Pound the Pavement

2016 was a crappy year, outside of basketball, and I don't want to relive or revisit it, by any means. So, let's look forward to 2017, and what it may hold for the NBA landscape. DeMarcus Cousins will be traded to the Boston Celtics, Rudy Gay to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Andrew Bogut to the Portland Trailblazers, Brook Lopez to the Dallas Mavericks, and Ricky Rubio to the Sacramento Kings. Giannis Antetokuonmpo and Marc Gasol will be All-Star game starters and Kemba Walker will make his first All-Star team, in a game that'll feature Russell Westbrook as MVP. The Milwaukee Bucks, Washington Wizards, and Denver Nuggets will make the playoffs. The Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, Portland Trailblazers, and Sacramento Kings will not make the playoffs. James Harden will be MVP, Rudy Gobert will be DPOY, and Joel Embiid will be ROY. The Houston Rockets and the Boston Celtics will make the conference finals in their respective conferences. The Finals will feature bot...

"I do not do cross-era comparisons." - David Jacoby That's how a lot of smart people view the NBA throughout history, as distinct eras, each with their most dominant players and most dominant teams - the 1960s with Russell's Celtics battling the individual greatness of Wilt, the coke-addled 70s with the rise of Kareem, the star power of the 1980s, featuring Magic's Lakers, Bird's Celtics, the Bad Boy Pistons, and Dr. J's Sixers, Jordan in the 90s, the barren wasteland of the early to mid-2000s with Shaq and Kobe, and then LeBron's world. Another way to distinguish these eras are through playing styles: The 1970s were all about gliding as close to the hoop and making smooth finishes near the rim. The 1980s were about pushing the pace and finding an open man in space. Jordan ushered in an era of hero ball with an emphasis on surrounding good post up players with cutting (i.e. MJ in Chicago, Hakeem in Houston, and Ewing in New York), something that c...

The whole point of the NBA is to get to the truth. For an NBA season, the truth is the answer to the question: "Who's the best team in the league?" You can probably look at the season as a series of binary experiments, comparing two teams. There are 1,230 such experiments during the regular season, and the playoffs consist of a maximum of 105 experiments. Based on the outcomes of these experiments, we're able to determine the best team in the league. Think about that - the NBA plays more than 1,300 games to get at this truth, and most, if not all, of these teams are entirely different at the end of the season as they are at the beginning. It's almost as if the first month and a half of the NBA regular season can be thrown out, kind of like a feeling out process. There's an algorithm used heavily in statistics called the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Essentially, it's a way to find the answer to a difficult question by creatively re-sampling from diffic...

The Hall of Fame is an achievement, and it's a fun exercise, at least for me, to think about players who deserve to be in and those who don't. Among retired players, there are obvious shoo-ins - guys like Kobe Bryant and Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan. There's no point talking about those players. Let's talk about some controversial players. We did a little bit of this on Episode 12 of The Crevice. You can check that out right here: Chris Webber (1993-2008) Stats: 17,182 PTS; 8,124 REB; 3,526 AST; 1,200 BLK; 1,200 STL Accolades: ROY, 5x All-Star, 1 All-NBA 1st Team, 3 All-NBA 2nd Team, 1 All-NBA 3rd Team BasketballReference HOF Probability: 14.6% Let's do the first simple check - the "who's got these stats" check. There are 12 players in NBA history who have recorded more that 17,000 points, 8,000 rebounds, and 3,500 assists, 11 of whom are retired. All of those 11 are in the Hall of Fame. Granted, Webber is at the very bottom ...

On a recent TrueHoop Show episode with Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton, they played a little game that piqued my interests. After a discussion about how Sacramento and Vlade Divac have failed DeMarcus Cousins (I really don't want to rehash that; that would take nearly a thousand words and would be really depressing), they ended their conversation with drafting a fake team under the salary cap for Boogie. So, I'm unabashedly going to do that: a 13-man roster, under the salary cap, with the sole purpose of making Boogie happy and in the Finals contention. Starting Lineup PG: John Wall (Salary: $16.96 million) SG: Rodney Hood (Salary: $1.41 million) SF: Jae Crowder (Salary: $6.29 million) PF: Serge Ibaka (Salary: $12.25 million) C: DeMarcus Cousins (Salary: $15.85 million) Bench PG: Cory Joseph (Salary: $7.35 million) SG: Malcolm Brogdon (Salary: $925 thousand) SF: Tony Snell (Salary: $2.37 million) PF: Channing Frye (Salary: $7.81 million) C: Willie Cauley-Stein...

Here's a quick thought exercise: I'm going to describe a type of player in three or four words and think of the first player who comes to mind who fits that description. Pass-first point guard... Maybe someone like Chris Paul or Rajon Rondo? Catch-and-shoot wing... I'm going with Klay Thompson or J.J. Redick. Rim-running big... DeAndre Jordan feels about right. Let's add a wrinkle - is Chris Paul's playing style more like Rajon Rondo or Steph Curry? I'm not sure if it's surprising or not, but by any subset of their statistics and tendency measures, Paul's game is more like Curry's than Rondo's. Something I'm interested in developing is a way to characterize player roles. The 2K series has started adding these sort of roles for players, like 'Interior defender' for someone like Bismack Biyombo or 'All-around wing superstar' for LeBron James. But, after a certain point, calling a player an 'All-around superstar...

We live in an NBA landscape, where playoff success is the end-all, be-all metric of personal and team glory. Kevin Durant, by at least a few accounts, is one of the top three perimeter scorers of all time, in volume and definitely in efficiency. But, until he wins a championship, he's a bum. Add to it the almost misogynistic backlash that he received after joining the best regular season team of all time to achieve that required chip for his legacy, there's really no winning for Durant. The Los Angeles Clippers have been subjected to the same maniacally idiotic logic, especially in recent years. Imagine this (and suspend your disbelief for this because this analogy is going to be far-fetched): a tech company, that's been mired in putridity, gets a lucky break and their shareholders start to buy in a little. Then, they aggressively commit to one of their products, and when sales go up a little, they realized that their founder is an unabashedly adulterous, self-immolating...