Let Earthquakes Be Earthquakes

"Welp. Still haven't posted at The Gothic Ginobili yet. Writer's block."

It's the strained, pathetic cry of futility, meaning nothing and aggravating me with its meaninglessness. I've long known there's something to this block beyond some nebulous "things have to change": it's just that I haven't known or been able to articulate just what.

I love basketball, and I love writing about basketball. As the spooky, CIA-monitored, RJ-enshrining, prevolutionary version of my contributions to that blog, Pearls of Mystery gives the lie to the writer's block. I have no trouble writing these sentences and approving them for publication when I'm safe in the knowledge that no one will read this crap. And so it goes that here I can write whatever I want, and I feel not just respite from the "block" but the non-existence of this block entirely. It's not performance anxiety, either: If you could witness the number of things I manage to say about sports in a given day to friends and acquaintances, you'd think that I'd thought about little else. I love the public discourse, too: That's not the friggin' problem. Nor is time commitment: I've been spending a lot of time learning sort of the theoretical and empirical basis for competition. I've really been exploring my most basic impulses, competitively, and been learning to articulate them. That's not the problem.

There is no damn writer's block, and there's nothing wrong with the Gothic Ginobili. So what the hell gives? Why am I suddenly so d*mn profane? LOL.

Well, the truth is, I think it starts with my relationship to my family (especially my extended family on my father's side). See, I love my family dearly and I'm certain they love me back. But while the love is unquestionably genuine at every turn on both sides, the relationships, communications, and expressions are ingenuous and infinitely questionable. Which is only to say that the love is human.

"Only at Nightfall": A Return of the Mystery and a Manifesto at Dawn

Hi, everyone. Oh, I see you've tripped over your own feet and spit out your coffee at having seen a new Pearls of Mystery post. Yes. Well, nice trip. See you next... it's almost fall, and it's been several months since I have posted here. This is good because I've been posting and editing at The Gothic Ginobili, which is in the process of becoming a Truehoop affiliate.

Now, The Gothic Ginobili has been wonderfully successful by any measure, thanks mostly to Aaron McGuire, but I've had a lot of great pieces go up and I've done a lot of fine editing. We've even had a few new writers and a few more guest writers, which is wonderful. I had a lot of pride when my link to "The Consummation of Dirk" turned out to connect its fine DFW-influenced author Jonathan Callahan to a literary magazine for the analogical "Beyond Good and Evil" to the "Thus Spake Zarathustra" of "Dirk".

Overall, the only regret I've had with GG is that the consistent feature I could theoretically bank on for a couple posts a week has thus far eluded me. So I go through alternating periods of intense posting activity and barren writer's block. So - in the utter midst of such a block - I want to spend my way out of the recession, so to speak, by putting  some ideas to virtual pen.

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.