not it was the best single regular-season performance ever, and yes, I’m going to examine that.

The sage.For a KU guy, Paul Pierce seems to have things in perspective. I'm working on a Royals piece that I hope to have up in an hour or so, though I've just jinxed myself by stating that. Anyway, I came across a quote from Pierce in the Boston Herald that made me chuckle, so I thought I'd pass it along. Understandably, fatigue is a point of discussion leading into the Boston-Orlando series being that the Celtics needed 7 3/4 games to finally eliminate the Bulls. When asked if he was tired, Pierce told The Herald: "I ain't tired. I sleep all day and play basketball at night. How can I be tired?"

EFFThis is kind of like American Idol and Part V (2 of 2) is the results show. All the previous posts and the build-up lead to the conclusions in this post. I’m not going to spend much time going over the details of the different formulas. That’s been done in previous parts, but there are a couple things I do need to make sure I’m clear on. Also, this series is less about finding broad readership and more about a reference for future discussions, so I don’t feel bad if it’s too esoteric for your tastes.