A More Deserving Champion

At RealGM, a look at why NBA champions are more deserving than MLB ones:

Since 1993, only two teams -- the Rangers and New York Yankees -- have won consecutive AL pennants. Making baseball teams play a best-of-five and two best-of-seven playoff series is entertaining, but it isn’t a way to determine who the best baseball team is.

When asked to explain the outcome of a game, Rangers manager Ron Washington once famously said “that’s the way baseball go”. In essence, he was throwing his hands in the air and accepting that there is no rhyme or reason to whether a ball is lined out directly to an outfielder or falls in the gap for a double.

But in a world where so much of our lives are controlled by the vagaries of chance and macro-economic fluctuations, I prefer watching a sport where players have more control of their own destiny. Basketball fans don’t worry about curses, hexes and billy goats. They know having the best players in the sport is the only way to win a championship.

Michael Beasley And The NCAA's Facade

At RealGM, a look at why no one really cares that Mike Beasley got money when he was at Kansas State:

In possibly the least surprising news of the year, a dispute between Michael Beasley and his former agent revealed that Beasley received “improper benefits” in his one season at Kansas State. As CBS Sports Gary Parrish noted, this means the top-3 picks in the 2008 Draft (Derrick Rose, Beasley and OJ Mayo) might all be ruled retroactively ineligible by the NCAA.

All three were part of the high school class of 2007, one of the most talented in over a generation. But because of the NBA’s one-and-done rule, all three were forced to attend college for at least one season, even if they had no interest in being student-athletes.

It’s a win-win scenario for everyone: the players pretend to play for the love of their alma mater, the schools pretend to teach them and the fans pretend to be outraged when it comes out years later that the “student-athletes” were amateurs in name only.

NBA Lockout: Public Stadiums, Private Profits

At SBNation, a look at the most indefensible aspect of the NBA lockout: the owners who benefit from publicly financed stadiums.

The NBA lockout, however, is not a typical case. In a capitalist system, owners provide the capital (the buildings, the machines, the infrastructure, etc.) necessary for the workers to create the product. The revenue this product generates in turn compensates the workers for their labor and the owners for their investment.

However, NBA owners are not the only ones providing the capital necessary to run their business. A modern arena is essential to the operation of an NBA franchise; Seattle's refusal to pay to renovate Key Arena or build a new facility was the central issue David Stern cited in helping Clay Bennett relocate the Sonics to a much smaller market in Oklahoma City. Over the last 10 years, local governments have spent $1.75 billion, 84 percent of the total cost, on eight new or renovated NBA arenas.

It's one thing for owners to shut down a business in order to gouge as much money from the workers as they possibly can. It's quite another to do so when they aren't the ones providing a huge portion of the capital necessary to run that business.

Ty Lawson And Usage Rating

At RealGM, a look at why Ty Lawson's production despite his low usage rating indicates how much room he has to grow as a player:

So when a young player has a usage rating under 20, it doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t be a primary offensive option. It just means they haven’t been given the opportunity yet.

And in his time with Denver, Lawson has done nothing to suggest he wouldn’t shine if given a bigger role. A 6’0 195 point guard who combines blinding fast-speed with the ability to score from all over the court and a great feel for the game, he’s a complete offensive player.

None of this is a surprise to anyone who saw him play at North Carolina. While Tyler Hansbrough received the majority of the publicity, Lawson was the key player on a 34-4 Tar Heel team that had one of the most dominant six-game runs in the history of the NCAA Tournament.

Wired On Dan Harmon, The Creator Of NBC's Community

Every once in awhile, I'll highlight a great bit of writing on the internet. In a brilliant article for Wired, Brian Raftery explains the process of how Dan Harmon, the creator of NBC's clever if not always funny sitcom "Community", deconstructs a TV show and uses it to tell the story of Harmon's life:

Harmon, 38, is the creator of Community, a sitcom about a group of community-college study buddies and the most giddily experimental show on network TV. He began doodling the circles in the late ’90s, while stuck on a screenplay. He wanted to codify the storytelling process—to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he’d been absorbing since he was a kid. “I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this,” he says of how stories are told. “Some simplicity.” So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps.

Early on he started picking up on things that other kids missed: the way The Bob Newhart Show experimented with freezing and unfreezing its end credits, or how Moonlighting would change genres from episode to episode. His earliest revelation about how the TV medium worked—one that heavily influences Community—came courtesy of a Cheers board game he spotted at a toy store. He realized that the characters were so relatable and their dynamics so clearly defined that anyone could step into their lives—even in a board game.

When he created a TV character who relates to the world through television, Harmon didn’t realize that he was, in a sense, inserting himself into his show. Ever since he recognized this, writing in Abed’s voice has gotten much easier; all Harmon has to do, he says, is “open up my memory.” And he has learned to understand himself a bit better, including why—like Abed—he sometimes unintentionally hurts those around him.

"The Ides Of March": Hollywood Grapples With Obama's Presidency

At OpenSalon, a review of George Clooney's "The Ides Of March", a fictionalized retelling of the 2008 campaign:

The old cliche of “ripped from the headlines” doesn’t do justice to "The Ides of March”, a fictionalized retelling of the 2008 presidential primaries. There’s a handsome, charismatic cipher referred to as ‘The One’, his stolid blue-collar opponent from Arkansas, a fight over super-delegates and breathless MSNBC reports about ‘Operation Chaos’, a Republican attempt to swing the Democratic primaries.

The 2008 primary, between the first realistic black and female presidential candidates in American history, captivated the nation in a way politics had not in over a generation. There was a feeling of optimism in the air, even in down-trodden Rust Belt states like Ohio, where "The Ides of March” is set.

Three years later, with the economy in shambles, unemployment as high as it’s been in almost a century and the long-term fiscal trajectory as dire as ever, the excitement around the 2008 campaign seems like a lifetime ago. The movie’s central question is one liberals, Hollywood among them, have been trying to grapple with over the last three years: what happened?

The Economics of Soccer And Football

At PolicyMic, a look at the trade-offs between the capitalism of European soccer and the socialism of the NFL:

English Premier League fans cannot understand why the NFL and NBA consistently reward mediocre franchises with the most talented young prospects through a reverse-order draft. NFL fans cannot understand why fans of the EPL in Britain and La Liga in Spain are content with a system where the vast majority of clubs have no realistic chance of ever competing for a domestic league championship.

In a remarkable bit of irony, the stereotyped socialists of Western Europe root for soccer teams that compete in a ruthlessly free-market system while the supposedly rugged individualists of the American plains root for football teams that share wealth and resources in order to grow the sport as a whole. Neither system is perfect, because sports leagues — like the broader economies around them — have to make trade-offs between two equally noble goals: equality and fairness.

If you want equality, you cannot treat everyone fairly. Conversely, if you treat everyone fairly, then a dramatically unequal equilibrium will develop. In sports, as in life, there is no economic system that can promote one without harming the other.

The Players Are Fighting For The Next CBA

At RealGM, a look at how the owners bad-faith negotiation tactics have made the players worry about future CBA talks:

Some have blamed the agents, who will be receiving commissions long after the current players are retired, for misleading the players into making a short-sighted, money-losing stand. But there’s a reason that veterans like Kevin Garnett, who have now been through three labor negotiations, are the ones urging the players to stand firm.

They feel an obligation to fight for the next generation of players, because they know that no number will satisfy the owners, not when they can always get more. It doesn’t matter what happens over the course of the new CBA; the owners consistent refusal to negotiate in good faith is a good indication they’ll be asking for even more money whenever it expires.

In comparison, the NFL and MLB each had eight different franchises win championships in the last decade. Because of the inherent differences between the sports, the NBA will never have the same amount of parity as the NFL, so owners can always claim the newest CBA needs to level the playing field between franchises.

NBA Defense: More Ability Than Effort

At SBNation, a look at why effort isn't nearly as important defensively as wingspan or athletic ability:

Individual defense comes down to two main factors: foot-speed and wingspan. Elite NBA defenders all have the same profiles: great athletes with long arms. Rajon Rondo, the first-team All-Defense point guard, is a perfect example: an athletic 6'1 guard with a 6'9 wingspan.

In a game of one-on-one between two equally skilled basketball players, the longer and faster one can take the ball to the front of the rim and score and there's very little the defender can do to stop him. In the NBA, where the vast majority of players can knock down an open jumper, being unable to contest a player's release point is essentially giving away a basket.

And no matter how many years an unathletic defender plays in the NBA, their arms won't get any longer and their feet won't get any faster. That type of defensive ability can be measured in the NBA's younger players, which gives us a good indication of which ones will become elite defenders and which ones will not.

The Miami Heat: Only A Few Tweaks Away

At RealGM, a look at why last year should not be considered a disappointment for Miami and how close they are to a title:

The Heat, while figuring out how to incorporate three stars accustomed to dominating the ball into an offense and dealing with key injuries to role players through most of the regular season and a revolving door of marginal veterans at the end of the bench, finished with a 58-24 record, third best in the NBA. Their +7.5 point differential, a more accurate gauge of a team’s strength, was best in the league.

In the last two rounds of the Eastern Conference playoffs, they demolished their two main competitors for conference supremacy (Boston and Miami), beating both 4-1. They proceeded to play in one of the most closely contested Finals series of all-time against a Dallas Mavericks team that had swept the two-time defending champion Lakers and went 12-3 in the Western Conference playoffs. With 3:00 left to go in Game 5 of the 2-2 series, the cumulative score was Miami 456, Dallas 451.

Year 2 of the LeBron era, even if it happens in 2012, will feature a significant improvement at the point guard position. The bench should be cleared of dead-wood as well: the Heat put far too much stock on veteran experience last year, as the presence of Bibby (32), Jamaal Magloire (32), Eddie House (32), Zydrunas Ilgauskas (35) Erick Dampier (35) and Juwan Howard (37) indicated.

Finding a good seven-footer will be extremely difficult, but fortunately for Miami, Dwight Howard is the only seven-footer who can even approach Dirk’s offensive dominance in the East. Orlando’s team has fallen apart since their run to the 2009 NBA Finals, and the Magic have to worry more about keeping their franchise center from departing in free agency than keeping up with the Heat.

The NBA's Middle Class And The Fight at The Center of The Lockout

At RealGM, a look at how the NBA's prosperous middle class is at the center of the lockout:

However, there’s a huge gap in how they are compensated: the NBA player has a guaranteed contract, a minimum yearly salary of at least $400,000 as well as first-class travel accommodations, world-class training facilities and access to a pension plan. In contrast, players in even the elite European leagues can be cut without reason in the middle of the season and often have to fight in court for years for unpaid wages.

The reason players like Bell, Blake and Duhon are able to make so much money is because the 1999 CBA set an arbitrary cap on the amount of money the league’s top stars can make, redistributing wealth downwards. Many people around the NBA believe LeBron James is worth $50 million a season on the open market; the difference between that number and his near max-salary of $16.2 million is what has created such a wealthy middle class of role players.

That’s the issue at the heart of the lockout. The owners, after squeezing money out of the league’s young players through a rookie wage scale and its top players through max contracts, are still trying to maximize their profits. The most tempting target left is the middle class, which would effectively be eliminated by a hard salary cap or a luxury tax so punitive it has the same effect.

Wright Thompson on Toomer's Corner

Every once in a while, I'm going to try to highlight an amazing bit of writing. Here's ESPN's Wright Thompson talking about the poisoning of the trees at Auburn's Toomer's Corner, and how those trees symbolize the changing nature of the South:

She slipped her overcoat on and grabbed her cane. It was midnight, the ground soaking wet. In her free hand, she carried a roll of toilet paper. The 2011 national championship game had just ended. Annette Gaston stepped over the Auburn doormat into a freezing Sylacauga evening.

The backyard was dark and still. She didn't tell her children the plan. They'd just fuss at her. But it felt right. A quiet tribute to Ware, who'd been gone six years now. The house still feels empty without him. She inched up to the nine-foot oak tree, slowly, because of her hip. This tree is a Toomer's Corner seedling. Ware bought it before he died.

She stood alone and strung strands of toilet paper. It was hard work, and she managed to get about six pieces up there before she tired and turned back toward the house. She's 83, a widow, in a town that's lost so much of what made it home, and so she went outside in the freezing cold to pay tribute to her late husband and the life they built.

Seventeen days later, an Alabama fan called a radio show and bragged about killing the big brothers of Ware and Annette Gaston's tree.

Nelson Cruz And The Nature of Fandom

At BarkingCarnival, a case for appreciating athletes for their ability and not their character:

I know about Colt McCoy’s family in small-town Texas, and that he was lightly recruited out of high school and that he believes in Jesus and that his wife is good-looking. I know about Dirk Nowitkzi’s upbringing in Germany, and the trials and tribulations he suffered to become an NBA superstar and the time he dated a woman who was not very good-looking and turned out to be a criminal.

Nelson Cruz? I know he’s a 6’2 240 pound outfielder who moves surprisingly well for a man of his size. He’s a tank of a man who can walk off having a 100 mph fastball beam him directly in the chest. He doesn’t hit just-barely home-runs; he hits moonshots that explode off his bat. His arm is just as powerful: he gunned Miguel Cabrera down by ten feet in Game 4.

That’s all I know about him, and I feel like that’s enough. Because I’m free of any narratives about his career that have grown up around him, I can simply appreciate him for what he’s doing on a baseball field.

Book Review: "The War For Late Night"

At PopMatters, a review of Bill Carter's "The War For Late Night":

Carter, who covered the struggle between Jay Leno and David Letterman to succeed Johnny Carson in 1994’s The Late Shift, received an unprecedented amount of access for his latest book. As a result, he’s able to give the reader a relatively unfiltered look into the minds of Conan O’Brien, Leno and all the NBC executives involved in the six-year soap opera.

In a sense, the two comedians became stand-ins for broader generational grievances. Leno, a deliberately unsentimental man who never took vacations and “lived to tell jokes at 11:30”, felt he was being forced to abandon the job he loved in order to placate a younger employee. Conan had turned down much more lucrative opportunities at other networks because he was promised The Tonight Show, his life-long dream as a comedian, only to watch his older counterpart hang on to a job long past the point he was supposed to retire.

The Tonight Show, once an integral part of the national discourse, has become increasingly irrelevant. Carter drops hints that Fallon and Colbert, seen by many executives as the future of late night, might one day have a chance at the brass ring. But at this point, both should probably heed Seinfeld’s advice: “There is no tradition! This is what I didn’t get. Conan has been on TV for sixteen years. At that point you should get it: There are no shows! It’s all made up! The TV show is just a card! Somebody printed the words on it!”

The NBA Lockout: This Too Shall Pass

At RealGM, a look at why even a cancelled season won't seriously damage the NBA:

All the positive momentum the league’s 2010-11 season generated is being thrown away, while the system the owners are proposing will prevent the formation of super-teams responsible for most of it. But even if the season is lost, the NBA, and basketball in general, will survive.

If you compare the public indifference to the NBA’s lockout to the hysteria surrounding the possible cancellation of NFL preseason games, the league looks in bad shape. But the NBA, just like the MLB and the NHL, isn’t really competing with the NFL. The NFL is America’s new past time; everything else is a niche product.

In the world of DVR and Netflix, sports are one of the only things that still consistently draw a live audience. The NFL’s short season creates a huge void of sports content the other seven months of the year; ESPN needs something on its airwaves February through August.

How The Bulls Can Beat Miami

At RealGM, a look at how Miami is blocking Chicago's path to a championship and what the Bulls can do to beat them:

He’s unable to match-up with elite power forwards like Chris Bosh, and he’s not very effective as a help-side defender either. That’s a huge problem for Chicago’s team defense, which depends on long and athletic big men. The Heat routinely attacked Boozer in pick-and-rolls, to the point where the Bulls often made offense/defense substitutions at the end of the game to keep him off the floor defensively.


Managing Boozer’s minutes in the ECF became a tough choice for Thibodeau: for all his defensive weaknesses, he was nearly indispensable to Chicago’s offense in the series. Boozer is the only other member of the Bulls who can consistently create his own shot beside Derrick Rose. In the regular season, Boozer and Rose had usage ratings of 26.9 and 32.2 respectively, while none of the other rotation players had usage ratings over 22.0.


To defeat Miami, the Bulls will have to score while keeping Carlos Boozer on the bench. And if they can’t add another perimeter shot-creator, their title hopes will come down to whether Derrick Rose can out-duel LeBron James in the fourth quarter of a deciding playoff game.

What Fans Should Want From The Lockout

At RealGM, a look at what parts of a new CBA most matter to the fans:

There’s one obvious question about the resolution of the lockout: why should fans care about how the players and owners divvy up over $4 billion dollars? For all the breathless coverage the topic has generated, the honest answer is they shouldn’t.

As a fan, how the NBA distributes talent is much more important to me than how it distributes income. I want the lockout to produce a system that allows great teams grow while still allowing smaller markets the chance to compete for championships. In short, I want the status quo.

But if the new CBA eliminates salary-cap exceptions and restricts “Larry Bird” rights, it’s going to be extremely difficult for those teams to retain the talent they have, much less add more. Instead of a race to the top it will be a race to the bottom, as the Mavericks and Heat bleed talent and return to the pack.

The Excessive Glorification of Steve Jobs

At PolicyMic, a look at why Steve Jobs was not a hero:

There is certainly no denying Jobs’ brilliance as a marketer or an innovator, but the rush to glorify him seems excessive. Jobs made a fortune by creating pleasant looking gadgets that made modern life more convenient, but is that all it takes to be considered a great man in our society?

Gates’ reputation as a hard-edged monopolist undoubtedly contributed to his desire to give away so much of his wealth, but the motivations behind his actions do not negate the kids he has sent through college or the medical discoveries he is funding. I have a hard time believing that Jobs’ ability to marginally improve the quality of life for the world’s richest people is somehow a nobler act.

Gates, a nerdy-looking guy who made the personal computer accessible and gave away a huge portion of his fortune, is a fairly well regarded figure. Jobs, a charismatic figure who made mobile technology cool and never made any public effort to promote philanthropy, is well on his way to deification.

The Heavy Price of College Tuition

At PolicyMic, a look at how the escalating cost of college tuition is harming America:

With a median household income of $49,445, the average family simply cannot afford the current cost of tuition. As a result, student loan debt is projected to reach $1 trillion dollars this year, outpacing credit card debt for the first time. “In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on the subject, told the New York Times.

As the costs of higher education continue to rise, the barriers for middle-income and low-income students get higher, giving the children of the wealthy an even bigger advantage in today’s information economy. A recent survey of college admissions officers revealed that more than half have stepped up recruitment of students capable of paying the full cost of tuition. In one telling example, Oregon’s Reed College replaced 100 students from its entering freshmen class of 2009 because they couldn’t afford the school’s $50,000 tuition.

While the costs of tuition have skyrocketed in the last forty years, the economics of teaching basic calculus and introductory writing haven’t. According to Bill Gates, web-based instruction and video technology could drop the price of a bachelor’s degree to only $2,000.

The NBA Lockout: It's All Over But The Crying

At RealGM, a look at how this weekend's "pivotal" CBA negotiations showed us the way the lockout will end:

The reality is simple: they have all the cards, now it’s just a matter of waiting for the union to fold. The vast majority of NBA players, like most people in their twenties, live paycheck-to-paycheck. That was the lesson of the 1999 lockout, and it’s unlikely much has changed since, as 60% of NBA players declare bankruptcy within five years of retirement.

If you assume the league’s revenue grows by an average of 4% a year over the next decade, the difference between what the players make under the old CBA and what they would make under the owners’ proposal is over five billion dollars. That’s billion with a 'B'.

Now, with the cancellation of games almost unavoidable, the owners’ bargaining position is clear: they are going to take as much money as they possibly can from the players, and there is nothing the players can do to stop them.

It doesn’t matter if it happens now, if it happens three months from now or if it happens a year from now. It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

Point/Counterpoint: Reseeding The NBA Playoffs

At RealGM, my contribution on whether the NBA should seed the playoff bracket 1-16 and not by conference:

However, the benefit of adding marginally better teams at the bottom of the playoff bracket doesn’t outweigh the cost of diminishing conference rivalries like the Bulls/Heat and the Spurs/Mavericks.

More than half of the NBA’s teams make the playoffs every year, as compared to 8 out of 30 in MLB and 12 out of 32 in the NFL. The NBA’s regular season is already diminished in comparison to the other major American sports; it’s hard to feel much sympathy for any team that can’t finish in the top half of its conference.

The playoffs, a prolonged two-month affair that features recurring characters and storylines drawn out over several seasons, are what draw in casual fans. Reseeding them every year, without regard to conference affiliation, would sacrifice what makes them so compelling in the name of novelty.