Spurs Grizzlies Update

So far I've gotten through one rotation of Game 2, after promising a full play-by-play, a full possession-by-possession of the entire gosh-darned game of 48 minutes.  Yes, it's coming sometime, but I've found it hard to continue.  Why?  Because many of my organizing assumptions and working concepts for the piece turned out to be false.

Problems I'm having extending the first rotation to the rest of the game:

• Too many images; not enough visual cues: A picture is worth a thousand words, but if the picture is of ten basketball players (as most of the pictures were) I've already diluted that maxim down to one hundred words per player.  Okay, seriously, though, it's hard to tell from a grainy still which short Grizzly is Sam Young and which one is Mike Conley. I need to explain visually (using cues like arrows/screen arrows/shading/words on the image) what is going on, then use those cues (and only those cues) in order to explain what is going on in the picture.  In other words, I need to treat stills as if they are of 10 wire-frames, assuming the reader doesn't know the difference between Duncan and Parker, but also assuming they can find the "left elbow" or the "mid-post" if I mark Tim Duncan there with a yellow circle and refer to the area in the text.    I don't think this is at all condescending; rather, I think describing these plays is telling me how little I actually understand of basketball strategy. It's what NBAPlaybook does and as far as I'm concerned, Pruiti's site is the absolute gold standard.  
• Not every possession is atomic: This wasn't obvious when I did the first rotation but when I started to do the second one it was clear: The structure of half-court sets really broke down for the Spurs and their opponent when Tim Duncan and Manu checked out.  I'm probably going to be using "flows" or natural sequences of possessions when chippy, scrappy scrums of turnovers begin.  
• Learn the difference between the different types of screens: A self-explanatory dictum that will allow me to avoid misuse of the word "flare" when describing a brilliant non-flare screen play.

I think that about covers the problems I've been having, and their obvious solutions.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as we see once again.  Anyway, I have to go back to my cave for a few weeks and finish this entire play-by-play.  Pearls...Away!  :hops into gigantic flying pearl laden with question marks:

Redundancy of Roles and the 1960s Celtics: An Academic-Sounding Blog Post Title

Over at A Substitute For War (a neat NBA blog if ever one existed), there's a great little piece about what the author believes to be the best starting five of all time.  Instead of going with the "All-Time All-NBA 1st team, so to speak," they simply describe an ideal team, taking into account that many of the best players in history (almost because of their greatness) would be redundant in their roles, and that having 5 incredible scorers but no one to hit an open 3 or get putbacks would not actually be ideal.  It's a fascinating concept: that players like Shane Battier might be better on an all-time team than LeBron, despite every statistic on Earth favoring LeBron as an individual performer (for all of Battier's particular areas of greatness).  Given (as ASFW notes) that the Heat were a solid contender this season whose limiting factor seemed to be the offensive redundancy of Wade and LeBron, I really agree with this concept, and I'd like to put to words a new take on a very old concept, a take that immediately jumped out at me after reading this piece (coming from someone fascinated by the relative strength of eras and conferences).

Okay, for some context for what I'll say next: I'm the first person to say (basically) that we are living in the best of possible NBA worlds.  There is an embarrassment of talent on at least 15 teams (I'm looking at you, entire Western Conference besides T'Wolves and Warriors) and the fact that #1 and #2 seeds keep getting bounced in the West - I sincerely believe - has as much to do with diminishing returns on such incredibly loaded (and well-coached) rosters as it does with sheer random chance, matchups, and injuries.  Every team in the Western playoffs belongs, and then some.  The 2011 Grizz and 2007 Warriors (and 2010 Spurs at the 7 seed) were fantastic, near-contending teams*.  And the East - while incredibly top-heavy - is actually quite heavy at the top and its top teams rival the West's top teams.  In short, we are looking at an incredibly loaded era which will surprise me if it can get any better, but given the intelligence at work in (most) of these great teams' front offices, I won't be too surprised.  What I'm saying is I have never bought the concept that the talent pool today is at all diluted relative to any other era - fewer teams or not.  If it seems like there is a diluted talent pool, I think it is mostly because there are the same proportion of bad/disinterested owners with a larger sample size (i.e. there are literally more examples), and that proportion's actions are more firmly in public view thanks to first ESPN and then the Internet.

*Granted, all eventually lost in the second round, but still, all three won the first in 6 convincing games and injuries hardly totally account for the difference in any of the three.

On the other hand, though the talent pool might be more barren than today, if we can accept that historically great players today and yesterday are comparable, then maybe the very best teams of yesterday are not as far behind our best teams then we think.  After all, historically great teams might not feature a whole lot of historically great players...but they certainly might feature a few historically great players and many historically great role players that complemented them (and be better off than the former situation, even ignoring egos and salaries).  And that got me thinking: What about teams like the 1960s Celtics?  Even with a drier talent pool, didn't they have historically great players and fill in the gaps with remarkable craft and intelligence?

"Solving For Pattern" and the NBA Lockout

Thanks to Larry Coon (via Pounding the Rock) we learn that the lockout is extraordinarily more expensive than the marginal percentages at stake in lockout negotiations. Now, as someone applying for jobs in computer science, and someone that has recently been obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales, maybe I can weigh in here with my (probably idiotic and reductive) two cents.

Wendell Barry's great essay "Solving For Pattern" (warning: PDF) is a fantastic burst of sense that tells us lucidly about "holistic" and "organic" solutions to problems without falling into ideological or mystical claptrap. Barry tries to differentiate between good solutions and bad solutions and uses as an example some case studies in agriculture. In his view, good solutions don't create problems outside the scope of the solution or the original problem. As Barry attempts to show, good farms mimick nature in her elegance, rather than in her bare-stripping brutality. Good farms don't pollute the surrounding area with manure. Good farms don't demand too much in resources of the world outside the farm, don't deconstruct their own long-term goals with short-term cash grabs (for example, by destroying the farm's topsoil with a monoculture). Good farms turn (as much as is possible by the Great Eroder) cattle waste into fertilizer for plants and plants into feed for cattle. Good farms are really good (if highly artificial) ecosystems with a sustainable yield. Good farms are not so large in scope or size that they cannot economically sustain the humans needed to tend to them. Good farms are good interrelated processes with the overall goal of social health and well-being.

Now, Barry is not just talking about some pie-in-the-sky utopia rooted in Ecclesiastes' meditations or some sort of Platonic or Randian ideal where a farmer is some sort of virtuous, compassionate genius or anything. No, Barry just calls for the existing attention and intelligence and vision of farmers to be directed to appropriate solutions, rather than directing that mental power to ameliorating work and liabilities with directionless amalgams of short-sighted band-aids (that in the end tally, says Barry, are unsustainable on every level). Barry recognizes that any solution not rooted in a whole understanding of problems, any solution that is not recognized as a process with its own qualitative demands and yields (he uses the analogy of an organ in the body) is doomed to fail at resolving the solution's goals in some ultimate sense.* Transparently, Barry's argument applies to just about any organization and its problems.

"Friday" by Rebecca Black is Actually Alright

Listen, I know as well as anyone that this is a basketball blog where we make dark, semi-literary vignettes about Richard Jefferson. Right now we're in the middle of documenting - to the possession - what happened to the Spurs against the Grizzlies, a complex, winding tour through marginal athletic advantage and its sometimes gigantic consequences in the legacy of professional athletics. I know all that.

But I just wanted to say that "Friday" by Rebecca Black is an alright song. It gets tons of bile towards it - somewhat justifiably, considering it's one of the simplest, most banal songs ever written, and doesn't say much of anything. It's entertainment at best. On the other hand, when did it pretend to be anything different? It's a melody, some lyrics, and a little bit of flashy image for teenagers. That's all it is, and if you're looking for more, then you're not going to find it.

Spurs-Grizzlies Game 2 - Part 2

Today we finish up the first rotation of the game. Everyone is still in the same place they were yesterday. Same exact players. Zach Randolph is no wider; Tim Duncan no thinner. Richard Jefferson no taller; Manu no less tenacious.

9:02 4-6

I was watching the Spurs-Knicks series a few weeks ago, and there were a couple hilarious Spurs possessions where no one was doing anything on offense, so much so that the announcers were vocally complaining before the possession was over. And then, with just seconds left on the shot clock, Tim Duncan still managed to drive to the basket or hit a high-arcing shot over his defender. It was really funny until I remembered this series, in which Zach Randolph did the exact same thing over and over. And his defender - usually that pinnacle of class (and legitimately skilled as a man defender) Antonio McDyess - could do nothing.

Spurs-Grizzlies Game 2 - Part 1

Introduction

As part of Pearls of Mystery's ongoing commitment to "stretch the game out; etch your [own] name out," we're going to be deconstructing the heck out of the Spurs-Grizzlies series.  The goals here are several, most of them federal:

1. Improve my ability to analyze basketball on a strategic level
2. Improve my knowledge of various star players and their actual contributions to basketball games, and 
3. Improve my communication and research apparatus of the above

So we're going to do look at every single possession of Game 2.  Some of these are going to be forgettable, especially in garbage time (after one rotation I eminently understand how the old saw "right way to play the game" has quite a bit of evidence), but even when a possession itself is broken or boring, oftentimes a string of possessions will be interesting and coherent.  So part of the challenge for me is to break it up into "possessions" at some times and "flows" at other times.  Will it drag on?  Yes, but after the first game or two like this, I'm going to switch this mode of analysis into 3-8 minute sequences deconstructing incredible runs or incredible breakdowns, or just basketball at its starkest and most stylistically interesting (for example, the Miami collapse in Game 2).

12:00, First Quarter, 0-0

The first possession of Game 2 is a startlingly elegant set play by the Spurs. Sebastian Pruiti shows perfectly a more extreme (and decisive) example of this play, but this more workaday possession is still a beaut.

After Duncan wins the tip, the Spurs and Grizzlies start with an insultingly simple defensive and offensive set-up reminiscent of a tic-tac-toe game gone wrong. I am insulted by this simplicity, Tim! Antonio McDyess stands in the high post (guarded by Zach Randolph) while Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Richard Jefferson, and Manu Ginobili stand around the perimeter. This is straightforward in every sense except that Tim Duncan has the ball.

The Grand Plan

Here's the plan: I'm starting a new NBA blog with a friend - a rather smart fellow, I might add - slated for the beginning of October, and being that he is quite literally a statistician out east and I am trained mostly in mathematics, it will be more statistically-inclined and prone to player descriptions and my (actually quite competent) book reviews. We've been wanting to do this for a long time: even *shudder* devoting an entire blog to his alma mater's sports, Duke, as a longform test run.

What does this mean for your old pals at Pearls of Mystery? Statistically, nothing, unless you are me. What does this mean for Pearls of Mystery? Well, to put it bluntly it will probably skew towards the longer end of character sketches, like before, but more so. About two-fifths of what I write about basketball receives the intensive editing of a post I really develop, and three-fourths of that actually ends up being reworked and posted here. So you're getting 30% of what I write now; in the future you might be getting 20%: the longer two-thirds of what remains. The good news - from my perspective - is that I have an extra 20% (in addition to the 30% I post here) which really doesn't belong here in general - basketball book reviews belong so much more on this other site that I have deliberately held back on them. Links posts on Pearls of Mystery, you ask? Don't make me laugh. Because this suggestion itself has done it to me.

Tim Duncan Player Description - The Crowning

A friend of mine on a certain private forum has for some months been taking on the absurd task of describing in great detail every single substantial player in the NBA, from rotation players to superstars. He has a bit more experience with many of these players than I do. But today he's covering Tim Duncan, our mutual favorite player. And, being that this is a basketball blog which has had at its emotional center The Big Fundamental, I think I should do the same here on Pearls of Mystery. And for the last week I've been trying to think of what to say, even writing a secondary post to bolster the argument in favor of Tim Duncan's era (and by extension, in favor of Duncan himself). So, for a few absurdly long posts, I'm going to talk about Tim Duncan: his playing style, his personality, and today, his simple, raw success.

In sports, the bare facts aren't so meaningful without context - the name Bill Russell next to that freakish number of titles, the video game numbers from Wilt's great 1962 campaign, Jordan's clipped parabola six-peat, and 72-10? They show a great deal of historical imbalance in favor of those players and teams, sure, but I could probably win 11 of 13 championships against third-graders, and so could you. By myself. No, we have to ask: were these players conquering historically great times or stealing titles from historically weak times? This is relevant because how you see the last decade in the NBA should naturally determine (to great extent) just how you choose to view Tim Duncan's four titles. I mean, it's a good question: are these four titles mere low-hanging fruit - transitional years in a transitional era - or are they representative of a historically great player conquering historically great opponents?

Everyone Needs To Know About This One Joke Tom Lehrer Made in 1959

Quite apart from basketball, I have a lot of different interests. I have a tendency to wear my mind up my sleeve. I have a history of losing my shirt. It's been one week since I blogged at you. I like music a great deal, is what I'm trying to say. I like jass bands, rappers, rock-'n'-rollers, and vaudevillians. I especially like Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. I'd give a pretty penny for the tenor at the Met; I'd give a quarter for a Cole Porter lyric and three for a melody by Strauss. "It's smooth! It's smart! It's Rodgers! It's Hart!"

On the lighter side of music is outright parody: Weird Al, that band that recorded "No Pigeons" in response to TLC's "No Scrubs": Yes, the list goes on of bands I don't listen to, not even a little. But parody - when mixed with a real capacity for ironic distance and a sincere musicality - has the chance to transcend its object. Tom Lehrer is one such parodist. You may remember his hilarious "New Math" but he took on any number of odd intellectual and political subjects in his few songs: folk music* ("Folk Song Army"), an optimistic interpretation of nuclear holocaust ("We Will All Go Together When We Go"), and even overzealous songwriting ("Clementine"). This latter is what I'd like to talk about.

*Probably his most scathing pronouncement was that "Little Boxes" was the most sanctimonious song ever written. Heh.

Tim Duncan Contemplates a 2003 Nets Fast Break

It's the Spurs-Nets Finals. Manu catches and shoots a three without moving his head or legs. Long story short, Richard Jefferson, Jason Kidd, and Kenyon Martin are on the break against only one player - Tim Duncan. Kidd has the ball.

Heh. I wish David Robinson were in the game. It's always fun smothering an offensive possession with the Admiral. I wonder if that's what the Navy is like, all just sailing to other countries and stopping them from becoming too offensively powerful. I wish I knew more about politics.

Well, I guess I'm back on defense. I wish someone else were here to help. I guess I'll have to handle it myself. Hmm, I'm in pretty much the right position, being on the corner of the paint. I wish I knew what this spot was called after all these years. Maybe it's the elbow. It has some kind of a name. I'll find out later. After all, my concentration is the only thing that stands between Richard Jefferson and a basket.

Confession Time

I'd like to make a few confessions on behalf of Pearls of Mystery. In the course of writing a blog post, numerous sins of the writer tempt me at every turn. Like, there was this one time I convinced my alcohol-neophyte friends to mix Dr. Pepper and Irish Cream*. Still other times I have had to break someone's leg. I dont remember why or if it had anything to do with writing a blog.

*actually quite tasty, though the tasteless slurry on the bottom would make it unsuitable for a general drink.

But the worst thing I've ever done is definitely that time I tried to break someone's leg. Wait, no, that wasn't me. And even if it was, I don't think that had anything to do with the blog.

In fact, I've never really done anything bad on this blog. But I haven't done anything good, either. Now my task is simple: I just have to do something good without doing anything bad, and I will be tied for the best blogger in the world according to efficiency metrics. Then I just have to keep writing neutral and good things, so that I climb steadily up the usage chart.

Onward!

Still Crazy After All These Two Years

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone

~"You'll Never Walk Alone," from Carousel

I'm afraid they have made the play far too sad. I doubt whether anyone will pay $6 for tickets to have their hearts completely broken.

~Lawrence Langner, on Carousel


As Paul Simon might say, we at Pearls of Mystery (okay, it's just me) are "Feelin' Groovy" and not just because we're kickin' down the cobblestones and looking for fun. You see, it's been two years since the Inception of this blog. I can hardly believe it.

I realize this blog entry is going to be a bit pretentious, but I put a lot of work into this blog and it feels like a good time to write a reflective "legacy" post, as unreadable as this will be for most of you readers. It's been 2 years, and I've written 75 things, and most of them are pretty long (and which very rarely had unjustified noise, for all my fixation on random bullshit). In fact, in the aggregate, I've written the equivalent of a long novella or a short novel (quite a bit more than 50000 words, probably closer to 60000 to be precise). And you know what? That's kind of how I actually see this blog: as some sort of perpetually-evolving, timestamped log of my personal development from this part of my life. A novel, told through its author's vignettes, of narratives yet unknown to me. A semi-fictional autobiography with no knowledge of the ending.

Synecdoche: 2001 All-Star Game and Relative Conference Strength

I’ve always found the relative strength of conferences and divisions to be such an interesting topic. The separation between "conferences" is starkest in baseball: There are two basically independent leagues with rare regular season offerings between them. We also get an All-Star Game and the World Series between the two leagues. For this reason, the World Series - for all the wonderful sabermetric tools - seems to me somewhat mysterious going in, the term "mysterious" going well beyond "unknown".

In NBA basketball, on the other hand, both Finals teams have generally played one another twice, and against the other team's conference fully 30 times. A lot of games (generally 450) are played between the conferences in the NBA. Because of this, strength-of-schedule ranking methods have a solid chance at giving us info about the relative strengths of conferences. While we might not know what to expect, we can make empirically plausible predictions in an extremely direct and simple way. "This team is 6-23 against the West, I'm pretty sure they'll lose in the Finals by an average of 5.4 points against the best team in the West right now, based on this graph here." If you're wrong, there's probably going to be some good reason for it, either an overestimate or an underestimate of someone's efficiency or shot volume or a certain play-call. Then again, few picked Dirk from the first round onward, so maybe our speculation is not so reasonable.

Ideal Job Offer

John: So, I can write whatever I want about basketball, sir?

Interviewer: Yes, John. We think this is going to be a great collaboration, and we’re pretty sure we want you. I just have a few more questions for you, before we hand this job offer to you.

J: Okay. Can we go over the salary terms again, sir?

I: Of course. With a broad brush, we will be paying you one hundred thousand dollars per year to write whatever you want about basketball, in any quantity, for the next five years. It’s a guaranteed contract with options to leave after every six months without any penalty, and with marginal penalty otherwise. You have to write for our company, but you can write for other companies while you are writing for us, so long as you aren’t reproducing material between publications. You can work from home, and have any hours. All we ask is that when we are promoting your work, you attend promotional events specifically for your work. We’ll handle food, transportation, and so on to get you there, and we’ll give you at least two weeks' notice before any such event. There is a monthly video-conference that of course can be attended from home. You will also receive a 20 percent royalty on ad revenue to your blog and published works that are sold under your name.

J: I know this is a bad negotiating move, but I am extremely satisfied with all of that, sir. This is a dream job.

I: Call me Dave, John. Yes, it is very generous, which is why we’re confident you’ll accept. I would just like to ask you a few questions before we offer this.

Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

1. The Move

The fortunes of the Spurs ownership sort of collapsed in 2012, not into dire straits but into a place where owning a team was suddenly an unaffordable luxury. So, even as their team arrested time for an improbable fifth championship, their owners could talk privately only about what the title would do for the selling price. The celebration was outfitted with the second-best champagnes and rings of 80% gold. And they announced, a couple months after the Riverwalk title strut, that Tim Duncan would not be resigned. Gregg Popovich, still regarded as an elite coach, left with him. The other expiring contracts left as well, leaving the Spurs more or less depleted, at once in rebuilding mode. Most of us thought Tim was going to retire, and the TV networks in the area devoted considerable space to tributes for a few days. Then he and Popovich signed absurd 5-year contracts with the Oklahoma Thunder. It was a period of sadness, but no one in San Antonio could really complain about their lot. It was just something that happened, albeit something strange and unfortunate. So everyone was on good terms when the airship of Duncan and Popovich sailed the Texas land-sea up to Oklahoma on gossamer wings in the clouds. From the windows the two saw banners at the airport they'd left behind, thanking them for all the memories and titles. Of course, they wouldn't see my car until they had landed.

See, at this point I'd been a mop-boy for the Spurs since 2009. Alas, the Spurs were downsizing and mop-boys were as a rule not retained: In a revolution, the mop-boys are always the first to be destroyed. Once I'd heard about Duncan and Popovich, though, I decided immediately that I would follow them to Oklahoma and see if I could parlay my experiences with the Spurs to get a mopping job with the Thunder. So for a solid hour I packed my things into my car and I was off. I was an adult for the first time, so I could and would make my own choices from now on, according to my family. Thus debriefed, I immediately chose the route that seemed most familiar to where I had just been, because that wasn't so bad. That was what I was looking for in the Thunder job. Also, as a basketball journalist, Tim's northern migration was the most interesting story in basketball, and I wanted to be on the ground level for the exclusive story. All the tape recorders and notebooks took up almost my entire car. All my lap was filled with food and toiletries and I went to Oklahoma.

Ask Pearls of Mystery Anything (actually just one question, that I wrote myself)!

Why are you so obsessed with Free Darko, Burl Ives, Richard Jefferson, Tim Duncan, Sean Elliott, etc., Alex? I want to hear about actual basketball in an objective and fun way, not about these strange, baroque character sketches with Lovecraftian and otherwise surreal undertones.

That's a good question, Alex. Let me answer your question in order.

1. Bethlehem Shoals (and to a lesser extent Eric Freeman) of Free Darko - Much of the first half of this blog can be read as a surreal parody of Free Darko (SEE: Every use of 'dialectic'). This is because he generally knows his stuff, but often lets his off-beat (though often moralistic or political) character sketches and writerly fixations on interesting narratives take the place of his judgment, like Bill Simmons crossed with...a grad student in journalism or library studies. Granted, he's certainly capable of the occasional "Eff You" short essay, and the clarity of some of his images is often called for. Something that makes Shoals better...or worse...than many other NBA scribes is his (how else shall I say it?) deliberate forgetfulness. It only matters marginally how he characterizes, say, the 2011 Suns when writing about the previous year's or next year's squads. He forgets, for the most part, everything he has written before when the new writing begins, only seeming to explicitly remember them again in the course of writing them. If the 2011 Nash was, say, "Bean from Ender's Shadow," then the process of trading Nash can be "Madame Bovary looking for a suitor" and Shoals will find no need to attempt to reconcile these images. This forgetful approach, without an overarching schema of images, seems cosmically wrong and is infuriatingly vague on occasion (...to the extent anything on the Internet actually infuriates people, a.k.a. annoyance with marginal moral outrage). But it's hard to argue with the results, which are generally successful. There is no ideology, and no bias, to Shoals, which makes his already-nebulous offering of a "unique take" blend further into the surrounding blogosphere, leaving as residue of the apparent uniqueness only the quality of the writing which implies a lifetime of thought and experience that is not perhaps unrivaled but is, still, unique.. Shoals is like a disembodied hand with no accountability, no memory, and no identity, but in the meantime has forged himself as a premier NBA writer. I have high respect for his craft, but his weird ability to co-opt any subject and lend his voice to any narrative he happens to encounter is kind of eerie, and I don't say that altogether respectfully. That fascinates me.

Defensive Drills, Snake Oil, and Hand-Based Syllogisms: Coach Mark Jackson

Formerly titled "Richard Jefferson and I meet Coach Mark Jackson"

Mark Jackson was the newly-minted coach of the Golden State Warriors. Curious about this plausible train-wreck, I decided to see what was up. So one morning, I packed my bags, headed to the station, and before noon an equally curious Richard Jefferson and I were on a train, going west to Jackson's "season combine".

"Why is he hosting a season combine? Is that normal?" I asked as the conductor left our compartment.

"John, nothing about this is normal. Mark Jackson was the Nets' color commentator for a couple years while I was there. He's the most abnormal person anyone could possibly have chosen for a coaching gig."

This took me by surprise. Of all the players likely to be considered for a job in the surreal and paranormal, Richard Jefferson was right below Ron Artest and Deshawn Stevenson. He had seen it all in this league, and had an acute sense for what was abnormal, largely because he was the most average player in the history of the league: What was abnormal was merely what was unlike Jefferson.

"Black Swan" Review, Posnanski Praise

Review:

I was reading "The Black Swan" on the flight home. It's got some fascinating stuff on the problem of induction, but overall, the author makes so many snarky hits at concepts and ideas he doesn't really bother to completely understand. I'm halfway through, and it seems to be getting a bit better, but I have to see this book so far as infuriating, decontextualized bile in the grand scheme of things that makes a few good points, and I think I will probably read the rest with such a viciously critical eye that I will probably miss any possibility of enlightenment.

You see, the book is about Black Swans, which are defined to be transformative, unexpected, rare events. The one-in-a-million events, like the invention of the wheel, the onset of a war, etc. Now, after a foreword asking us to imagine all such events in our life and in history, the author (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) claims that most of our lives absolutely hinge on these catastrophically powerful Black Swans, that these events are so transformative that they leave in their dust the gradual changes. This is the general assumption of the book, from which all the rest follows. Taleb's history as a trader gives him a wealth of examples to draw upon to illustrate Black Swans, and the consequent failures of predictions. Taleb also finds a number of historical examples: Wars, far from seeming inevitable, actually take almost everyone by surprise in the beginning. We have failures in predictions, and we are governed by unfathomable forces that are unfathomably rare.

"The Decision" - One Year Later

What is there left to say about "The Decision"? What to say hasn't already been said? How can I lure readers into this contrarian death trap of tedious arguments and insidious intent, focusing especially on Richard Jefferson, that I call a weblog? Hmm....

Well, personally I think LeBron made a bad decision in leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers, but "The Decision" was a fantastic, brilliant marketing move that made him the talk of the town for probably the rest of his career. He certainly ended all those "LeBron/Kobe" arguments that people were actually having in 2010. It was a gigantic way of saying to him, "Kobe, listen: you're a great player, but no general manager on Earth would want you over LeBron right now for next year. Where LeBron chooses to go will determine the state of the league for the next decade. You will not understand this, Kobe. It's alright."

Now, in spite of this successful media gamble, and in spite of LeBron inarguably embracing the team concept over selfishness, he was hated on, by, naturally, people born and bred to hate things. He was hated on by such inverse-latchers-on for his pink plaid shirt and his unfortunate decision to be announced first (and therefore most important) in the subsequent Heat parade (another media coup, but Wade's relegation to the end of the Big Three in the parade showed unbearable narcissism by James). This media blunder would haunt James, much like Vlade Divac in "Once Brothers," but there was basketball to play and they were players that played basketball in Miami, now, because of "The Decision", which happened exactly one year ago.

Travel Blog Day 20 - On hiking

I don't know if I'm cut out for traveling at this point in my life. I like to do exciting things, I guess, but I also know that I feel a sort of guilt about luxury, especially the unearned luxury of merely being born into my family. Especially luxury in a hiatus of searching for a career. I feel a strong sense of guilt over this trip, and my aunt casually telling me to spend more and do more varying things with this time ("You only live once") only makes the guilt stronger, especially as she tells me about how "one of her conditions" for this trip is to start over from a disappointed career as an artist. Now, spending money isn't going to help either of our coming job searches, but, then again, wasting a trip on hotel rooms seems worse. That's why my favorite outdoors pastime is probably hiking (on this trip, usually on straightforward paths or even along roads cutting across the mountains of Italy and Greece).

There are no airs in hiking, no real worries about how I'm dressed or groomed. There are no veneers of authenticity, no pretenses of locality, no luxury, and most of all, no forgetting myself and no escaping myself, neither of which I want. Just a couple buses at beginning and end, some fraction of a marathon's distance taken at 3 of 4 miles an hour (with frequent pauses), some fun sights for my eyes and fun grades for my feet. I don't need scuba dives, or gondoliers, or whistling a happy tune at a bar late to give me what could only equal the ecstasy, engagement, fatigue, and meditation that hiking can.

Quick thought on Quatrain LI from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

-- Omar Khayyam (from Edward Fitzgerald's famous translation of Khayyam's Rubaiyat)

One of my favorite parts of this verse (besides, you know, being an absolutely perfect four-line poem with an absolutely affecting image) is how metrically complex the first two lines are. I'm going to go into this, but first look at the last two lines:

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

As a Royal Guru once said...

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think about it.

-A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Okay, I've dissed Richard Jefferson enough. This is a mistake, and, as per my motto*, I would like to fix this mistake. As ridiculous as he is, we cannot prey on phantoms just because we are hungry. RJ 2.0 (as some Spurs fans first enthusiastically, than mockingly, titled his promising 2010-11) didn't exactly bring us to the promised land; in fact, he looked lost in the Memphis series, and indeed, the whole time after the All-Star break, he was a less efficient, less influential part of the Spurs on both ends. Sure, he had his place in the starting lineup, but after Tim's injury (and doubly so after Manu's at the end) he just did not have a place on the team. The reasons for this are several, most of them federal: List while I list.

*-"Never make mistakes, always come correct."

Travel Blog Day 17: Two Gorge-ous Hallucinations

I checked the view count earlier today and apparently Free Darko linked to my ridiculous Burl Ives/Free Darko fiction. Heh.



Blogging's a funny business: One day you're blogging about some gibberish that passes through your head as randomly as a cloud in a dream over the sycamore tress, the next day (or year) you are sanctimoniously defending these same opinions in an overwrought second blog that attests to the consistency of your identity, the solemn consideration with which you decided to pit a quite-popular blogger who pairs basketball and critical theory against a legendary folk singer known for his off-beat characters that encapsulate the futility and the cynical artistry of the aristrocratic American gentry in a satirical screed against the former which, unbeknownst to me at the time, actually fails miserably to make this juxtaposition correctly, damns my narrator (the third character) of mental violence and sadomasochistic machismo, and ends up giving a feeble and "badass" adolescent-hero-figure voice to the legitimately impenentrable and difficult vocal genius Burl Ives. Yes, blogging's a funny business indeed. Yeah, blogging will certainly teach your grandmother to suck eggs, alright.

Incredibly Readable and Confusingly Enthusiastic Tripe

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--Omar Khayyam


After that pretty negative post on the 2010 Finals, it's only natural that I would have more negative things to say. Or, it's only natural that I would have something overly positive to say about some other Finals. I don't know what's natural anymore, but I know it's the second one that's happening.

How about 2011: That was a pretty good Finals. Let's associate series with Radiohead songs. Whereas the 2010 Finals was the series of "No Surprises", and the Spurs-Grizzlies series was a "Let Down" (I guess OKC-LAL last year was "Morning Bell"?) the 2011 Finals had "Everything in its Right Place" (you only need the title to get these). Wherea$ the 2006 Final$ were more like "Electioneering" (amirite?).

Travel Blog - Day 12: An American in Paros

In one of the more blasphemous tracts extracted from the post-Pentagon papers of 2018, the time-traveler Oscar "Mercury" Robertson slipped this line into an analysis of the great lockout of 2011:

There is no rebirth. There is no lockout. There is no God.

Whether it's right or wrong (following Thucydides), the owners and players have more bargaining power than the fans, and so they will do what they can, as the fans suffer what we must. But I think this can give us a lens for appreciating the lockout just as we might appreciate a playoff series, as I'll try to explain.

You see...back in 2010, when the Lakers played the Celtics in the Finals, for most fans, the season was over. Either of the most banal, sketchiest contenders would prevail. And it was, as it had to be, the most cynical series that I have ever witnessed. To describe it is to encapsulate it: Kobe took over for a third quarter and left his teammates to wither and rot in the fourth quarter. Ray Allen shot seven threes in a half, but (seemingly psychologically) struggled the rest of the series and ended up right around average. Rajon Rondo probably got an obscene statline in a couple games because of a tremendous third quarter in which he was ubiquitous. The home team got a free throw disparity and won by a margin comfortably fitting this free throw disparity. Pau Gasol was and is less talented than Kobe but because he rebounded and had better percentages he probably played more effectively. When Kobe rebounded and forced his way into the lane all of this became more forgivable and his team won Game 7. Phil Jackson and Doc Rivers were calm and balanced. Kevin Garnett got beaten by Pau Gasol. Etc. Etc.

RJ Imagination Prayer

So, after that last post on RJ I only have one thing to say:

No, I don't want to be RJ. I want to be more like Tim.

Oh, imagine clever Tim making quip after keen quip as eternal as the truth, while clumsy RJ babbles the words out of bounds, ephemeral and forgotten.

Oh, imagine thoughtful Tim receiving (without asking) the best seats in the opera house for coolly expressing his opinion to an aristocrat, while dispirited RJ, obscured, sits in front of the orchestra with the rabble for his embarrassing ignorance of Puccini.

Oh, imagine workmanlike Tim running miles before dawn in the sand, while lazy RJ waits for the late alarm to engage in futile calisthenics and check out from his hotel just in time.

And imagine, finally, an exhausted RJ going home from Venice early (in defeat, upon a private jet), a baseball cap not nobly crowning but merely covering his bald, well-intentioned head with a slight sideways slant, the better to reject perfection, while persistent Tim flies the very jet, his first solo flight across the Atlantic, having recently received his pilot's license after months of diligence.

I bought in. I'm staying in Venice for as long as the itinerary says to. I'm proving through revealed preference that I want to be more like Tim, as opposed to (and specifically for the purpose of opposing) being like Rj. It's so exhilirating to buy in and--actually the itinerary says we're leaving tomorrow morning anyway never mind.

RJ Character Sketch

Day I - Venice

On the flight: Not enough legroom, overpriced airport food, mediocre airline food, not enough sleep, slept a long time when I arrived, baggage-check problems, altering my behavior under the assumption that the TSA cannot distinguish an orange from an organ. It's bad sitcom or stand-up material or Kafka. There's really not much to say. It was uncomfortable, but well within most people's tolerance for discomfort. I don't even find it entertaining but I've called this a travel blog and therefore I must share banalities. It's why the camera obscura principle was discovered, it's why Twitter exists, and it's why I'm typing these words at 0055 on a screen instead of preparing my body for another walking trek through the canal city.

After so many pieces on here in which RJ and his personality were the feature, or at least the backdrop, I think I've distilled the essence of Richard Jefferson, most derided member of the once-legendary Spurs of San Antonio. You see, I barely know a word of Italian and here I am on vacation in Italy, stumbling: stumbling even in my effusive politesse, stumbling especially in wit, without music to create or social situations to control. My strengths are not many in this country yet, like a community organizer at a rough dive or a pick-up artist at a political convention. There's upside there (a gift for language, some study tools), but the upside would come from habits I don't know that I could deliver on. Sure, there are things I can do to mitigate this stumbling in the short term, but most of them boil down to saying less, doing less, and staying along a narrow path constructed by my wisers and superiors. Similarly, being a short trip, there is no obvious benefit to a long-term plan for learning languages.

Turning this into a Travel blog.

I'm going on vacation today, and so now this will be a travel blog of my trip to Italy and Greece over the next few weeks. I will post...well, not pictures, nor journals. In fact, I think what I'll post are fictionalized basketball vignettes that name check recent events in basketball to which I will add local flavor that really will amount to setting, while seeming to have a different style than normal which will mostly be a product of learning two new languages in a touch-and-go way and internalizing authors that I normally wouldn't set aside much time for. So basically what I'm saying is that I will post more often because I will be on the road a lot and having a lot of new experiences, but what I will post will only tangentially relate to those experiences and have mostly to do with the change in habits associated with long travel periods. I will post inconsistently in time and general quality, not more so than I have in the past, but I will have the excuse of a busy itinerary in case anyone calls me out, and since you don't have my itinerary, any excuse I make will seem at least plausible and even if it seems implausible it will be functionally impossible to doubt.

--Alex

P.S. Posts I've planned: