Beautiful day in Northern California. Perhaps you’d like to take your smartphone bathroom reading outside?
Q & A with Stan Van Gundy
Jordan Ramirez
Warriorsworld
We’re a bit Warriors heavy this week, so apologies there, but this really is too good to not include in the bathroom reader this week. Warriorsworld blogger managed to snag a bit of time with former NBA coach Stan Van Gundy to discuss the Dubs struggles. In the interview, SVG offers some harsh truths for increasingly anxious Warriors fans: the team has been sub .500 since January 1st due to a lack of commitment on defense, and they really just need to worry about getting into the playoffs at this point, favorable home schedule or not. I also found it interesting how much SVG mentioned coach Mark Jackson’s “staff”, emphasizing that a lof of Jax’s success has come from his impressive lineup of assistant coaches. It’s a great interview with one of the best personalities in the NBA. That David Stern robbed us of SVG’s mind on a large platform continues to rankle me.
- JG
The Best Bargains in the NBA
Bill Simmons
Grantland
Over time, most people have agreed that Bill Simmons has become dichotomized, including Bill Simmons himself. On the one had, we have “the Sports Guy”, the affable personality from ESPN’s now-forgotten Page 2 that wrote rolling streams of consciousness that admirably captured the breathless enthusiasm and wild assertions of most NBA fans who feel they have something interesting to say about the league. On the other hand, we have Bill Simmons the Celebrity, ESPN television personality, New York Times bestselling author and famous person name-dropper, who (apparently) has trouble seeing the joy and fun of it all, and instead must meet deadlines and the standards of ESPN’s (questionable) journalistic integrity. Most work from Simmons seems to be concerned with finding a healthy middle ground, where internet-legend the Sports Guy can usefully interface with Bill Simmons the Celebrity and produce good work. This piece from Grantland, listing the best contracts in the NBA, is a step in the right direction. We see some traces of the Sports Guy, who offers hasty (but harmless) superlatives about “best”, “greatest”, and “most definitely”, but also Bill Simmons the Celebrity, who understands the inner workings of the NBA much better than he did as a simple fan. Worth a read, especially if you feel nostalgic for the Sports Guy.
- JG
Sportstoralist: The NBA Needs to Stop its Latest Uniform Experiment
Wesley Morris
Grantland
It feels like a distant memory, but in happier times (aka, two weeks ago), the Warriors beat the Spurs while wearing some wacky yellow short-sleeved uniforms. Since then, a few college teams have busted them out. The uniforms have elicited a number of strong reactions, but none as eloquent as Wesley Morris’. For Morris, the greatest weakness of the uniforms isn’t really the material, or the fact that it made the Warriors look “amateurish”, but rather that it “hid a lot of ink, and work, and grit.” Morris writes that “the body has gotten more beautiful in professional basketball” and that this form of expression is as much a part of basketball as the basketball itself. Indeed, the uniforms would hide the beauty of Matt Barnes (who Morris mentions), but also J.R. Smith, Wilson Chandler, and Birdman. For these reasons, Morris argues, the uniforms must go. Sounds good to me.
- JG
The Future’s So Bright…Maybe.
Steve McPherson
Hardwood Paroxysm
As a PhD drop-out whose sole academic conference experience involved a panic attack, failed presentation and subsequent full-fledged man-boy tantrum in a San Diego Hilton bathroom, I regarded most of the reports from this week’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference with distrust and annoyance. Additionally, as a perennial underachiever in math (though I did win “most improved” my senior year of high school for scraping together a B-minus in trigonometry), I have a healthy dislike for numbers, and those who try to privilege the sanctity of them over other forms of analysis. However, I enjoyed this piece from Stephen McPherson, a short dispatch from the conference on the problems of modeling, in sports and otherwise. McPherson discusses how, in all the panels at the conference, there was a emphasis (either stated or implied) on finding “the way to true understanding.” Yet at the same time, most panelists admitted that modeling, especially with numbers, was tricky business in a “world where things are changing constantly”. Reading this was amazingly refreshing for a guy who doesn’t like numbers — and perhaps further proof of McPherson’s final assertion, that the next step in the analytics revolution will involve those who don’t like stats getting involved. We’ll see, I suppose.
- JG
Why LeBron Left
Robert Hogg
Breaking Beasley
In this piece, Robert Hogg discusses an oft-overlooked fact in The Decision: LeBron didn’t actually sign with the Heat, he was signed-and-traded. In order to obtain LeBron, Miami had to give up a hefty haul of draft picks; “two of Miami’s first-round draft picks starting no earlier than 2013 and continuing through 2017, the Heat’s 2012 second-round pick from New Orleans, and the future second-round pick Miami acquired from Oklahoma City.” Hogg smartly points out that the Cavs will likely have two more top 18 picks in the next two years, while the Heat (provided their big three all opt in) will be grossly over the salary cap, stripped of their draft picks, and essentially unable rebuild their contending team. Just about everyone has offered a rumor about LeBron’s potential return to Cleveland. But has anyone offered the theory that LeBron left Cleveland so he could rebuild it with another team’s draft picks? This is a first. Fun, trollish read on a site whose purpose is to allow bloggers to work out sort of hackneyed ideas before they unleash them to the public. I approve.
- JG