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. 

Phil Jackson & Bela Guttmann

Jonathan Wilson’s latest article, which asks whether Barcelona will be a victim of Bela Guttmann’s famous three-year rule, is worth a look.  Here is the gist:

"The third year," the great Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann always said, "is fatal." If a manager stays at a club more than that, he said, his players tend to become bored and/or complacent and opponents start to work out counter-strategies. There are occasional exceptions, especially in weaker leagues, but at the highest level it seems to hold true that great teams last a maximum of three years – which is why Barcelona's draw against Espanyol on Saturday may be more significant than just two dropped points. This, after all, is Pep Guardiola's fourth season as a manager at the Camp Nou.

Now right off the bat, there is a problem with Wilson’s analogy.  Guttmann said that the third year is fatal, but in year three under Guardiola, Barca won the two biggest prizes available to it: the Spanish Primera and the Champions League.  It’s only if you modify Guttmann’s concept to “every year after the first three is fatal” that is has applicability here.  Additionally, Guardiola is a disciple of Johan Cruyff and Cruyff’s version of the theory is that a great team has a four-year shelf life.  This makes sense from Cruyff’s personal experience because his Barca Dream Team won four straight La Liga titles in the early 90s, as well as the club’s first European Cup, and then declined.*  Guttmann could make a side function at a top level for two years, so he thinks that that is the statute of limitations.  Cruyff’s team lasted for four, so he thinks that that is the limit.  There is a danger here of assuming that one’s personal experience is universal.

* – Cruyff suggested that Barca should have broken its 2006 Champions League-winning side apart because it was coming to the end of its cycle, although that team had really only been together for three years.  The bottom really fell out in year five when the Blaugrana finished third in La Liga and suffered the ultimate humiliation of forming a Pasillo for Real Madrid after Los Merengues clinched the league.  Samuel Eto’o and Deco both got cards intentionally in the preceding match so they would not have to participate, which is a major reason that both were ultimately drummed out of the club.

Wilson’s article got me thinking about American sports and whether a three- or four-year rule applies there.  One could make a good argument that it applies in the NBA.  Because basketball requires more natural teamwork than baseball or football,* it would seem to be a proper candidate.  Look at recent NBA history.  The Bulls won three titles, then Michael Jordan went away.  They won three more, then Jerry Krause broke the team apart.  The Lakers won three in a row, then Shaq and Kobe could no longer co-exist.  Once a team gets to the top, it seems that it has a three-year statute of limitations before the combination of egos and pressure create an untenable situation.  Phil Jackson, did you ever know that your intellectual forefather was a Hungarian nomad?

* – Football obviously involves players working together, but to do so, they are often following instructions in the form of a play.  Basketball, because it is less controlled by the coaches, requires organic cooperation from its players.

In addressing whether Barca can be an exception to the three-year rule, Wilson points out a distinction that would not apply to NBA teams:

Yet in many ways, Barcelona are a side set up to endure. Like Ferguson, who reflected last week on how those who have been brought up at a club have more instinctive loyalty, Guardiola has a stock of homegrown talent. The impression is that most players play for Barcelona because they want to rather than because it's a convenient way of paying for the cars and clothes and rounds of Jaegerbombs.

The Lakers and Bulls didn't build their teams by signing players when they were twelve and then teaching those players over the course of years how to play in a certain style.  With the exception of Dani Alves, Barca's current core comes from the La Masia cocoon.  These players grew up together, were taught how to play together, matured together, and have now won a room full of trophies together.  That experience is simply different than what the NBA's dynastic teams experience.

I'm currently reading Soccer Men, which is Simon Kuper's attempt to explain what modern soccer* stars are really like.  One of the themes of the book is that players don't feel the same way that we do about teams and matches because for them, it's a job.  For instance, Bernd Holzenbein, one of the starters on the team that won the 1974 World Cup in a famous final against the Netherlands, recalls West Germany's win in 1954 with greater fondness.  As he describes his feelings, he was a fan in 1954 and a professional in 1974.  The chapter on Fernando Torres is also interesting, as it explains that Torres was an Atletico Madrid fan almost from birth, but had no problem moving to Liverpool because it was a better opportunity for him.  We want to think that the players we love feel the same way about the clubs that we love, but that usually isn't true.  On one end of the spectrum, we expect that LeBron, Wade, and Bosh don't feel any strong connection to the Miami Heat as an institution.  On the other end, it will be interesting to learn how strong the connection is between Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi and Futbol Club Barcelona.   

* - Kuper explains in the book that soccer is actually a British term and the sport was referred to by that title instead of football until the 70s.  I am going to be more comfortable using the term and not worrying that I come off as too American.

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. 

Atlanta is the Worst Sports Town Ever, Heat-Mavs Edition

In an article that is becoming an annual occurrence, Tim Tucker notes that Atlanta had the 11th highest TV ratings for the NBA Finals out of 56 metered markets.  The ten markets that finished ahead of Atlanta, you ask?

Miami-Fort Lauderdale (33.7), Dallas-Fort Worth (30.7), West Palm Beach (17.7), San Antonio (15.9), Cleveland (15.8), New Orleans (15.1), Memphis (14.5), Houston (14.5), Oklahoma City (14.4) and Chicago (13.7).

You have the markets that had finalists, followed by the home of the West’s #1 seed, the market rooting for LeBron to humiliate himself (and who says that Cleveland never wins anything?), the beaten conference finalists, a beaten conference semifinalist, and then Houston and New Orleans.  Interestingly enough, Boston, the greatest sports city in the universe (is the sarcasm coming across here?), and Los Angeles are not on the list, but the other beaten conference semifinalists – Atlanta and Memphis – are. 

This raises a point that is often missed in the discussion about “best sports towns,” which is that the discussions almost always focuses on support for specific teams instead of sports or leagues in general.  Atlanta is not super-supportive of the Hawks.  Maybe we have a right to be lukewarm on the local professional basketball collective because the team has delivered so little over the years, but the team was certainly good enough that they should not have finished 22nd in attendance this year.  That said, this is a very strong NBA market, as Atlanta consistently out-performs other NBA markets when it comes to ratings for the later rounds of the playoffs.  In short, we’re not great at supporting our own team, but we are interested in other teams.  Boston, for example, is the opposite.  Personally, I’d attribute this difference to the fact that Boston is a provincial city and Atlanta is not, but I’m a little biased in saying that.

Atlanta as a college football market is somewhat similar.  The one major program in the city limits – Georgia Tech – gets good, but not overwhelming fan support.  However, there is tremendous interest here for teams all over the Southeast, as well as a number of Big Ten programs with a large number of transplants.  (Cough.)  Thus, this is a great college football market (the TV ratings consistently back this conclusion up) without being hogwild over the Jackets.  If people outside of the market could differentiate between support for home teams and support for sports in general, then this city would have a better reputation as a sports town.

What Happens when a Jump-shooting Team Makes its Jumpers?

This.  The Hawks just stole home court advantage from a team that finished a mere 18 games ahead of it over the course of the regular season.  Were the Hawks merely coasting for most of the regular season, knowing all along that they have an extra gear and that their season would be dictated by their performance in April and May?  Viva the meaningless 82-game regular season!

Just about every writer who previewed the series, friend and foe alike, saw doom for the Hawks, especially with Kirk HInrich injured and the Hawks therefore having to look to secondary options to defend the presumptive league MVP.  So naturally, Jeff Teague, the player buried on the bench by Mike Woodson and Larry Drew, turned in the best performance of his young career.  Here is Bret LeGree describing Teague’s performance:

Given his lack of regular playing time over the past two seasons, Jeff Teague should probably be graded on a curve. But he needn't be. The 44:37 he played, the 10 points he scored on 11 shots (that 8 of those 11 came inside of 15 feet certainly contributed to the diverse offensive attack), the 5 assists he earned against a single turnover and the 27 shots Derrick Rose needed to score 24 points (even though the Bulls, as a whole, scored just as efficiently tonight against the Hawks as they did during the regular season) should earn the second-year point guard a passing grade on merit.

Peachtree Hoops agrees:

Can't say enough about Jeff Teague. Man was balling tonight. Again I have to mention that his efforts defensively ensured that, not only would somebody actually stay around Derrick Rose tonight, but that Johnson and Crawford did [not] have to die trying. He was 5-11, 2 rebounds, 5 assists, and a single turnover. And he only committed 2 fouls in 45 minutes. Derrick Rose drove at him, on him, shot through and over him, and never got to the free throw line. That's worth mentioning. Honestly, could Kirk Hinrich done better?

Also singing from the same hymnal/siddur, Mark Bradley cites Teague’s efforts in the run late in the third and early in the fourth to put the Hawks in charge:

Teague, who’d seen nine-plus minutes against Orlando, had gone 32 of Game 1’s first 36 minutes and had held his own against Rose. And he kept going. He was the floor when the Hawks broke it open — yes, you read that right — to start the fourth quarter. Johnson was hitting everything, and Zaza Pachulia was doing his grunt work in the lane, but none of this would have matter had Teague not held it all together.

Said Drew: “He did just a phenomenal job in running our team. And I could see our players trying to keep him motivated and stimulated. We thought we could get into the lane and cause some havoc.”

By the way, what does it say that the Chicago quotes after the game all cover a lack of intensity by the Bulls and then Larry Drew says that the veteran Hawks had to keep their rookie point guard “motivated and stimulated.”  If you can’t be fired up for game one of the NBA quarterfinals, then when can you be fired up?  And frankly, a series in which the Hawks reach the Eastern Conference finals for the first time on the strength of a good performance from Teague will feel very strange.  It will lead to all sorts of questions as to where was he for the rest of his career, as well as a query as to whether the Hawks’ brain trust has an irrational fear of playing its first round picks. 

Anyway, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.  The Hawks have won a second-round game for the first time in 14 years and they have a real chance to knock out the NBA’s #1 seed.  Joe Johnson played like a guy who deserved the max deal that Atlanta Spirit bestowed upon him.  Jamal Crawford was money.  Josh Smith made a jumper.  The Hawks are up in the series without a big performance from their best player (Al Horford) and without Zaza turning in a vintage irritant in residence performance.  In other words, Larry Drew could have counter-measures when Tom Thibodeau makes defensive adjustments to stop Johnson and Crawford.  This could be interesting.

Three Quick Thoughts on the Cavs' Demise

1. Josef Stalin was a murderous bastard, even by a dictator's standards, but he could be counted on for the occasional pithy quote. At some point shortly after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, when the Wehrmacht was rolling over the Soviet Union like a knife through butter, he looked at the members of his inner circle and said "Lenin left us a good thing and we've f***ed it up." I have to imagine that Danny Ferry and Mike Brown were saying something along those lines to one another on the plane back to Cleveland last night. The Cavs were bestowed with the good fortune of winning the lottery when the clear #1 choice was a player (and a local, to boot) who has turned out to be one of the best players of all time, at least at his age. Seven years later, the best that Ferry can do for him is to give him a clueless coach and a rotation that includes a bunch of spare parts. I complain about the Yankees winning titles without having to show management skill because they can simply buy the best free agents; the Cavs winning a title with this collection would have been similar, as it would have been the result of nothing more than good fortune with lottery balls.

2. Question for Adrian Wojnarowski and every other two-bit columnist who is complaining that LeBron isn't like Magic, Larry, or Michael: who on LeBron's roster is his DJ, Parish, McHale, Kareem, Worthy, or Pippen. If I squint very hard, I can see Varejao being a poor man's Rodman or Grant. If we were picking teams based on the players available last night, LeBron is the first pick and then the next five picks are all Celtics. LeBron is going to be blamed unfairly for the failings of everyone around him. If he decamps for Chicago or New York, the Cavs' management and the supporting cast they assembled will be the reason why. (This may be wishful thinking on my part, but after being let down by weak teammates for two straight years, isn't LeBron less likely to go to play for the Knicks, who have nothing? Even if Lebron goes with Joe Johnson or Bosh, you're still looking at a two-man team that is capped out.

2a. I'll admit that LeBron was crap in Game Five and strangely uneven last night. However, if we're apportioning blame for the fact that the Cavs didn't win a title in LeBron's year seven, I'm not starting with the guy who had a triple double last night.

2b. LeBron is also being blamed unfairly because the Cavs were "upset" by the Celtics, but the series was only an upset because the Celtics mailed in the second half of the season, whereas LeBron played hard and got his team the #1 seed. So hey, let's reward the scrappy Celtics for finally caring!

3. What's with the "Cleveland Sports Disasters" montages that ESPN has been running on a loop. If I'm sick of them and I have no feelings for Cleveland, then how to actual Clevelanders feel about having their noses rubbed in their futility? Yes, we don't need to be reminded that the Browns lost AFC Championship Games to the Broncos in dramatic fashion. It's one thing for ESPN to push sports memes relentlessly; it's another to be the Marquis de Sade in doing so.

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.

Piling onto the Suns/Spurs Debate

I don't have too much to add to jjwalker's entertaining invective against David Stern for suspending Amare Stoudemire and thereby rewarding the Spurs for cheap-shotting Steve Nash and inducing an ever-so-minor, but technically improper reaction by Amare. I agree that Stern is way too concerned about the appearance of "angry black men fighting" and that the hyperventilation over NBA fights as opposed to baseball or hockey fights is almost certainly motivated by conscious or unconscious racial bias.

The one point that I want to add is that I'm preconditioned to question whether the NBA's reactions are motivated by a desire to increase ratings. I watched too many fights involving the execrable Knicks in the 90s and each time, I always assumed that Stern would come down harder on the Knicks's opponents to make sure that the New York team advanced. In retrospect, I was probably wrong about the belief, but there was such a sense on my part at the time that the league and NBC were rooting for the Knicks. Maybe it was the net effect of watching one too many games officiated by Knick Bavetta.

In this instance, the NBA's decision is especially irrational because it doesn't even make economic sense for them. The Suns are one of the most popular teams in the NBA. Neutral casual fans like me won't go out of our way to watch the Spurs, who aren't aesthetically pleasing and are old hat, but we'll certainly watch the Suns, who push the ball up the court and involve one another on offense all the time. They're a throwback to the teams we grew up watching in the 80s. And if you don't believe me, look at where the Suns and Spurs rank in terms of road attendance. I'll watch the Finals if it's Suns-Pistons; I probably won't watch if it's Spurs-Pistons, who are the Chelsea-Liverpool pairing of the NBA.

In suspending Amare and swinging a finely-balanced series in favor of the Spurs, the NBA not only angered fans by overreacting to a minor incident, they took money out of their own pockets by increasing the likelihood that the Finals will have low TV ratings. In the end, the best way to view the decision by David Stern (or more precisely Stu Jackson, who gets skewered by The New Republic's Jason Zengerle as Isiah Thomas-lite) is that of a mindless ballpark usher who won't let you move to a different section, even when that section is completely empty and farther from the plate than the section for which you have a ticket. The decision is an example of mindless, bureaucratic application of rules without the slightest concern for interpretation, context, common sense, or even self-interest.