Will the Heat Care Tonight?

On my way to lunch on Saturday, I was listening to ESPN Radio and the hosts were interviewing some media professional associated with the Miami Heat.  (Either that or they were talking to an NBA writer and just happened to only ask him questions about the Heat.  Given that we are talking about ESPN, that is just as plausible.)  The topic was the Heat coasting at times during the season, specifically during a barely-explicable home loss to the Bucks that dropped the Heat to 11-5.  The Heat have since won five in a row to get to 16-5, a record more befitting their talent, but the fact remains that even in a shortened NBA season, we can't rely on teams to be focused from game to game.  The stakes are simply too low.  What is the advantage gained by the Heat busting their tails to get to 50 wins?  The right to play those rare game sevens at home.  That's a small payoff for a major effort.  If you want an illustration of how low the stakes are in regular season NBA games, the Heat and Bulls - the two best teams in the East - played on Sunday and the discussion on Monday morning was not about the result, but rather about the fact that Carlos Boozer's son was caught going along with the "Let's go Heat" chant.

If you want to know why I've gravitated to European soccer as my second favorite sport after college football, the lack of importance of the vast majority of American pro sports games would be one of the major reason.  In contrast to the "will the Heat care today?" question that we have to ask ourselves before each game, on Sunday afternoon, I watched Barca labor to a 0-0 draw at Villarreal.  Unlike the Heat, Barca have earned the right to coast every now and again by winning 13 trophies in the past three years and change.  The theme of Barca's season in La Liga this year has been their struggles on the road, dropping points regularly in 0-0 and 2-2 draws.  Maybe Barca's players are having a hard time getting up for these games, but the key point is that they are punished for doing so.  The Blaugrana are now seven points behind Real Madrid and will require significant help from their arch-rivals to get back into the title race.  If the La Liga season were simply about seeding for a short post-season tournament, then Barca could go through the motions on the road and no one would bat an eyelash.  Instead, the stakes are high for each match and the penalty for not scoring at El Madrigal is significant.

I thought about this issue when reading Bill Simmons' column last night.  Simmons spends 1,261 words describing an elaborate plan to push the NBA regular season back with a later start date and conclusion, but he never grapples with the fundamental problem with the sport: the regular season is four-times as long as the playoffs, but isn't even one-quarter as important.  What about doing away with the playoffs to reward the teams that are the best over the long-haul?  Or at least limit the playoffs to one series like baseball did before 1969?  To quote Simmons:

"Because that's the way we've always done it."

(News flash: Those are the eight worst words in sports.)

For the record, I don't buy Simmons' notion that leagues should make radical changes and that there is no value in traditions.  A sport should follow a certain rhythm and the NBA is no different.  Get rid of that rhythm and you are disconnecting your fans from their patterns, which might lead them to no longer buy your product.  However, if the NBA is interested in a major change, then surely doing something to increase the stakes of the regular season is more important than the start date. 

The Dwight Howard Pipedream

Two weeks ago, I started a post agreeing with Jeff Schultz that the Hawks should make a play for Dwight Howard and then, in the process of writing it, realized that Howard would never come here because he would end up in a situation that is worse than the one he was leaving in Orlando.  Here was my conclusion:

Additionally, Howard has to be thinking that the biggest obstacle to gaining a higher Q-rating is that he hasn't won a championship and has only made the Finals once.  He needs to go somewhere where he will win.  His issue in Orlando is the supporting cast.  Will it make sense for him to come here to play with Jeff Teague (a player whose promise is based on a six-game series against the Bulls last year), Joe Johnson (holder of one of the worst contracts in the NBA), Marvin Williams (average small forward who escapes being non-descript only because of his Draft position and the careers of the players taken after him), and a power forward to be named later?  And then you add in the fact that Atlanta Spirit has expressed an aversion to paying the luxury tax and in light of the team's revenues, they can't really be blamed, can they?  The end game could well be that Thorpe wants to send Howard to Atlanta, but can't make the trade happen because Howard refuses to agree to a potential extension with the Hawks.

Yesterday, Bill Simmons framed Howard's decision in the same way:

Put it this way: If I'm Dwight Howard, I'm thinking about titles and titles only. I don't care about money — that's coming, regardless. I don't care about weather — I have to live in whatever city for only eight months a year, and I'm traveling during that entire time, anyway. I don't care about "building my brand" and all that crap — if I don't start winning titles soon, my brand is going to be "the center who's much better than every other center but can't win a title." I care only about playing in a big city, finding a team that doesn't have to demolish itself to acquire me, finding one All-Star teammate who can make my life a little easier (the Duncan to my Robinson), and winning titles. Not title … titles. I want to come out of this decade with more rings than anyone else. I want to be remembered alongside Shaq, Moses and Hakeem, not Robinson and Ewing.

Tellingly, Simmons listed five destinations for Howard and Black Hollywood was nowhere in sight, except for a brief mention of the fact that the Hawks were able to beat the Magic last year with a "let Dwight get his; we need to make sure that the Magic shooters don't get theirs" strategy.  For instance, he pooh-poohs the prospect of Howard ending up on the Lakers because he would be playing with Kobe Bryant and a gutted roster.  Would Howard be any more likely to have a desire to play with Joe Johnson, Jeff Teague, Marvin Williams, and then a similarly gutted roster, only in this instance, you have Atlanta Spirit instead of Jerry Buss filling in the remainder?

Simmons' interest in stars going to play for the Bulls is interesting to me.  As he mentions, he wanted LeBron to go there and now he wants Howard to make the same decision.  This preference is to Simmons' credit, as a superpower in Chicago would be detrimental to the prospect of the Celtics winning a title in the next decade.  Simmons is often derided as a Boston homer and he does plenty of things to earn the label, but he is able to put that aside when he pines for Derrick Rose to have a superstar wing man like LeBron or Howard.  I think that there are two things going on here.  First, Simmons is more of a basketball fan than a Celtics fan and he would like to see a memorable team come together instead of the NBA's stars being isolated and surrounded by poor supporting casts.  Second, he wants that memorable team to play in uniforms that mean something and in an environment that makes for good TV.  The Bulls uniform evokes memories of the Jordan dynasty and the United Center has a great atmosphere when the team is good.

I have to admit that I feel the same way.  It's hard for me to reconcile my feelings about Major League Baseball with my current feelings about the NBA.  In baseball, I get very annoyed by the constant focus on the Red Sox and Yankees.  This annoyance extends to those two teams sucking up free agents left and right to cover for the failings of their own farm systems.  In basketball, I liked the idea of Chris Paul and Dwight Howard going to the Lakers because that team would be highly entertaining.  Again, I am going to point to two factors that drive my thinking.  First, basketball is a team game.  Like soccer, it's more interesting to watch great players play with one another because they bring one another to a higher level.  Baseball, on the other hand, is a game with a minimal amount of teamwork.  This makes baseball more conducive to reaching stat-based conclusions with confidence, but it also means that there is no great joy in watching superstars play with one another.  Mark Teixeira driving in A-Rod isn't the same thing as Messi finding Cesc with a defense-splitting pass or Paul hitting Howard with an alley-oop.  Second, I have a lifelong disdain for New York teams.  If the Knicks were the ones assembling a cache of talent, then I would be annoyed because Mike Lupica would be happy.  I don't feel the same "oh G-d, this is going to be intolerable" pangs with Chicago or Los Angeles.

LeBron and Leo

Basketball and soccer are the two most popular team sports in the world.  Right now, basketball has LeBron James, a player who was supposed to become one of the all-time greats, but hasn’t quite gotten over the hump, and soccer has Leo Messi, a player who is fully on the path to becoming an all-timer. 

Evaluating LeBron isn’t the easiest thing in the world.  Cutting out the emotional feelings that LeBron created with his ham-handed move from Cleveland to Miami, he had a good season in Miami, even by his standards.  James led the NBA in PER, his Miami team won the Eastern Conference (recall that lots of pundits were predicting before the season that the Heat would not get that far because of the lack of quality on the roster after the top three), and they were in a winning position in the Finals before a strange series of events sent the title to Dallas.  (In many ways, the 2011 Finals were a mirror image of the 2006 Finals, where a superior Dallas team had the lead in the series, lost a number of close games to a Heat team dominated by one player, and then lost the title at home in Game Six.)  That said, LeBron’s bizarre disappearing act in the Finals colors everything that he accomplished this season.  It’s one thing for an NBA star to try and fail by missing shots and forcing the issue; it’s quite another for a star to simply stop shooting.  For those of us who have been watching basketball for decades, we were all witnesses to something that we hadn’t seen before, but it wasn’t what LeBron and Nike had in mind: a superstar simply vanishing in the NBA Finals.  Until he makes amends for this performance (and he is only 26, so there is plenty of time), LeBron cannot be mentioned in the same breath as Jordan, Magic, and Bird, the three greatest players of my lifetime.

In contrast, Leo Messi is being compared with Pele, Maradona, and Cruyff after another terrific season.  Like LeBron, Messi had a very productive season statistically speaking, scoring 51 goals and adding 21 assists.  He tied Ruud van Nistlerooy’s record for most goals in a Champions League campaign.  Unlike LeBron, Messi capped his season with success in Barca’s crunch games, as he scored twice in the decisive Champions League semifinal first leg at Real Madrid and then added the winning goal in the Wembley Final against Manchester United.  We often grade players based on their performances in the biggest games (unfairly at times) and Messi passed that test, while LeBron failed the final exam.  Of course, the criticism of LeBron omits the fact that he did very well in the tests before the final, specifically his performances against the Celtics and Bulls.

So where is Messi succeeding where LeBron is failing?  To me, the answer is in how much the two of them love playing their games.  Messi is the soccer equivalent of a gym rat (pitch rat?), a player who just loves to play all the time.  Messi was pouty as Barca was celebrating its La Liga title at the Camp Nou, most likely because he finds the experience of sitting on the bench while others are playing to be frustrating.  When Pep Guardiola was asked during the season why he wasn’t giving Messi a break, he answered that Messi got angry when he wasn’t included in the starting lineup.  Messi is such a soccer nerd that he spends a lot of his time off the pitch playing soccer video games.  Thus, Barca has the good fortune of having a star player who is not just talented and hard-working, but also cares about nothing other than playing.  Messi is a reluctant interview and an even more reluctant pitch-man.  Despite being the best player in the world’s most popular sport, Messi has a relatively low commercial profile.

Would anyone describe LeBron in the same way?  I am not claiming that LeBron doesn’t love to play the game of basketball.  Obviously, he wouldn’t be the player that he is today without enjoying the act of putting a ball in a basket and stopping an opponent from doing the same.  That said, LeBron is not single-minded in the way that Messi is.  He has other interests.  LeBron has a self-stated goal of becoming a "global icon."   He is interested in his profile in ways that Messi isn’t.  We cannot claim that interest in commercial opportunities is inconsistent with being an all-time great, as Michael Jordan’s repeated endorsements during his playing career make clear.  However, LeBron does seem distracted.

How does this distraction manifest itself on the court?  LeBron’s game hasn’t evolved like Messi’s has.  Watching him every week, I can see what Messi has added to his bag of tricks. He is more of a threat to score from outside the box than he was as a youngster, as Edwin van der Sar can attest.  Opponents used to handle Barca by falling off of their players and forcing them to shoot from distance.  That strategy no longer works because of the way that Messi’s game has evolved.  Additionally, Messi’s passing range has improved, such that Barca now play him as a quasi-midfielder whereas he started his career as a right winger.  Messi’s work off the pitch has created options for his manager.  Has LeBron's game evolved? I don’t pretend to watch enough NBA basketball to make an observation based on personal observation, but every time I read Bill Simmons, he's killing LeBron for not adding a post game.  Simmons also adds that his opinion on LeBron’s lack of a post game is shared among NBA writers.  Dallas was able to get away with guarding LeBron with guards because James couldn’t punish them down low.  That is a failure in development.   

The other difference between Messi and LeBron is that Messi is playing with the right supporting cast.  Messi plays in front of two great passing midfielders.  When he drifts to the right, he has the game’s best right back overlapping his runs.  When he looks to pass, he has the joint leading scorer from last summer’s World Cup in front of him.  In charge of the whole operation is a coach who has a perfect understanding of the Barca way of playing, the style on which Messi was trained for years before joining the first team.  Unless you attribute ESP to Messi’s parents when they moved their son from Rosario to Barcelona when he was 13, Messi is lucky.  He is in a situation that makes him look good.  If you want to watch the best player in the world look mortal, watch him with Argentina, where the style is a little different and the supporting cast does not mesh with Messi’s talents in the same way.

In contrast, LeBron is not in a situation that suits him.  LeBron didn't have a decent supporting cast in Cleveland, which was not his fault.  That fact weakened the criticism of his decision to leave Cleveland (although not the manner of his departure).  The Cavs had years to build around their star player and came up woefully short of assembling a championship supporting cast.  The problem for LeBron is that he chose to play in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, so his supporting cast is now on him.  Pairing up with Wade wasn't the best idea because their games are a little redundant. They’re both swingmen who are used to having the ball in their hands.  Generally speaking, NBA championship teams have had a mix of point guards, swing men, and big men, usually two stars from those categories, but not from the same categories.  When teams have had two star swing men, like the ‘08 Celtics, those guys have had different skill sets.  I can see Ray Allen and Paul Pierce meshing because Allen is a shooter and Pierce is a driver.  Wade and LeBron are both drivers who shoot from outside just enough to keep defenders honest.  LeBron adds better passing skills, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to get around the overlap in orientation.  In retrospect, LeBron should have signed with the Bulls, who already had a perfect supporting cast and had hired a better coach.  As of this summer, it appears that LeBron made a Decision that will limit his ascent into the stratosphere of legends in his sport.  It is fortunate for him that many members of the American sports media are soccer-illiterate or else they would be making a comparison with a player who is putting himself onto his sport’s Mount Rushmore in a way that LeBron is not. 

Really, Bill?

You spend days ripping on LeBron James for signing with Miami and then you write this:

I love visiting Seattle and Portland -- two of my favorite cities in America, actually -- but could never live in the Pacific Northwest because nonstop rain puts me in a perpetual funk. If Portland drafted me No. 1 in a Sports Columnist draft, and I knew I could hold out for a few months and force them to trade me to San Diego, Miami or Los Angeles ... you're telling me I wouldn't hold out? Please. In a heartbeat. I need the sun. Sorry, Portland. It's not you, it's me.

Simmons has written on numerous occasions that he lives in LA because of the weather, that people going to college should go somewhere with nice weather, that the Northeast is depressing in the winter because of the weather, blah blah blah. When LeBron James makes the decision to play in Miami over Cleveland, Chicago, or New York, Simmons should be the first one saying "welcome to the team."

Note: much of Simmons' criticism of LeBron is based on the manner in which he announced his decision. I agree 100% on that front. However, if you're going to complain about the substance of the decision as opposed to the procedure, then you had better have clean hands. Additionally, Simmons is not dissimilar from most writers (especially NBA writer because the sport is so star-driven) who evaluate athletes based on whether they win championships. If LeBron is going to be judged based on the number of rings he wins with insufficient attention paid to context, then it makes perfect sense for him to ally himself with the best possible players. The fact that he was able to do so and live in Miami makes the decision even more of a no-brainer. Personally, I don't like the decision because Miami is one of the few cities for which I have a per se rule against rooting for its teams. (The others: New York, Philadephia, and Boston, with Boston being a more recent entry on the list. I liked the Pats and Red Sox just fine before the aughts.) However, the decision makes perfect sense to me.

Can't you Hear me Knocking on your Window? Can't you? Now? Anything?

I went for a run yesterday morning and was listening to Bill Simmons' podcast with Mike Lombardi. (My opinion on Simmons' podcasts: they are highly dependent on the guest. I pass on any of his interviews with celebrities and his friends. I like the podcasts with subject matter experts. Lombardi falls into the latter category.) Simmons started off by making the point that football has snuck up on us this year because this has been a sports year full of interesting stories. If the American sports scene were struggling for stories, then we would get a lot of college football and NFL coverage because those are the two most popular sports in the country. Instead, we've had the Winter Olympics, above-average NHL and NBA seasons (although the NBA playoffs lacked a compelling series between the first round and the finals, save for the Boston-Cleveland matchup), Tiger's return, the Big Dance (although Simmons was wrong that this year's edition was in any way above average), and the World Cup.


I nodded when Simmons made this point, as he was hitting on something that I've been feeling, as well. Football hasn't grabbed me like it normally does over the summer. I normally get Phil Steele the moment that it hits the rack at Borders, but I got it as an afterthought this year. I had to remind myself to order the Football Outsiders preview, despite the fact that they have done a great job in beefing up the college coverage. I'll freely grant that as someone who has always been a soccer fan and has become more intense in that preference over the past several years - in part because so many games are on the TV and in part as a coping mechanism because Michigan football and the Braves have been weak while Barca has been very strong - I'm not a representative example. Or at least I felt that way until Simmons voiced similar thoughts.

It was interesting to me that Simmons omitted baseball from his list of stories that have reduced the anticipation for the season, especially in light of the fact that he just wrote a column explaining why Red Sox fans are feeling a sense of ennui about this year's edition. If any fan base should be looking forward to football season, it's one with the expectations of Red Sox fans that sees its team well behind the Yankees and Rays in the AL East. Spoiled fans, perhaps? (I don't mean this as a criticism. This hasn't been an especially compelling baseball season in terms of national stories.
Upon reflection, though, the distribution of teams having good season might at least partially explain why college football isn't on the front of our brains in the summer like normal. (Obviously, Simmons wasn’t talking about college football when he said that football has suck up on him this year. As a product of his environment, college football is about the last thing on his radar.) There are two major regions for intense college football interest: the South and the Midwest. The flagship baseball team for the South - the Braves - is in first place. The Texas Rangers are in first place and the Rays are awfully close. In the Midwest, the Twins, Tigers (until recently), White Sox, Cards, and Reds have all had good summers. There was a heavy prevalence of Midwestern teams in the rankings of local ratings that I linked last week. In short, this has not been a baseball season dominated by the coasts, so fan bases that would normally give up on baseball and start obsessing about the depth chart on the offensive line have had their interest held by their local baseball collectives. The fact that the baseball playoffs have been a random number generator for years adds to the interest.

Another factor in the comparative lack of college football dominating my thoughts as it normally would at this stage (and, if I’m representative of other fans, the thoughts of others) is that this season doesn’t have an obvious dominant team(s) to drive attention. At this time last year, we had Tebow and Florida as the kings of the hill and McCoy’s Texas and Bradford’s Oklahoma in challenging positions. With quarterbacks filling a sometimes excessive role as driving attention, 2009 lent itself to a lot of preseason hype, but 2010 is not the same.

The “no alpha male teams” explanation does not apply to the NFL, which finished a banner season in 2009 with the lovable Saints beating Manning’s Colts in exciting fashion. Those teams are back again, as are a number of other very good teams with ready-made plot lines. There’s no reason for the NFL to sneak up on us this year, other than the fact that there has been less oxygen this summer for football stories because of LeBron, Tiger, and the vuvuzela.

Claudio Caniggia is on Line Four

[Full marks to me for the pun in the title that about three of you got.]

I fully support Bill Simmons coming into the light and becoming a footie fan. The fact that he is doing so for most of the same reasons that I love the sport (although unlike Bill, I played and watched from a young age because my parents are British Empire emigres and because I was less bad at it than other sports) is especially nice. As he progresses from being a casual fan into obsession like his buddy Marc Stein, he'll learn not to make statements like this:

As a scoreless second half creeped into the 80s, he was muttering to himself and yelling helplessly at the television. Tottenham was controlling the flow and getting more scoring chances; in soccer, karmically, that eventually translates to a goal. (Note: That's different from playoff hockey, where one team can dominate an overtime for 15-16 minutes and the Hockey Gods decide, "Wouldn't it be funny if the other team scored on some garbage goal?" The Soccer Gods aren't nearly as cruel.) Throw in Man City's urgency to score, as well as its inevitable sub of an extra striker in the last 10-12 minutes, and Steiny Mo was becoming increasingly resigned to his fate. Tottenham finally scored on a defensive lapse and a hard rebound headed in by Crouch -- karma again, since he had just missed by a hair on about 25 chances in the game. Ten minutes later, we had a 1-0 final. Yet another heartbreak for Man City.

Bill, not only are footie fans familiar with the concept of a team dominating a match and then losing, but there is a term for it: smash-and-grab. The Platonic ideal for the smash-and-grab is the first example listed in that Guardian article: the Italia '90 round of 16 match between Brazil and Argentina in which Brazil created all the pressure for 80 minutes, then got beaten on one Maradona counter that caused unmitigated panic in the Selecao's rearguard.



My favorite aspect of the highlight is Caniggia's look of utter shock after scoring, as if to say "this wasn't part of the plan at all! We were supposed to win in penalties after a goalless 120 minutes!" Because of their performance at the 1990 World Cup, I hated Argentina for years, although their slick side at Germany '06 changed my mind.

There's another smash-and-grab not mentioned in the Guardian's article that is near and dear to my heart:



At some point, I need to create a tag for all of the posts in which I have invented reasons to include that clip.

He's Here

Boom goes the dynamite. I watched that clip on my DVR about eight times last night. By the end, I was picking out fans in the crowd and watching their reactions. My favorite was a guy in right field in a white t-shirt and khakis who was jumping up and down with his arms extended in the air like he had just won a Showcase Showdown. Atlanta fans have been waiting for someone like Heyward ever since the air went out of the Vick balloon (and we can debate when that happened) and he certainly didn't disappoint.

[Side note: I wish that I could say that the Hawks had produced a star to fill the space left by Vick, but they haven't. The team is very good, but Joe Johnson doesn't have quite the charisma to be a star and Josh Smith doesn't quite score enough points to be a superstar. The Hawks' disappointing attendance this year, which is not in line with the team's performance, can be partly laid at the feet of the fact that the team doesn't have one big star, especially in a sport where teams are defined by individuals.]

Other thoughts on the game:

1. Derek Lowe, yeesh. A pitcher can get away with a low strikeout rate if he keeps the ball in the park and doesn't walk opponents. Lowe gave up two homers yesterday and had three walks. It's only one start, but it's not encouraging. I'll be interested to see how the Braves treat him if his performances remain poor. On the one hand, the Braves paying him to be an ace. It's hard to bench a guy with that contract for Kris Medlin. On the other hand, a team with playoff aspirations can't trot out a guy to get rocked every five days.

2. After an offseason in which the mainstream media really picked up on the trend towards valuing defense, the Braves' first inning was a great illustration. Before Heyward put us all on the back of his chariot and took us to HappyLand, the Braves had scored three runs without hitting a ball hard. A better defensive team would have turned one or more of the flares hit by Prado, Chipper, and McCann into outs, not to mention the grounder up the middle by Yunel that preceded Heyward's bomb. Better defense would have been the difference between no runs and six. Also, in watching the inning, I was reminded of the fact that it is hard to evaluate defense. When I'm watching a game on TV, I see a flare hit to the outfield and I see the centerfielder almost get there. I don't see his positioning or the jump he got on the ball, and it's hard to evaluate how his speed or lack thereof was the difference between making the play and letting the ball fall in. Thus, I became even more appreciative of the defensive stats that can tell me what my brain struggles to perceive. I liked Bill Simmons's line about Ultimate Zone Rating:

I'm one of those "I don't care how you killed the cow; just serve me a great steak" guys. If the results are logical and easy to understand, I'm pouring some A1 sauce on that formula and eating it.

Speaking of Simmons, I quite enjoyed his podcasts with Jonah Keri and Keith Law over the weekend. It's interesting to see him step out of the dark on the usefulness of advanced baseball stats. It's also nice listening to him when he's not spending all of his time on the Red Sox and the Yankees. I'm generally excited about baseball this year, partially because of Heyward and partially because it's new and shiny.

Maybe Pulling a Head Coach From the 2004 Pistons Was a Good Idea

Peachtree Hoops had a good post asking whether Mike Woodson has changed and it hit on a thought on which I've been noodling. I started Bill Simmons' NBA book last week and found myself disagreeing with Simmons description of how a championship team has to be constructed. I don't have the book in front of me, but Simmons argues that a championship team has to have an alpha dog who is one of the best players in the league, if not the best. My immediate thought when reading this was "2004 Pistons?" Simmons tried to shoehorn Chauncey Billups into the star role for that team, which is interesting coming from a writer who didn't seem to like Billups so much in 2007:

Announcers and studio guys steadfastly continu[e] to call Chauncey Billups "Mr. Big Shot," quite possibly the most undeserved sports nickname of this century. Here's a quick recap of Chauncey's career:

1997-2001: Bounces around from Boston to Toronto to Denver to Orlando to Minnesota.

2002: Plays well enough for the T-Wolves (0-3 in the '02 playoffs) that Detroit gives him a $30 million contract.

2003: Leads a Pistons team that eventually gets swept in the 2003 Eastern finals by New Jersey … and gets destroyed by Jason Kidd in the process. Billups shot 11 for 40 in the series; Kidd averaged 23.5 points, 7.5 assists and 10 rebounds per game. To be fair, Billups was playing with a sprained ankle. Just pointing out that the "Mr. Big Shot" nickname hadn't kicked in yet.

2004: Shoots 39 percent in the regular season, gets hot in the playoffs, leads the Pistons to the title, makes some big shots along the way, and somehow picks up the name "Mr. Big Shot."

2005: Leads the Pistons to the Finals, makes some big shots along the way, then pulls a relative no-show in Game 7 (13 points, 3 for 8 from the field, no big shots).

2006: Heading into the playoffs, with the Pistons peaking as a 64-win team, I wrote that Billups was "one more killer spring away from moving into the pantheon of Big Game Guards, along with Sam Jones, Jerry West, Dennis Johnson and Walt Frazier. Out of anyone in the playoffs other than Kobe, he's the one who can make the biggest leap historically. Well, unless Artest charges into the stands again."

Didn't happen. During the last three games of the Eastern semis against Cleveland -- which the Pistons nearly blew -- Billups shot 13 for 34. In the six-game loss to Miami in the Eastern finals, he shot 39 percent and 3 for 14 in the deciding game. So much for the pantheon of Big Game Guards.

2007: Struggled in the Chicago series (39 percent shooting), then completely flopped in the first four games of the Cavs series (22-for-57 shooting, 32 turnovers, some killer mistakes at the end of Games 3 and 4), to the point that people are now openly wondering how much money he's costing himself this summer.

So here's my question: With all due respect to Billups -- who's been a valuable player, a gamer and a winner over the past few years -- can we really keep calling a 41 percent career shooter who slapped together one great playoffs and nine-tenths of another great playoffs "Mr. Big Shot"? Isn't that a little insulting to Robert Horry? I vote that we call him "Chauncey" or "Billups" unless he completely redeems himself over these next few weeks. This meeting is adjourned.

And keep in mind that Simmons is big on the idea of reading what people wrote at the time that a player in question was at his peak and using those contemporaneous judgments as a measuring stick. That's one of his bases for arguing that Russell was better than Wilt. I digress.

The point at which I was driving is that the 2004 Pistons stand as an example for this Hawks team, a historical marker that shows that a team does not need to have a dominant superstar in order to win a title. Just like the 2004 Pistons, the Hawks will need a little good fortune in that the teams with the dominant superstars will need to be operating at below peak efficiency because of injuries, in-fighting, distractions, slumping supporting casts, inexplicable decisions to bring in aging, out-of-shape, not half as good as their reputations centers, etc. That said, there are precious few champions in any sport that don't require some good fortune.

The Pistons succeeded because they had a balanced roster that fit together nicely and because they had a head coach who was able to convince the players to co-exist and not play outside of their roles. It's been a bumpy road, but Billy Knight and Rick Sund collectively put together a logical roster full of complementary players. (Remember when there were constant complaints that Knight was assembling too many similar swing men? Does anyone watch Joe Johnson, Marvin Williams, and Josh Smith and think that they all do the same things? I suppose the story might be a little different if Josh Childress were still here.) And interestingly enough, through 11 games, Mike Woodson has his charges playing their roles and not trying to do things at which they struggle (read: Josh Smith shooting jump shots.)

To come back to the Peachtree Hoops post, this passage struck me as a good description of where Woodson has succeeded in a Larry Brown kind of way for the first 11 games of the season:

Jamal Crawford. The guy is doing things we have never had before in Atlanta. He can break guys down, get to the foul line, pass well, and get (if not always hit) wide open jumpers. As Hoopinion has mentioned well and I have tried to talk about badly, Woody's job is to manage these great skills against Crawford's very real weaknesses. How can you hide his defense? How can you manage his minutes in a way to control his shot selection? So far Woodson has done a great job, but so has Crawford. Where to stop lauding Jamal with praise and start tipping your hat to Woody is a tough line to find.

It's still early, but Woodson is fulfilling the Brown role of getting NBA players to limit themselves to roles that work for the team. Jamal Crawford has always been one of those guys about whom you'd say "he can be a very good player if..." Those ifs - namely, "...he had better shot selection and didn't always try to hard to get his" - have never come true because he's always played for bad teams that presumably had toxic environments. Maybe this is the environment where Crawford becomes truly valuable?

And one last question about the parallel to the 2004 Pistons: is that team viewed in NBA circles the way that I view the 2002 Ohio State Buckeyes, namely as a total anomaly, an exception to the rule, a team that followed a path to a title that is almost impossible to replicate? I honestly don't know enough about NBA history to know how really knowledgeable fans view the '04 Pistons.

Six Reasons Why I'm Happy That the Yankees Won Last Night

Also known as the post that I never thought I would write.

For the record, I hate the Yankees as much as any self-respecting Southerner. That said, I found myself in the unique position of not rooting against them last night. I'm still coming to grips with this new feeling, so an explanation is in order:

1. The Yankees achieved nothing other than successfully exercise raw economic power. Honestly, how much of a baseball achievement is it to pay more money than any other team for the three biggest free agents on the market in a winter in which there were three big free agents on the market? It must have taken some real skill for the Yankees to figure out that C.C. Sabathia and Mark Teixeira are good players. And lo and behold, who were the Yankees' heroes in the post-season? Burnett (at least in game two), A-Rod, Johnny Damon, and Hideki Matsui. Mercenaries, all of them. Oh, and let's not forget about the Jeter/Posada/Pettite/Rivera core, who do prove that the Yankees are about more than just offering more money than anyone else in baseball...or at least they were over a decade ago. The Yankees winning is a nice reminder of how baseball actually works, and for that I'm happy.

2. I found the idea of the Phillies repeating to be distasteful. I have nothing against this Philadelphia team, other than the fact that they represent Philadelphia. There's nothing aversive about Utley, Rollins, Howard, Lee, or Hamels. However, I have this gnawing notion that a team that repeats as a champion ought to be a great team. No college football team has repeated since 1994-95 Nebraska. No college basketball team has repeated since 1991-92 Duke. No NFL team has repeated since the 2003-04 Patriots. No NBA team has repeated since the 2000-02 Lakers. No baseball team has repeated since the 1998-2000 Yankees. All of those teams were great. Does this Phillies team fit that bill? A team that won 92 and 93 games in a relatively weak league? (And before 2008, the Phillies had not won 90 games in a season since 1993.) There's nothing awe-inspiring about this Philadelphia team, so my sense of order in the universe has been confirmed by them not winning the title.

[Edit: a helpful commenter pointed out that I forgot that Florida repeated as national champions in college basketball two years ago. I'm comfortable labeling that Florida team as great. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I complained at the time that Florida would have been viewed as an all-time great team if they were North Carolina or UCLA and now I've forgotten that they repeated. Another commenter has pointed out that I glossed over USC's back-to-back titles in football. I could make the "they didn't win consecutive crystal balls" argument, but I don't really believe that. If you are #1 in the AP poll at the end of the year, you're a national champion, just like you are if you win the BCS trophy. USC and LSU were both champs in 2003. I should refrain from making statements without thinking about them.]

3. It shows that numerous figures in the media were idiots for the "A-Rod is a choker" meme. I have to admit that I'm happy for Alex Rodriguez. One of the dumbest labels in sports is the "he doesn't respond to pressure" tag. The tag is inevitably applied based on a small sample size and selective use of evidence. It assumes that someone who is better than 99.9% of the population at a particular sport suddenly loses the ability to handle performance anxiety. Most importantly, the people who apply it never get that their binary clutch/unclutch worldview is flawed, so when an athlete or coach shatters their perception, they don't admit that they were wrong. Rather, they just move on to the next person to label unfairly.

Bill Simmons, make my point for me:

More than a few Colts fans thanked me during signings this week for "coming around on Peyton" or "finally appreciating Peyton." As if I had been irrationally biased against him this entire time. Look, you can't tell me Manning didn't reinvent himself to some degree in 2008 and 2009. I always thought he was the A-Rod of football: great when it didn't matter, sketchy when it did. You may disagree. But that's how I felt. This season, he has reached "I will never, ever, EVER bet against that guy in a night game" status. Which is saying something. He owns that team. Owns it.

HE'S THE SAME GUY YOU RIPPED AS A CHOKER FOR YEARS!!! It's not like Manning got some sort of personality transplant and he can suddenly respond to pressure whereas before, he wilted. He's the same guy who led his team from behind on a number of occasions in college and the pros, only now, he's not being judged based on a small sample size of road playoff games against a defensive genius at the top of his game deploying excellent personnel. Simmons' refusal to admit that he was wrong illustrates perfectly why clutch/unclutch analysts keep on making the same mistake. So yay for A-Rod (a player who had 1,000+ OPSs in the 2000 and 2004 postseasons) for winning a title and getting a collection of misguided critics off his back. I'm anxiously looking forward to the next highly conditioned, incredibly successful athlete who is going to be portrayed as the Scarecrow.

And before I finish with Simmons, note that he deployed the "that's how I felt" crutch, which is a surefire way to know that someone is wrong because they are substituting their feelings for an actual argument. He's like the opponents of gay marriage who defend their position with the "I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman" claim. That's not an argument; it's a statement of feeling. I don't care what you believe; tell me why you're right...or maybe you can't.

4. Speaking of Simmons, the obnoxiousness of the Red Sox Nation phenomenon has softened my dislike of the Yankees. If nothing else, Boston's emergence as a Yankees-lite franchise has reduced the Yankees' role as an evil hegemon in baseball. (To Simmons' credit, he has acknowledged the Yankees-lite point on a number of occasions.)

5. The Phillies' loss probably annoys Buzz Bissinger. Also, the Yankees winning makes Mets fans even more miserable. Schadenfreude!

6. The Series didn't go seven games, so we won't be subjected to an endless barrage of "what a classic!" myth-making that occurs like clockwork when baseball teams from the Northeast are involved.

Amen

I wonder if the commenter who said that he was not going to come back to this site after he figured out that I write about soccer (the 161 posts regarding "the Other Football" must have been confusing to him) is now going to boycott Bill Simmons. A couple thoughts on a very strong piece:

1. I think the correct analogy for Mexico's playing style is not a football team that controls time of possession with a brutal running game and a short passing game. Mexico's tempo is faster than that. At least when playing at the Azteca, El Tri seem more like a football team with an excellent defense that forces a lot of three-and-outs and then runs a no-huddle on offense. They didn't strike me as playing a very deliberate game last week. They're more the Saints with a better defense than they are the Giants.

2. I quite liked this paragraph describing the reaction to the winning goal:

I will remember the reaction afterward: Complete and utter delirium. Everyone just threw whatever drink they had as far as they could. It was like watching a new Pixar movie called "A Snowstorm of Drinks" crossed with a full-fledged prison riot. Then and only then did we realize exactly how much that game meant to the Mexicans. As Hopper said right after the final whistle (Mexico 2, USA 1), "I guess the upside is that we're going to live."

The one sports experience that I can remember that was similar was Charlie Peprah's interception return for a touchdown for Alabama against Georgia in 2002. Peprah's TD was the second Bama TD in quick succession that turned a 24-12 deficit into a 25-24 lead. I've never seen a scene quite like that. Drinks flying everywhere. Noise like you wouldn't believe (amplified for us by the metal overhand right above our heads). I'll always remember looking at my wife and the two of us exchanging looks of utter disbelief at the anarchy going on around us. And two possessions later, Georgia drove down the field and Billy Bennett kicked the winning field goal.

3. I'm not buying the following paragraph:

The good news for U.S. fans? Our boys hung for two hours in Mexico without disgracing themselves. The bad news? The defeat reinforced some basic problems with our soccer program. We have only a few world-class players (Donovan, Oguchi Onyewu, Clint Dempsey and goalie Tim Howard) and lack a franchise guy who could swing any game, even one being played in Estadio Azteca. For instance, I watched Sunday's Liverpool-Tottenham battle, and Steven Gerrard was so ridiculously, dominantly good in so many different ways -- some overt, some subtle -- that I couldn't get over it. He makes difficult plays seem effortless; you never forget he's on the field. America doesn't have anyone like that. Just like in basketball, you can't win championships in soccer without a LeBron/Kobe-type player.

I watched the Spurs-Liverpool match on Sunday and Gerrard was mostly peripheral because Liverpool miss Xabi Alonso pinging the ball around behind him. It was not a dominant Gerrard performance because he lacked support, thus illustrating the fact that soccer, moreso than basketball, requires that the entire team function in order for a superstar to dominate a game. There are few soccer equivalents to a LeBron single-handedly winning games for his team.

4. Amen to this:

Whatever happens, the stars seem to be aligning for soccer in the United States. Subtle factors have made soccer a potential breakout sport for the next decade: high definition; few commercial breaks; games that almost always end within two hours; improved camera angles; increased exposure to international play; a generation of adults weaned on the 1994 World Cup; even the near-death of passing in basketball, which led people like me to gravitate toward soccer simply because I miss seeing telepathic connections between teammates and will take it any way I can get it. I don't think I'm alone.

I have the same thoughts on passing. Maybe it's a result of watching the Gretzky Oilers during my formative sports years?

5. Did you ever think that you would read a Red Sox nut like Simmons type the two sentences that conclude the piece?

As for the Mexicans, they averted a national disaster and reignited their Cup chances. On the way back to our hotel, driving in our bulletproof car, we passed under a bridge on the highway and noticed one lone Mexican man happily swinging a flag back and forth. He had to have been 45 minutes from the stadium. There was nobody around him. He just kept swinging that flag with a joyous grin on his face. I remember thinking to myself, "Nobody in America will ever care about a sport that much." And we won't.

Me neither.

You Know We Are / Bring It Down / We're F***in' Crazy!

I heartily co-sign on Andy Staples' paean to SEC fans. Any writer who writes two paragraphs like the following for a major sports web site is truly a man after my heart:

College football is just more important to people in the South than it is to people in the rest of the country. There is a good reason for this. Pro sports ignored the South for a long time. For southerners in my parents' generation, college football dominated the news because it usually was the only game in town. Those people passed their sports consumption habits down to the next generation, and my generation will pass it along to the one that follows ours. For that reason, many SEC fans pay no mind to the NFL, unless it's a Tennessee fan checking on Peyton Manning or an LSU fan following LaRon Landry...

Unlike much of the national media -- which regularly underestimates the passion and buying power of rabid college football fans -- CBS and ESPN know that in a nine-state footprint lives a dedicated base of fans who will follow their teams to the ends of the earth. Baseball can't match that dedication. The next time you meet someone who claims to be a die-hard Red Sox fan, ask him how many magnets he can fit on his RV. That's why the two networks will pay a combined $3 billion over the next 15 years to televise SEC sports.

Staples makes a good point that ESPN has figured out that there are a lot of eyeballs in the SEC states and those eyeballs are glued tight to SEC football. That said, his point regarding intensity of fan support can be taken one step farther. I doubt that ESPN and CBS forked over hundreds of millions of dollars to the SEC just to get ratings in this region. They realize that genuine fan support creates unparalleled atmospheres at SEC games and that makes for great TV. I'm reminded of what Bill Simmons wrote when he decided that he was going to become an EPL fan:

You know how Red makes the comment that, after a life spent in Shawshank, he can't even squeeze a drop of pee without asking for permission first? I feel like that's happening to us. American sports have been ravaged by TV timeouts, ticket price hikes and Jumbotrons that pretty much order fans how to act. Just look at what happened in the NBA playoffs. Miami fans were urged to wear all white like a bunch of outpatients from a psych ward; the Detroit announcer screamed, "Let's give it up!" and "Lemme HEAR YOU!" as the crowd responded like a bunch of trained seals; Clippers fans weren't able to stand and cheer after an outrageous Shaun Livingston dunk in the Denver series because disco music was blaring at deafening levels. And it's not just basketball. During Angels games in baseball, the crowd waits to make noise until a monkey appears on the scoreboard. You can't attend an NHL game without hearing the opening to "Welcome to the Jungle" 90 times. Even our NFL games have slipped -- you cheer when the players run out, cheer on third downs, cheer on scores and sit the rest of the time. It's a crying shame.

Not to pull a Madonna on you, but European soccer stands out because of the superhuman energy of its fans -- the chants and songs, the nonstop cheering, the utter jubilation whenever anything good happens, how the games seem to double as life-or-death experiences -- and I can't help but wonder if that same trait has been sucked out of our own sports for reasons beyond our control. And no, that same energy hasn't completely disappeared; you can see a similar energy on display at Fenway, Yankee Stadium, Lambeau, MSG (if the Knicks and/or Rangers are good, a big "if" these days) and any other city with enough history and passion to override the evils of the Jumbotron Era. Still, these are aberrations. By pricing out most of the common fans and overwhelming the ones who remained, professional sports leagues in this country made a conscious decision: We'd rather hear artificially created noise than genuine noise. That's the biggest problem with sports in America right now. And there's no real way to solve it.

Simmons's current opinion (and it's a perceptive one) is that European soccer is the next big thing in American sports because we've become a TV-oriented sports culture and European footie translates better on TV. The games are played in front of singing, crazed fans without any of the manipulative prompting so common with American pro sports. If he's right, then SEC football is an attractive TV property outside of the South because it brings something to the table that most American sports do not: genuine, unadulterated passion. A fan in Seattle or Philadelphia who is disillusioned by what the pro sports experience has become could be sucked in by an SEC game because it reminds him of the way games used to be before t-shirt bazookas and "Cheer! Now! Do It!" reminders on the scoreboard.

The one limiting factor to neutrals being swayed by a better TV experience is their feelings about the locales of the game. European footie will have a hard time becoming mainstream because it's foreign. It's not necessarily that the most popular foreign league is English. Most Americans like England and remember that they were our allies in WWII. (We forget that the Russians were as well, but that's a different rant.) However, because English footballers are generally rubbish, the league is mostly dominated by foreign stars: Drogba, Essien, Fabregas, Torres, etc. Unless NBC is wrong about the sentiment of the average American when it ignores the rest of the world in its Olympic coverage, the EPL may always remain a fringe sport because of all the funny names.

To a lesser extent, this could be an issue with SEC football. The South is still viewed by many in the North as being defined by the Confederacy and Jim Crow. Florida seems nonthreatening because it is heavily populated by retirees from the Northeast and Midwest, but can we imagine people in the Northeast getting very excited about Alabama and Ole Miss, given where they get their ideas about the Deep South? (Better they think about Bull Connor than the Boston busing riots, right?) I'd be fascinated to know what ESPN and CBS think about the potential for the SEC as a TV property outside of the Sunbelt.

For $20, BurritoBlogging will take you to a Ku Klux Klan cookout

I can't believe we got anything for the Out-o-matic 9000. I haven't seen his numbers this year, but my sense is that Church is a decent player. Anything is better that our former rightfielder, but we actually got a decent player to replace him? And Church is a lefty, which will help a team that struggles against right-handed starters.

Our trading partner makes me feel even better about this deal. Has Omar Minaya done anything good as the Mets' GM that didn't involve prospects drafted by his predecessor or the exercise of naked economic power? If the Mets play Francoeur every day, then we've simultaneously helped ourselved and hurt a major rival. The Braves just sent smallpox to New York. Or, I guess to riff on our nickname, we gave them tobacco.

I listened to the Bill Simmons-Colin Cowherd podcast last night. Although their discussion of blogs was at times fatuous, I was most interested when they both proclaimed how much they have grown to like soccer. Footie-haters, you know your days are numbered when sports talk radio stops treating the sport like Bolshevism run amok. And Simmons is the most popular writer for the WWL, so having him write about watching Spurs can't help but push soccer further into the mainstream. As Cowherd was talking about the NBA and the fact that Americans eat up sports that are all about stars and personalities, I thought that ESPN is really going to be able to sell Barca-Real. La Primera will make sense to the network that adores the Yanks and Red Sox. OK, I need to disinfect after that last sentence.

A full post on the Hawks is coming, but this offseason is going great. Best of all, the fears about Atlanta Spirit being skinflints have turned out to be unjustified. Can they really be losing that much money if they are adding payroll? Am I being greedy in imagining that they resign Marvin and then bring Andersen over from Barca to take Solomon Jones' minutes? That team would be a Lebron injury from being a real contender in the East.

You are looking live at Coors Field... Coors is one of the underrated parks in baseball. The stadium isn't any different from every other new park built since Camden, but the way it is worked into Lodo is really cool. Camden and Coors are the best of the new parks that I've been to. To achieve the same effect, the Ted should have been built...next to Midtown? Maybe along with Atlantic Station?

Raging Burrito was just treated to a great live version of "Some Girls.". Sadly, they have a 300-disc changer here, so the bartender couldn't tell me the bootleg title. "Some Girls" is a great track; a way for a Stones fan to make clear that he isn't a casual, greatest hits guy. Also acceptable: "Memo from Turner," "All Down the Line," and "Sister Morphine.". Speaking of drugs, I scared two co-workers this week by volunteering that rain is a euphemism for heroin, before explaining that I know that because of my favorite Dylan song. "Smack addict" isn't a great niche to fill at a law firm.

John Sciambi needs to meet gay Ben, my stylist. Speaking of which, when the guy cutting your hair wants your opinion regarding the Confederations Cup final, you know that soccer is infiltrating.

The only part of me that is sad about Frenchy's departure is that he was the avatar of the '05 Braves, the last and one of the most enjoyable of the 14 straight division champs. For a summer, he was the mayor. Now, he's a f***'in Met.

The Best and Worst of Bill Simmons in One Handy Capsule

I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Simmons. On the one hand, this is my 21st post about his columns and most of those posts have been some variety of "this argument is totally wrong!" He is typically irrational when it comes to the Boston teams, which is to be expected, and he lets that irrationality affect his analysis, which is a problem for a guy who's paid to write smart columns about sports. He turned me into a Peyton Manning fan, which is quite an accomplishment in light of the fact that I swore eternal vengeance against Manning and Phil Fulmer for lying down in the January 1998 Orange Bowl. The recent dominance of Boston teams has been the worst development for my enjoyment of Simmons' work.

On the other hand, I read Simmons with more regularity than any other columnist. He doesn't just have a good writing style; he clearly cares about the craft of writing. His reading habits are evident in his writing and I appreciate anyone who reads voraciously. I wish I had more time to do the same. Simmons is so much better than the average columnist because he's a product of the Internet. He knows that there is a market out there for analysis that goes deeper than "Derek Jeter is clutch because his teams win." He knows that there are better stats than the conventional ones that one would see opening a newspaper, as evidenced by his collaboration with people like Aaron Schatz and John Hollinger. That said, he does get lazy with his analysis...

Take today's effort regarding Mike D'Antoni. This paragraph irked me:

We spent so much time arguing SSOL's team merits that we never noticed its effects on careers. Remember what happened to Quentin Richardson when he left Phoenix? (Even Sugar from Survivor didn't disappear as quickly.) Have you seen Boris Diaw, Leandro Barbosa or Raja Bell this season? (Overpaid bench players, as it turns out.) Or Amaré Stoudemire? (Is he even an All-Star anymore?) Have you caught Al Harrington, David Lee, Nate Robinson and Duhon in the Knicks' version of the SSOL system? (Suddenly, they're gone in every fantasy league.) Most important, has anyone seen Steve Nash lately?

Initially, the paragraph bothered me because Simmons ought to acknowledge that Joe Johnson has had an excellent career since leaving Phoenix. Billy Knight was ripped for signing Johnson to a massive deal and giving up a lot to acquire him. The source of the critique was that Johnson would not be the same player outside of Phoenix's system and without Steve Nash to feed him the ball. Now, Johnson is the lead player for a 21-10 team. He's turned into a good scoring option at the end of a tight game and he's also the Hawks' defensive stopper against opposing guards. If he were more of a character (you know, giving himself nicknames, getting stabbed in a nightclub, that sort of thing), he'd be one of the big stars in the league. Of all people who should know about Johnson, a Celtics nut who saw game four of the Celtics-Hawks series last year tops the list. He's a massive exception to Simmons' argument and he isn't mentioned.

So, with a skeptical eye, I decided to look at the players that Simmons did choose to cite to prove his point that players drop off the face of the earth when they are no longer playing for D'Antoni:

Quentin Richardson - Funny thing about Q, he's muddling along this year at 12 points per game while being coached by D'Antoni! If Simmons' theory were right, he should have exploded this year. Here are Richardson's PER numbers for the last four years:

2004-05 - 13.63
2005-06 - 9.61
2006-07 - 14.30
2007-08 - 8.72
2008-09 - 12.00

Richardson was in Phoenix for 2004-5 and then ended up with the Knicks thereafter. He had a great year for Phoenix, then a bad year, a good year, and a bad year for the Knicks. If I were trying to make the case that D'Antoni makes players better, I wouldn't choose a guy who had a better PER two years after playing for D'Antoni.

Boris Diaw - Diaw had a terrific 2005-6 that caused Hawks fans to want to send him or Mike Woodson a Semtex eclair (depending on whom we blamed for Diaw exploding after leaving Atlanta), then promptly declined thereafter:

2005-06 - 17.31
2006-07 - 13.02
2007-08 - 11.97
2008-09 - 13.55

Either D'Antoni was an apparition in 2006-07 and 2007-08 or Diaw declined while he was in the SSOL system. Note that Diaw's numbers have gotten better this year in year one AD'A.

Leandro Barbosa - Here is another guy who had one great year for D'Antoni, but started his decline while D'Antoni was still on the bench in Phoenix:

2005-06 - 15.14
2006-07 - 18.49
2007-08 - 15.81
2008-09 - 16.00

Barbosa's numbers are unchanged this year, despite the coaching change.

Raja Bell - Here is another guy whose decline started well before D'Antoni took the money from the Knicks:

2005-06 - 12.94
2006-07 - 12.01
2007-08 - 10.48
2008-09 - 8.97

Bell was 29 in 2005-06. The best explanation for his decline would be the fact that he has been moving farther and farther from his athletic prime.

Amaré Stoudemire - Finally, we have a guy who suffered from D'Antoni leaving:

2004-05 - 26.71
2005-06 - injured
2006-07 - 23.15
2007-08 - 27.29
2008-09 - 22.77

Stoudemire is not producing on the same levels he hit under D'Antoni. This could be the result of coaching, or it could be the result of Steve Nash showing his age. A third possibility is that we are dealing with a small sample size of 30 games and we need to wait a year or two before proclaiming that Stoudemire was destroyed by D'Antoni leaving Arizona.

As for the Knicks players, they are producing bigger numbers, but I don't see anyone proclaiming that Nate Robinson and Al Harrington are suddenly great players. Rather, I think most sane people realize that the Knicks are playing at a much faster pace this year, which means more shots for Knicks players and their opponents.

While Simmons' examples are faulty, his underlying point is spot-on:

The best thing that ever happened to Malone was Stockton, and vice versa; So, what if the Bullets hadn't screwed up and had picked Mailman one spot ahead of Utah instead of taking the immortal Kenny Green? How would you remember Dominique's career if the Lakers had picked him over Worthy? What if Pippen never played with MJ? What if McHale never played with Bird? What if young Kobe had gotten stuck on an expansion team instead of the Lakers? What if KG found a great team before he turned 30? What if Tim Duncan landed on the 1997-98 Celtics instead of the 1997-98 Spurs? In a league where you can play only five at a time, the fortunes of every good player are irrevocably tied to those of his teammates and coach. For better and worse.

If I had to pick one mistake that sports columnists make more than any other, it's that they fail to appreciate context. I've yet to see anyone in the AJC note that we all thought that Mark Richt was a great coach when Georgia's primary rivals were coached by Phil Fulmer, Ron Zook, and Chan Gailey, but now we all have gnawing concerns because of Urban Meyer and Paul Johnson. We all thought that Leo Mazzone was the greatest pitching coach on earth, but how much of that was based on the fact that he could trot out Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz on a regular basis? We all worried that Joe Johnson was a complementary piece masquerading as a star, but look at what Johnson looks like now with a proper point guard and more mature sidekicks at the forward positions?

Simmons makes a great point. I just wish that he would have remembered it when he claimed last year that the 2007 NFL season was resolving the Manning-Brady debate, as if Brady's numbers had nothing to do with having a motivated Randy Moss on the team. Or maybe Simmons will acknowledge that he thought that Doc Rivers was one of the worst coaches in basketball when the Celtics were tanking in 2007, but now he loves the Doc who gets to coach Garnett, Pierce, Allen, and a maturing Rondo.

Super

Random thoughts on the game last night in no particular order:

1. The Giants won the game because of their defensive line dominating the Patriots' offensive line, in conjunction with Steve Spagnuolo dreaming up some outstanding blitz schemes that ensured that his defensive linemen would be single-blocked and the Patriots' offensive linemen would be tentative. The game reminded me of the Sugar Bowl between LSU and Oklahoma, where LSU's defensive line (led by Marcus Spears and the late Marquise Hill) devoured Jason White and his gimpy ankle, in part because Nick Saban and Will Muschamp used the weeks leading up to the game to dream up exotic blitzes. The Giants' coaches also did a nice job of preparing for New England's pressure. One of the best nuggets offered up by Football Outsiders' Aaron Schatz on Bill Simmons' podcast last week was that the Giants struggle against six-man blitzes. New England blitzed six on the Giants' first several third down plays and the Giants picked up the blitzes every time, correctly predicting that the Patriots would attempt to exploit this weakness. Unfortunately, Schatz also claimed on the podcast that the Giants did not resemble the '01 Patriots (and, in his defense, had the numbers to back up his claims) and instead compared them to the '85 Patriots, forgetting that the '85 Patriots were opposed in the Super Bowl by a team that was peaking as opposed to a team that played its best football in the first half of the season. And speaking of Simmons...

2. Am I a bad person because my first thoughts as the game was ending were that I couldn't wait to: (a) hear Steak Shapiro whine and complain on the radio this morning and; (b) read Simmons write about the terrible unfairness of it all? Do I take this schadenfreude thing a little too far?

2a. Someone should do a compliation of all the instances in which Simmons has taken shots at the Mannings over the past five years and then send him a tastefully decorated scrapbook containing the results.

3. Speaking of thinking negative things about people, is Rodney Harrison the biggest prick in all of sports or just the NFL? On one play, he led with his forearm in the direction of Amani Toomer, missed the tackle, and then jumped on him forearm first at the end of the play. He does something dirty on just about every play. Pending confirmation of the latest Spygate revelations, Harrison is the perfect symbol for this New England team, or at least the defense coached by Belichick.

4. Was I the only one who was sure when Eli shook out of a sack on third and five on the Giants' final drive that he was sure to throw an interception when he heaved the ball down the middle of the field? Seriously, his adrenaline is racing, he's taken his eyes off the rush, and he's throwing into an area populated by defenders. It seemed like a reasonable fear at the time.

5. As you may know, I thoroughly enjoy snarking at announcers, but I found very little to pick on from Joe Buck and Troy Aikman last night. Buck did a great job of shutting up after both of the late touchdowns, widely choosing to let the sights and sounds of the game speak for themselves. Cue Mia Wallace: "Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?"

6. I don't know why, but the Giants have always been my favorite of the New York teams. Admittedly, this is like saying that Albert Speer is my favorite Nazi, but they've never quite rubbed me the wrong way like the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, and Rangers have. They don't win as a result of raw economic power like the New York baseball teams do, they didn't set basketball back 20 years like the Riley-era Knicks did, and they didn't spawn a truly annoying media lovefest the way the '94 Rangers did. Plus, the Giants draft as if they didn't get the memo that all Michigan players are slow and useless in the NFL.

7. Shouldn't Roger Goodell hand the Lombardi Trophy to Tom Coughlin or one of the Giants' captains as opposed to the team's owner? Don't Giants fans root more for the coach and players than the owner? I know I'm a Euro snob and all, but this packs more punch:



8. Even in defeat, you have to give the Patriots credit as the team that never misses a beat. It's hard to imagine any other team in the NFL noticing that an opposing player was a step slow getting off of the field and therefore, that the Pats could prolong a drive by getting a too many men on the field penalty on the Giants.

9. While Bill Belichick is getting plenty of stick for going for 4th and 13 in the third quarter instead of kicking a field goal, he really ought to get more criticism for punting on a 4th and 2 from the Giants' 44 earlier in the drive. Belichick has correctly come to the conclusion that going for 4th down is an underutilized strategy, so his decision to punt on fourth and short in his opponent's territory was out of character.

10. Just as I'll never understand how Georgia went from being a decent team through seven games to a world-beating team in its final six, I'll never quite understand how the Giants generally and Eli Manning specifically went from being a decent team through 15 games to an excellent one in their final five. Maybe the lesson from this football season isn't any more complicated than "s*** happens."

Thoughts on the Championship Games

Getting in Touch with my Feelings

This sucks. I was all ready to root against the Patriots in the Super Bowl because I'm not prepared to deal with the ludicrous hyperbole that will come from certain quarters. (The opening bit about how the '86 Lakers and '07 Colts intentionally lost because they were terrified of the Celtics and Patriots and that this deprived Boston fans of their just desserts was possibly the perfect encapsulation of Sports Guy's bitchiness. His team is on the brink of the first 19-0 season in NFL history and he still manages to piss and moan about how it's all so unfair for Boston fans. These people really cannot let the Red Sox Persecution Complex go.) I was ready to root for the Packers. Hell, I was even ready to root for the Cowboys. But now? I have to root for a New York team? And after my enjoyment of baseball was slowly destroyed by the incessant Yankees-Red Sox drumbeat from the Worldwide Leader, we'll now be subjected to two weeks of hype leading up to a Boston-New York Super Bowl? Kill me now.

I felt annoyed about not having a rooting interest in the Super Bowl, but nothing cheers me up quite like a little Hitler humor:



Favre

I was interested to read how Peter King would react to his man-crush Brett Favre playing so poorly in the Packers' biggest game of the season. Naturally, he totally ignored Favre's role in the game. King spends roughly 5,500 words on the two games and only at the very end meekly points out that Brett shouldn't have thrown a pick to R.W. McQuarters. Really, doctor? Would it pain you to also point out that Favre threw a terrible pick to Corey Webster to set the Giants up for the winning field goal in overtime? Or that Favre preceded his interception to McQuarters with a truly dreadful throw into triple-coverage? Will Deanna no longer invite you over for tea and crumpets if you point out when her husband throws abysmal passes that would cause various talking heads to label just about any other NFL quarterback as a choker or a terrible passer? Yesterday's game really made me think that Favre is the anti-Bonds. Barry Bonds gets treated ruthlessly by the press because he is, by all accounts, a prick (or at least he's a prick to the media). Favre can get away with terrible throws that would lead any other quarterback to be pilloried because he is, by all accounts, a really good guy. And let me be even more frank, just to show you that I'm not a hard-hearted man, and that it's not all dollars and cents: I was rooting for Favre after reading the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece. That said, sports are supposed to be about performance and Favre's performance was not good yesterday. At one point in the fourth quarter, I was cringing at the idea of Bill Belichick having two weeks to come up with pressure schemes designed to force Favre into excessively risky throws. What does it say that I'm far more confident that Eli Manning will be able to handle the looks that the Pats will throw at him than Fave would?

That said, Favre had no running game to speak of and New York's defensive line won its match-up with the Packers' offensive line, so Favre shouldn't be singled out as the only reason why Green Bay lost. It's not easy to win on a windy day when your running back produces a tad more than two yards per carry.

I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but Favre seemed to have a lot of problems when Green Bay was heading left-to-right on the TV. I assume that there is a wind-related explanation for this, but Favre was unable to complete anything other than very short screen passes in the first quarter, the fourth quarter, and overtime. He was OK in the second and third quarters. Eli Manning, on the other hand, was able to consistently make passes throughout the game.

Random Stuff

In case you're wondering, I did feel quite conflicted by the fact that Charles Woodson and Amani Toomer were matched up against one another all game.

Did anyone else notice that Philip Rivers' first pick was caused by Mike Vrabel kicking out his leg as he flew by and tripping Rivers during his delivery? Isn't tripping, you know, illegal? And why was I able to notice this, but Jim Nantz and Phil Simms prattled on about Rivers making a bad throw? Should the slogan for the Pats' linebackers be "we're old and slow, but we know the best ways to cheat"? (Actually, Vrabel had run right around Marcus MacNeil on that play, so slow isn't the right word for him.)

Norv Turner redeemed his reputation in this post-season, but the guy is a really, really conservative coach. Punting from the 36 down two scores in the fourth quarter is the most obvious example, but did it seem to anyone else that San Diego's playcalling on first and second downs was, dare I say it, Big Ten-esque?

I was impressed by the Pats' ability to switch identities on offense based on the opponent. With Brady struggling and the Chargers doing a good job on the Pats' spread formations, New England was able to shift course and run Laurence Maroney using two tight end sets. Now I can see what Charlie Weis was trying to accomplish...in 20-hour practice weeks with inexperienced players who lack basic fundamentals.

I was quite amused to read this piece, which concludes as follows:

"Sports in my view is a highly disposable product in that it has a significant decline in viewer interest once you know the outcome," said [Jeff] Genthner, the general manager of Atlanta-based regional sports networks FSN South and SportSouth. "So therefore you know that when people watch your sports event they are watching it live and can't fast-forward through the commercials. Agencies and advertisers know that as well."

while Der Wife and I were watching the Packers-Giants game on DVR and fast-forwarding through the commercials. Because the Pats-Chargers game started at the same time as the Barca-Racing match (yes, I know I'm probably the only person who viewed this as a legitimate conflict), I decided to DVR both, watch the first half of the Barca match, and then start the Pats game with a 45 minute delay so I could fast-forward through commercials. That 45-minute lag lasted me through halftime so I ended up having to watch the second half in real time. In case you're scoring at home, that's 45 minutes of commercials and useless piffle from the CBS studio crew in a 100-minute period. The lesson I took is that there is no reason to start an NFL game less than one hour after the actual start time. I've said it before and I'll say it again: no league pisses on its fans quite like the NFL.

Michael Lewis is not Amused

Thanks to columns like this effort from Bill Simmons, Moneyball continues its ascent as one of the most misinterpreted book in the Western Canon, right up there with the Bible and the Prince. Moneyball tells the story of Billy Beane overcoming the A's financial disadvantages by exploiting a market inefficiency, namely the undervaluing of strike zone judgment and college players in the market for baseball players. In so doing, Beane rejected the subjective judgments of his scouts that certain guys "look like players" in favor of objective statistical analysis of prospects.

Simmons claims that a similar revolution is taking place in the NBA:

Here's the new mantra for savvy NBA teams: "Chemacterility." Why haven't you heard the term before? Because I just made it up. But it's an amalgam of three concepts that have formed the foundation of the Duncan era in San Antonio: chemistry, character and (cap) flexibility. As soon as Duncan arrived, in 1997, Popovich and Buford began to avoid bad guys and bad contracts, preferring role players, quality guys and short-term deals.

You're probably aware of the obvious stupidity of this argument, especially with Moneyball as the lead-in. One of the primary themes of Moneyball is the importance of objective analysis of players. Beane figured out that it was better to evaluate players statistically than to listen to scouts, who based their judgments of their experience and near-mystical beliefs in whether a guy could succeed or fail. Simmons has Moneyball backwards and claims that the analogous revolution in the NBA is to evaluate players based on chemistry and character, both of which are inherently subjective.

You would think that a guy like Simmons who pays attention to the NBA would realize that there is a much better parallel between Buford's Spurs and Beane's A's. The Spurs were one of the first NBA teams to figure out that foreign players were undervalued because they developed better team skills - namely passing, movement without the ball, and team defense - than American players did. Thus, they capitalized on the good fortune of landing the best player in basketball (Tim Duncan) by surrounding him with Tony Parker (28th pick in the Draft) and Manu Ginobili (57th pick in the Draft). Screw character, the Spurs pay homage to Moneyball because they had a better player acquisition strategy than anyone else in the league did.

Simmons cites the Miami Heat as an example of a team that has ignored the character strategy at their own peril, but this completely misses the reason why the Heat aren't very good. Miami has two marquee players. Dewayne Wade is coming off of a significant shoulder injury. He is still rounding into form. Shaquille O'Neal is a shell of his former self. He can barely lift his arms over his head after years of getting pounded in the post. The rest of the Miami roster is crap. It doesn't much matter whether that crap is high- or low-character. Does Simmons really think that Dewayne Wade is frustrated because Ricky Davis and Mark Blount are bad guys or because he doesn't have any teammates who can hit open jumpers or rebound misses?

The irony of Simmons touting a character and chemistry strategy is that his beloved Patriots are unbeaten in large part because of their acquisition of Randy Moss. Apparently, character and chemistry matter in the NBA, but they don't matter in the NFL.

It's a Great Column, But...

Kudos to Bill Simmons for a remarkably self-aware column acknowledging the fact that New York and Boston teams get excessive media attention and their successes and failures are shoved down the throat of the rest of the country to no end. That said, Simmons, as one of the most widely read and influential Internet sports columnists, has a giant hand in the over-hype of New York and Boston teams. Regardless of his writing talent, he wouldn't have obtained his Page Two gig if he were the Buffalo Sports Guy or the Auburn Sports Guy. Once hired by ESPN, he hasn't exactly shied away from writing endlessly about Boston and New York teams, which is why his NBA columns when the Celtics were bad were his best work. I know that Simmons faced a word limit with this column and he comes close to a mea culpa with his self-deprecating remark about being one of the 60,000 people who wrote books about the Red Sox after the 2004 World Series, but couldn't he have done a little more to acknowledge that he is as complicit in the "New York and Boston teams are the greatest! Or they're the worst!" focus that comes out of Bristol and much of the rest of the sports media?

Your Mind is Filled with Big Ideas, Images and Distorted Facts

In advance of the turdocaust of triumphalism that is likely on its way from Bill Simmons, I have a couple bones to pick with him:

Bill should stop picking on the outfielder from my state.

You would think that, after killing J.D. Drew for the entire season as being a choker, Simmons would write something containing the words "I was wrong" after Drew hit a clutch grand slam to put the Red Sox on their way to a critical win in game six of the ALCS. Or that maybe he would acknowledge that Drew didn't only hit that grand slam, but he went five for ten with six RBI during the three games in which Boston rallied from a 3-1 deficit. If he was really self-aware, Simmons would question the assumption that girds so much of his writing that certain players are chokers and certain players are clutch. After all, if Peyton Manning can lead an epic comeback in the AFC Championship Game against his bete noire and J.D. Drew can perform at a top level in crunch ALCS games, then maybe this notion of certain players being clutch is vastly overblown and the result of unreliably small sample sizes.

Predictably, Simmons doesn't engage in any approaching a mea culpa, but instead blathers on about how shocked he was and then adds in a bevy of e-mails from his Red Sox herd parroting the same line. File this under the heading of "no shit, Sherlock. You killed the guy all year and then he came up huge. I'm shocked that you were shocked."

A couple other notes on Drew:

1. His overall post-season numbers aren't outstanding, but here are his OPSs for the three Championship Series in which he's played: .750, 1.044, and .905.

2. Simmons made Drew out to be the worst player in recorded history this year, but he ended up with a 105 OPS+ and a .373 OBP. Admittedly, he didn't play like a $14M player, but he wasn't terrible or anything. Of course, I'm sure all those hits and walks were in "non-clutch" situations.

Bill should stop picking on the quarterback from my alma mater.

This passage bothered me when Simmons wrote it a few weeks ago:

Put it this way: When your own fans are chanting "Griese! Griese!" for your backup, only it's 2007 and they're chanting for Brian instead of Bob, then you know you've colossally failed as a starting QB. Is Brian Griese the worst athlete who ever had his name chanted at a professional sporting event? He has to be right up there, correct? This was like 19,000 NBA fans chanting "Madsen! Madsen!" at the same time. Anyway, you beat this Lions team by throwing the ball on them and outscoring them ... and I'm not backing Brian Griese in a shootout. No, thanks.

The Mark Madsen comparison annoyed me, starting with the fact that Griese has made the Pro Bowl, whereas Madsen has never been on the periphery of the periphery of considering for the NBA All-Star Game. Griese has a career passer rating of 84.6. For context, here are the career passer ratings of some other prominent NFL quarterbacks:

Peyton Manning - 94.7
Tom Brady - 91.8
Carson Palmer - 91.2
Ben Roethlisberger - 89.7
Chad Pennington - 89.3
Mark Bulger - 88.8
Drew Brees - 85.8
Matt Hasselbeck - 85.4
Donovan McNabb - 85.4
Jake Delhomme - 85.2
Brett Favre - 85.1
Brad Johnson - 83.1
Steve McNair - 83.1
Michael Vick - 75.7
Eli Manning - 74.6
Trent Dilfer - 70.8
Rex Grossman - 69.3

I'll concede that passer rating isn't a perfect way to judge a quarterback, but it's the most easily accessible. I doubt that different measures would lead to a different result than the obvious conclusion that Griese is a good quarterback. His numbers sit in the Hasselbeck-McNabb-McNair zone and most fans would conclude that those three are good quarterbacks. His numbers are miles better than Rex Grossman, the guy he replaced, and Trent Dilfer, the model for a game managing quarterback. The rap on Griese is that he struggles to stay healthy and that he was a questionable on and off the field when he played in Denver as Elway's replacement. Neither of those criticisms would lead one to believe that he's a bad quarterback.

In looking at these numbers, my primary reaction after "Bill Simmons' beliefs are refuted by the numbers, yet again" is that I would be royally pissed at Lovie Smith if I were a Bears fan. The Bears blew a shot at winning the Super Bowl last year because Smith was totally committed to Grossman as a starter, against all evidence. He stuck with Grossman in a way that he never would have stuck with an underperforming player at another position. Most damningly, Smith did so with a very viable option on the bench, an accurate passer who makes relatively few mistakes and who would have been perfect paired with the Bears defense. Griese would have been especially useful in the Super Bowl because the Bears' offense was going after a relatively conservative cover-two defense that puts a premium on accurate passes underneath and penalizes quarterbacks who take reckless risks down the field. Because of injuries and salary cap issues, last year might have been the extent of the Bears' window to win a Super Bowl with their dominant defense and they blew it with the "equivalent of Mark Madsen" sitting on the bench.

See, I made it through an entire post about Griese without mentioning the '97 Wolverines. Give me a sticker!

Horford and Law

I'm happy, but not overjoyed with the Hawks' draft decisions last night. If the rumors about the team rejecting a trade for Amare Stoudemire are true, then the evening was a failure relative to what it could have brought, but we'll probably never know. That aside, I like the pick of Al Horford. I would have been happy with either him or Conley. Horford was the best player available and gives the Hawks a potent front line. Billy Knight is clearly wanting to win now, as he took a college junior and a college senior who are ready to play now (we hope). I'm now excited for NBA Opening Night.

The reasoning for not taking Conley - with Joe Johnson, the Hawks need a point guard who can hit threes and make opponents pay for doubling Joe - makes perfect sense to me. The moment that the Hawks passed on Conley, the discussion on 790 immediately went to "is this passing on Chris Paul again" and I was shouting at my radio "Chris Paul was a great shooter in college! Stop fighting the last war!" Conley may very well turn out to be an excellent player, but he's not a perfect fit for this team. Then again, I wouldn't have been overly disappointed to see the Hawks roll the dice on the possibility that Conley will improve his shot.

Although I will root like hell for him, I'm not that geeked about Acie Law for the reasons I set forth before. He reminds me way too much of Randolph Childress. Compare the bios of Childress and Law if you don't agree: same stats, same size, same reputation for being clutch. I hope I'm wrong about Law and I must admit that I was excited to see that he hit 45.8% from behind the arc last year. That said, he's still a scoring point without Iverson/Terry quickness, which does not bode well.

I would have preferred the Hawks make the rumored Josh Childress for Jose Calderon deal. I like Childress's game a lot, but dealing him would have alleviated the logjam at the forward spots and brought a very impressive point guard to Atlanta. The team then could have gone with the best available player at #11, although I'm not sure who that would have been. Maybe Crittenden with the thinking being that he'll get 2-3 years to mature while Calderon is the starter and Speedy or Lue are the backups?

Mark Bradley is quite positive and thinks that the Hawks should be a playoff team next year. A contrasting view was provided by Der Wife, who proclaimed that she is not at all happy with Billy Knight taking "another forward" and that she doesn't know how she feels about the Hawks right now. (Keep in mind that this is the same woman who happily went to a half a season's worth of home games of a 26-win team with me, and not just because our section won free burritos twice during the season.) We now have a standing bet on next season as to whether the Hawks will win more than 35 games, with the winner getting to design his/her own dream date. (Note to the Georgia Theatre: if you could show Gladiator or Braveheart after a 3:30 Georgia home game in 2008, that would be lovely. The Kinchafoonee Cowboys will understand.

Incidentally, one ancillary benefit to Billy Knight's moves last night is that Bill Simmons has now and forever lost the right to rip into Billy since Knight did exactly what Simmons as the self-proclaimed "VP of Common Sense" implored him to do.

A Guy Can Dream, Can't He?

How about Joe Johnson, Marvin Williams, Ty Lue and the No. 11 pick for Kobe and Radmanovic? The Hawks then grab Mike Conley with the #3 pick (although I'm not sure that he's the right point guard to play with Kobe because the primary attribute that a Kobe sidekick needs is dead-eye shooting ability to make opponents pay for double-teams) and have the following starting lineup: Conley, Kobe, Childress, J-Smoove, Zaza. Or how about this: the Hawks use the #3 pick on Al Horford because they're admitting a mistake on Shelden Williams and then give Salim a greater role now that that they don't need a true point guard with the ball going through Kobe on most possessions, thus giving them a starting five of Salim, Kobe, J-Smoove, Horford, Zaza with Childress in the sixth man role. Either of those teams is a playoff contender in the East. If Lebron can get the Cavs close to the Finals with his crap-tastic supporting cast, then couldn't Kobe get the Hawks close with a supporting cast that isn't great now, but is getting better and might be dynamite in two years? A few other thoughts on the fantasy that will never happen:

1. The 800-pound elephant in the room is whether Billy Knight has the authority to make an enormous deal for a player like Kobe, given the legal wrangling going on between Belkin and Atlanta Spirit. Is it possible, from a legal perspective, that Atlanta Spirit would want or need Belkin to sign off on this deal?

2. Notice how the two players taken after Josh Childress are the potential centerpieces for Philly or Chicago to use in acquiring Kobe? Oy. (And I say this as an unabashed fan of Childress's game.)

3. I have absolutely no problem with Kobe demanding a trade. Mitch Kupchak has been inept in his efforts to surround Kobe with talent. Kobe will turn 29 before next season starts and he knows that he is reaching the second half of his prime years. Why should he be forced to waste those years playing with Chris Mihm and Smush Parker? Bryant has leverage because he's a terrific player who always plays hard; why shouldn't he use that leverage? The counter to this defense of Kobe has always been that he forced Shaq's departure in the first place, but it's now looking that that might not be the case, but instead, the Lakers floated that rumor as cover for their real motivation, which was to get rid of Shaquille before paying a guy with a suspect work ethic and his prime years in the rearview mirror a max deal.

4. It wouldn't be a Bill Simmons column without taking a shot at Atlanta as a "moribund NBA city," but look at his explanation that LA is a terrific destination for NBA free agents because of "the weather, the women, the wealth and the Hollywood scene." Insert the word "Black" in front of "Hollywood" and which city are we describing? Atlanta isn't a choice NBA destination right now because the team hasn't won since the Clinton Administration. (If I can figure out a way to blame George Bush for the Hawks, I surely will. Someone get Cindy Sheehan on the phone, stat!) Kobe would change that and he's smart enough to know that this will be a good NBA market with a winning team and a major star.

4a. After taking the obligatory shot at Simmons, I need to mention that his discussion of prior All-NBA players traded in their primes is very compelling. There's almost no way to overpay for Bryant, although the Joe Johnson-Josh Smith-#3 pick deal I saw somewhere yesterday comes close.

5. To throw more cold water on the possibility of Bryant coming to Atlanta, Chad Ford's suggestion that the more likely result is that Jerry Buss will fire Kupchak($) seems solid to me. The only way this wouldn't work is if Bryant sees the damage done by Kupchak as long-term and he feels impatient.

6. One positive thought: given the Hawks' (understandable) struggles in recent years to sell tickets, Kobe has more economic value to them than he does to just about any other NBA franchise.

7. Jeff Schultz's attempt to argue that the Hawks should not try to acquire Bryant are beyond weak:

In the culmination of a three-year franchise meltdown since Shaquille O’Neal was drop-kicked to Miami, the Los Angeles Lakers heard Bryant demand a trade on a radio talkshow.

On. A radio. Talkshow.

Now that’s class.

Yeah, that's a reason to decline to make an effort to acquire one of the top five players in basketball: he made a trade demand on a sports talk radio show. That has EVERYTHING to do with building a winning hoops team.

This isn’t about what kind of athlete Bryant is or what he could bring to a basketball team. It’s about what he has become. After three championships with the Lakers, he wanted to be The Show. Now he’s Sideshow Kobe.

Right, because most people would not react when they bust their rears for 80+ games every year, only to see their inept management base their plan for improving the team on the maturation of a 19-year old post project, all while declining every opportunity to bring in players who can help the team win now.

But there is also little question that the Bryant-O’Neal feud significantly played into the situation. Their relationship drove a wedge into a team that could’ve won more championships. It drove Phil Jackson to grab a candle and a harp and run for the hills. Bryant’s actions set the stage for O’Neal’s departure.

If you still don’t believe that, consider Jackson’s book, “The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul.” He referred to his relationship with Bryant as “psychological war.”

Jackson also wrote that he became so frustrated with his star that he approached general manager Mitch Kupchak in January about trading him. The key passage: “I won’t coach this team next year if he is still here. He won’t listen to anyone. I’ve had it with this kid.”

And Jackson believed what he wrote so much that he came right back to coach the Lakers after a one-year hiatus. And who was the first person to call Kobe to talk him down off the ledge after he made his trade demand? Phil Jackson.

You think: “Bryant and Joe Johnson. Wow!” But any Lakers trade demands probably would start with Johnson and the third overall pick.

Don’t. Even. Think about it.

The Hawks have a chance to do something right (draft Mike Conley Jr.) and go up.

If Jeff Schultz was writing in Phoenix in 1992, he undoubtedly would have written about how Jeff Hornacek, Andrew Lang and Tim Perry were a good nucleus and if the Suns could just pair them with a good draft pick, they'd be on the road to success.

What annoys me most about Schultz's column is that he simply ignores Bryant's merits as a basketball player, namely that he scores 30+ per game and is one of the best on-the-ball defenders in the NBA to boot, not to mention the fact that no one has ever accused him of not playing hard. Schultz ignores the most important evidence and instead relies on the pop psychology factors that ought to be at the back of the bus when evaluating a potential Bryant trade. Unfortunately, that's where we are in modern mainstream sports journalism. The juicy bits from Phil Jackson's book and the choice of medium in announcing a trade demand are more important than 32.8 points, 5.2 rebounds, and 4.4 assists every game. Let's just have psychologists run teams instead of basketball pros.