Since I'm on an off week for Epochrypha, and seeing as my soupe du jour or, rather, soupe de la saison (i.e. the NBA) isn't top news right now, I figured it'd be a good time serve up the first helping of Era-ta, which will taste pretty much like the bi-weekly but be a little less meaty (cf. clam chowder vs. corn chowder). For now, Great Sports Names, some guy named Tiger, and a little Madness may thicken the air, but in a week or two you're going to want to turn your attention back to the only league that insists on calling itself an association. The following tidbits won't make you more knowledgeable come NBA postseason, they won't help you win any sports bar arguments with your buddies, but it should keep your appetite whetted and keep you feeling superior to your boxscore billeted "peers". So tuck your bibs in boys and girls and get that saliva going. Here we go.
- So, last Epochrypha, I talked about parity as probably good for ratings, and fan excitement, and etc. I also talked about polarity being better for narrative creation (incidentally, case study: Kobe). Whatever. Who cares. People who care say 32 to 50 wins make an average, and if you look at the East it's actually quite paritous (to borrow a page from the Shaqtus book of spelling). The West, however, is a mess, mostly because six or seven teams are projected to win more than 50 games and nearly the same amount are projected to win less than 30. Yawn. But here's the wake-up call. The Toronto Raptors look to fall just outside that paritous zone. Makes sense when you look at their season, but not when you look at a game like Sunday night's. Bosh puts up 31 and 15 and Calderon dished out 19 to push them over the right at .500 Bulls. With stars who can perform like that, you gotta think they do well, but they don't. Similarly, look at the New Jersey Nets. By all accounts, Vince Carter and Devin Harris are having excellent years, and Brook Lopez is showing himself as a solid contributor, if not more. They're well within the paritous zone but fairly far from the playoffs at this point. Sure their bench sucks, but with feel good stories like that you'd think they'd be a little closer to pushing the woeful Pistons from the postseason. Then, look at the top of the standings in the East. Three teams projecting into the 60-win range. Cleveland, sure. But Boston hasn't had the season people expected by any stretch of the imagination. Still, 60-ish wins. And Orlando? Maybe Dwight's stepped up his game. But Lewis and Turkoglu haven't had significantly better seasons than they did last year. And Jameer Nelson went out after a game over half a season. How is that a 60 win team? What I'm getting at is the impropriety of perception. Feel good stories don't mean squat at the end of the season. They might be good for the pundits and bloggers, or the casual fans, but they don't get you to the postseason. No, what does that is mid-season streaks and "no news is good news" style of ball. See: Spurs (Yawn).
- Hate to keep beating a dead horse, but people keep writing about my idea and not giving me credit. Following that link, you'll find a Marc Stein piece on what this year's playoffs would like if the division winners could select their first round opponents. It's good to see the idea extended and applied like that. What I find intriguing is actually all the stories you'd get from teams' internal bickering over which opponent to choose. You can just imagine Dwight Howard telling the press that he'd have picked Detroit if he had the choice, even though it'd probably be a bad basketball decision. It'd be another chance to see the star egos at play, which is always fun.
- Stein's been doing a bunch of foward-looking thinking (and I'm not talking about drooling over Blake Griffin), which is commendable. He gives quite a full FAQ about the possibility of a lockout, so if you want to be knowledgeable about the party after the after-party, you can check that out. What interests me more, however, is the quiet mention that Stern's going to propose the pick-your-poison playoff scheme to the NBA's shrouded-in-mist "competition committee." This really intrigues me, because I've heard this semi-governing body bandied about the blogosphere a bit, but I have absolutely no idea what it is. Who's on it? Does it simply entail Stern going back to his boudoir (don't ask me why all the French), sticking ideas on a dart board, and playing pop the balloon? Okay, a hot second of poking around reminds that the competition committee led the decision to make the perimeter a wing's feeding frenzy. And it's headed by Jerry Colangelo, who is responsible for both the national Redeem Team and, partially, the Phoenix incarnation. Also, the NFL has a competition committee. Still, no other period in sports would produce such a method of getting things done. So maybe there were groups of guys who made the decisions about how games should look before, but they never needed to be referred to as some kind of shadowy recourse for all the tough questions put to the commissioner.
- Maybe I was wrong to quote the Kobster on this twitter stuff. I mean why look to the guys who are abstaining to tell you how good the forbidden fruit is? I criticized the breaking of the fourth wall for making athletes all the more unreachable and distant, making their presentable facade leak in to their actual lives, which is sad. However, who's the king of all this? The Big Antithesis (to Kobe), of course. And how does the Diesel do it? By being more real than we've ever seen a star athlete be. Sure, his actions remind more of a 20 year old than a 37 year old. Still, we can't discount how refreshing it is to see an athlete frequenting normal places, like a diner or department store. Also, it's pleasantly revealing to know he can't sleep sometimes, just like most people, and to see the hilariously mundane photos he takes when insomnia strikes.
- Louis Amundson, he of recent Stepping Up fame, apparently called Nene a "dirty player" and "fake tough guy." Accusations of dirty have been flying all over the league this year. But I love Nene's response. He calls Amundson a "stupid dude" and says, "That was no head butt. That is nothing ... If I do a head butt, I break all of his face. That was nothing.'' He also says George Karl talks to him about control, but what he's really trying to work on is patience. Me? I'm patiently waiting for all this dirty talk to hit the competition committee fan.
