Matthew Yglesias

Game Four

One of the sweetest things about sports is the clichés. Halftime at the Verizon Center everyone was milling around muttering to their friends about how the Wizards had no intensity and Gilbert needed to step up. Then we were talking to total strangers about how the Wizards needed to play with more intensity and moaning that Gilbert wasn't stepping up. Then play resumed, the Wizards had more intensity, and in the third quarter, Gilbert stepped up, and the Wiz won! Sweet. Also -- crucial famous-for-DC sightings of William Cohen, Tim Russert, and Ron Brownstein.

Draft Day

I never really believed that the NFL Draft was televised live on ESPN until I saw about ten minutes of it with my own eyes. It just sounded like absolutely terrible television. And it turns out to be . . . absolutely terrible television. How anyone could possibly be sufficiently into football to want to watch that baffles me. To each his own I suppose, but it's really a bizarre idea.

Pacers run in the first four minutes of the fourth quarter, on the other hand: Thrilling. The refs should blatantly cheat in favor of teams at risk of getting blown out all the time. Like the "computer assistance" feature on NBA Jam.

UPDATE: Howard remarks, "no offense, matthew, but they've been broadcasting the draft for at least 25 years or so now: where have you been?" I've been not watching it; I thought that was clear. It sounded boring. Then, this year, I decided to check it out and it was boring.

A Bad Night

Tough losses for all three of the teams I was supporting tonight. Being on hand to see the Wizards lose a game in which the Cavs held a lead for maybe two minutes total (of course it's not how many minutes you hold the lead for, but which minutes) is, of course, especially disappointing. Arenas is going to have to try to add "hitting the big shots" to the Gilbertology arsenal. I note, in addition, that at one point in the fourth quarter he was shooting free throws and substantial portion of the crowd failed to observe the traditional "shut up while your guy is shooting" rule, then Gilbert missed the shot and Antonio Daniels motioned for everyone to quiet down. Since life was made for second-guessing, I think it was a mistake on Eddie Jordan's part to keep Brendan Haywood on the bench once Big Z fouled out. The point of benching Brendan once he picked up his fifth seemed to be to save him to defend Ilgauskas late in the game if necessary. But with Z gone, there was nothing to save him for and it would have been worth trying to take advantage of Cleveland's reduced size.

Meanwhile, there's something downright creepy about the new, team-oriented Kobe. Obviously, enhanced maturity is a good thing. But if Kobe really wanted to be team-oriented, it was in his power at one time to have Shaq as a teammate.

Quorum of Twelve

As we know, on Battlestar: Galactica there's an ill-defined political institution known as the "Quorum of Twelve." Unbeknownst to me, this is a real institution of the LDS Church. If one is so inclined, one can apparently spin paranoid fantasies out of this factoid.

The Notorious Bettie Page

Mary Harron, or so it seems to me, can do no wrong. The basic idea of the film is as a celebration of . . . the moral virtues of the pornography industry. The porn is rather tame by contemporary standards but, even that aside, draped in a kind of innocence. Outside the porn world, everyone -- fathers, senators, random men on the street, legit movie producers, boyfriends, acting teachers -- is terrible, but the dirty pictures business if full of stand up people. This, though subversive, would be subversive in a boringly cliché way of its own except for the fact that hard-core Baptist Christianity proves itself to be the other positive force in the world and somehow the two go together perfectly.

I'm a Nice Guy, I Swear!

Was just walking home past the proverbial crime scene and there was a woman standing by the fence checking the situation at (there's nothing to see). She saw me walking up the block and began to literally run away. I'm seriously not very scary-looking.

Neighborhood News

Apparently, someone was shot and killed at 6AM this morning directly across the street from my house and I didn't hear a thing. Did wonder what the cops and local news people were doing on the block when I left to go to work.

Wiz-Cavs 2

Woo! What a game. You don't see the 'Zards involved in a lot of bruising defensive struggles -- it was kind of like old times watching the Knicks, especially with Jeff Van Gundy on hand for commentary. This, it should be said, pretty much cut against everything I've been saying. It was possible to seriously contain King James, that was the key to victory. Worse (for me) Jared Jeffries proved he is a valuable defensive stopper and Antonio Daniels played like crap.

Duncan Versus Garnett

Since it's come up in comments, why not weigh in? I don't actually have an opinion on this, except to note that Garnett certainly looks better when you watch him play. I believe, however, in dogmatic adherence to the numbers. And the Duncan/Garnett comparison is an easy one to make, since they're exactly the same age and you can just toss KG's first two seasons out and do an apples to apples comparison.

Garnett's scoring (18.5, 20.8, 22.9, 22.0, 21.2, 23.0, 24.2, 22.2, and 21.8 ppg) has usually been somewhat worse than Duncan's (21.1, 21.7, 23.2, 22.2, 25.5, 23.2, 22.3, 20.3, and 18.6 ppg) though that's changed in the past two seasons. All else being equal, Garnett probably should score more than Duncan, since Duncan has much better teammates and therefore other options. The standard defense of a guy who scores slightly fewer points might be that he scores them more efficiently than the other guy. That's not the case here. Rather, Duncan's true shooting percentages (.577, .541, .555, .536, .576, .564, .534, .540, and .523) as compared to Garnett's (.527, .493, .545, .531, .536, .553, .547, .567, and .589) show essentially the same pattern -- Duncan was the more effective scorer for most of their careers, but Garnett's been better for the past couple of years.

In terms of rebound rate Garnett's numbers (13.9, 15.4, 17.1, 16.4, 17.8, 18.8, 20.1, 20.3, 19.6) started out worse than Duncan's (17.6, 16.4, 18.1, 17.8, 18.0, 19.0, 19.0, 19.4, 18.7) but, once again, have been better recently. Duncan's turnover ratios (13.9, 11.5, 12.0, 11.1, 11.0, 11.1, 10.0, 08.2, 10.6) are almost uniformly worse than Garnett's (9.7, 10.2, 11.3, 10.0, 10.2, 09.4, 08.7, 09.7, 09.5). Or, to just aggregate it all, you can look at PER, where, once again Duncan's numbers (22.8, 23.2, 24.8, 23.8, 27.0, 26.9, 27.1, 27.0, 23.1) were better for a while, but Garnett (20.4, 22.4, 23.6, 23.9, 23.8, 26.4, 29.4, 28.2, 26.8) has been superior in recent years.

In sum, then, most seasons that they've both been in the league, Duncan's been better. In another sense, Garnett's probably had a better career. He was a very good player for several seasons before Duncan turned pro. Then Duncan entered the league, was better, and stayed better as they both improved. But for the past two-three seasons, Garnett's been better. And they're both young enough to keep playing for a while, during which which time it seems reasonable to assume that KG will be superior. I don't really know which way is the right way to look at this, and, of course, it sort of depends on what happens in the future.

Attack! Attack!

"Wizards Must Attack James". But why? Despite James' performance, the Cavs only scored 97 points, slightly below their 97.6 points per game average. Meanwhile, the Wizards, who average 101.7 ppg, only scored 86. The Washington defense was, by Wizards standards, pretty much fine. The offense was absurdly sub-standard.

A Scary Thought

On the CNN front page I saw an article titled "Czech, please! Eat like a local in Prague." I spent a bunch of time in the Czech Republic back in 1997 before there was much non-Czech cuisine available, even in Prague, and I can tell you that this is a terrible idea. Czech beer, great. Czech people, great. Lots of great stuff over there. But Czech food -- terrible. The last thing you want to eat like is a local. Fortunately, when you click the link the actual headline is "Czech, please! Restaurants in Prague worth getting excited about" and the restaurants worth getting excited about turn out, rightly, to be the ones that don't serve authentic central european fare. Instead, they talk about places where "A hearty sweet-and-sour vegetable stir-fry, with glazed zucchini, carrots and smoked tofu, comes with a side of couscous ($4.50)."

Do You?

Here's a curious exchange:

Nate (Mpls, MN): Jordan had Pippen...who would be LeBron's ideal #2?

Brian Windhorst: If he had his choice of anyone in the league right now it would probably be Tim Duncan because you need a great big man to win titles. If you are taking about a wing player I'd say Michael Redd because he's such a great spot-up shooter.

But what about Jordan, Pippen, and the six titles? Chicago wasn't playing bad big men on those teams, but I think we know who the great players were.

Trade Down

Stealing a page from my friend Matt Quirk's brief article on the NFL draft in the last Atlantic, let me say I think drafting Mario Williams or D'Brickashaw Ferguson with a top three draft pick is kind of silly. If you've got the second pick and you don't want to hand your franchise over to Young, Leinart, or Cutler, you should trade the pick to someone who does and pick up two defensive ends or whatever. Basically, instead of the guy who your scouts think is the best DE prospect in the draft, you could get the guy who they think is the second-best DE prospect and either their third- or fourth-favorite DE prospect. If your scouts were clairvoyant, taking the first choice would be the smart move, but the historical record indicates that this drafting is a pretty inexact science and your odds are going to be better with two guys than with a single, somewhat better-regarded guy.

Other Games

I kept hearing about Carmelo's awesome clutch play but hadn't actually seen it in action. Too bad it didn't work out tonight -- I like the Nuggets. With regard to Heat-Bulls, obviously Miami won, but I thought their performance in a home first round game was kind of unimpressive for an alleged championship contender. The Spurs, meanwhile, "sent a message" as the kids say. Readers will recall that I've picked them to win it all. I think this is a curiously underrated team considering that they're the defending champs and had an excellent regular season record.

Wizards-Cavs One

It's easy to forget that all that talk during the regular season about the "playoff atmosphere" being different is true. I'd been sort of discounting the notion that Cleveland's home court advantage was going to be an important leg up in this series, but perhaps that was a mistake. For the record, I put some money on this series -- got what I think are pretty good odds, I lose $50 if Cleveland wins, get $82.50 if the Wiz win.

UPDATE 3:34 Incidentally, this dose of Gilbertology courtesy of Sports Illustrated is pretty hilarious.

UPDATE 3:38 Man, solid half of a quarter there . . . second eighth, well, not so much. Gotta make the free throws!

UPDATE 3:50 Ah, this is looking bad . . . perhaps better to just blog nothing.

UPDATE 5:35 Okay, let me just note that contrary to what the commentators are saying, LeBron's greatness isn't really the issue here. He's great, you just sort of need to live with it. All things considered, though, the Cavs haven't scored an outlandish number of points. Instead, the Wizards offense has been terrible. They're 3-20 from beyond the arc at the moment, which is terrible. Make that 8-20 and the game's a whole different story. Obviously, developing some "shut down James" strategy would work, too, but trying to count on making that happen is crazy. But Cleveland's no kind of defensive powerhouse; Washington needs its big scorers to deliver.

Heat Hating

Apparently, my feelings on this crucial topic had somehow been left unclear. This is like the perfect storm of hating for me. No love lost between the Knicks and the Heat in my youth, and the return of turncoat Pat Riley to the Heat bench doesn't help matters. And then, of course, there's the humiliatingly one-sided Wizards-Heat rivalry here in my newfound Southeast Division. And I don't like Shaq dating back to the old Lakers juggernauts of yore.

Then, to cap it off, the New Model Heat this season are just one of those basketball teams that I think you've got to hate -- assembling a bunch of well-known, over-the-hill ring-chasing veterans instead of decent, God-fearing honest role players is always annoying (see the horrifying Shaq/Kobe/Payton/Malone Lakers). The route 'Zo took to wind up in Miami makes the stomach turn. Dwyane Wade's great, everyone loves him, fair enough, but the rest of the situation is totally hate-worthy.

Pearl Jam

I like Bill Simmons, but this Peal Jam is the best band ever business is just so totally indefensible that I refuse to even say anything about it.

Playoff Predictions

Um . . . mostly the obvious things will probably happen. Wizards will upset the Cavs as Gilbert seeks revenge against Larry Hughes. And the Clippers will score a pseudo-upset over "third seed" Denver. Second round, Spurs and Suns win in the West. It'd be fun to predict that New Jersey will beat the abhorrent Heat, but they won't. Then it's Spurs over Pistons in the finals.

Wherefore Jay-Z's Nizzle?

New York, right? So what's this business about "Fo' shizzle my nizzle used to dribble down in VA / Was herbin' em in the home of the Terrapins / Got it dirt cheap for them"? Admittedly, it's not exactly unheard of for someone to move from NYC to the lovely Washington, DC area, but it seems like an odd career trajectory for a rapper. Also, if he knows the area he really ought to bring go-go to mainstream attention.

The Verdict

Life gets confusing when you acquire too many new albums in brief succession. Fortunately, putting a few hours in on Amtrack making the NYC-DC allowed me to do some head-to-head comparisons of the new albums from Rainer Maria, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and I think I'm prepared to proclaim the latter's Show Your Bones the best of the three. Certainly, "Cheated Hearts" is the best new song I've heard in a good long while.

Whew!

Ordinarily, I would have tried my damnednest to go to tonight's Wizards game. At a minimum, I would have watched it on TV. But for various reasons I'm in New York at the moment, so it wasn't possible. But after the long recent slide, the gang came through when they needed to. Based on regular season experience, it seems that the 'Zards have a decent chance of beating the Cavs not withstanding the latter's much-better record since, basicallly, LeBron's been really mediocre versus Washington when they play. Here's hoping for the fifth seed. Sorry, Sixers fans....

Not Good

Now all of a sudden it looks like the Wizards may not make the playoffs. It seems like it was only ten days ago when the number five seed was in the bag. So sad. This business from Marc Stein about their being no potential sleepers in this year's playoffs doesn't really have anything convincing to say on the subject of Sacremento. The current roster's record is excellent, and I see no particular reason to hold their poor pre-Artest performance against them.

Ticket Prices

I still think that salary caps are good for competitive balance and find this alleged rebuttal unconvincing (more on that later). That said, Scott Lemieux's obviously correct to say that fans who think siding with owners' efforts to cap sports labor costs will reduce ticket prices are fooling themselves. A given team uses a given ticket-pricing scheme because they believe that the scheme they're using maximizes revenues. They think that if they raised prices, the decline in sales would offset the greater per-unit price and reduce revenue. They think that if they lowered prices, the rise in sales would be too small to offset the lower per-unit price and reduce revenue. Of course, the odds that any given team owner has hit the precise revenue-maximizing sweet spot is very low. But this is what ownership is trying to do, and it makes sense to assume that they're getting it close to right. Altering the underlying costs of operating a franchize isn't going to affect what the revenue-maximizing price is one way or another. All it will do is alter how profitable it is to own a team that's drawing maximum revenue. If costs get too high, the team may lose money. If costs get really low, it may become super-profitable. But the ticket prices won't change.

It should also be added that even if you did somehow set prices below the maximizing point, this wouldn't have good effects. Maybe Mark Cuban decides he doesn't really care if he makes money owning the Mavs and just wants the people of Dallas to have a good time. So he lowers prices -- the top rung of seats goes for $1, courtside seats go for $50, everything in between is, well, in between. A boon for the fans? Not really. At those prices, people are just going to buy up huge blocks of tickets and re-sell them. Cuban's forgone profits are going to just become profits for scalpers, not savings for fans. Now since most people are much less wealthy than Mark Cuban, this would would still sort of work out to be a progressive redistribution of income but I don't think it would really generate a meaningful fan surplus.

Antonio Daniels

Eddie Jordan's been a pretty successful coach for the Wizards. That said, this year I keep feeling like he's thinking too hard. For some reason, he started the season with Caron Butler coming off the bench even though I think everyone on the planet understood that Butler was a better player than Jarvis Hayes. Eventually, Butler started started and the team played much better. Now that Butler's hurt, we're seeing that the team's all bad because -- guess what? -- Butler's a good player. That's why he should start. But even so, I've been wondering why Antonio Daniels doesn't start. Again, Daniels is clearly a better basketball player than Jared Jeffries. Obviously, starting your five best players isn't always the right thing to do. Jeffries is a lot taller than Daniels, and maybe the team needs that size. Then again, Jeffries "plays small" and, basically, everyone knows he's worse. Well, look at the five man rotation stats.

The standard starting lineup (and most common lineup) of Arenas-Butler-Jamison-Jeffries-Haywood gets a +7. But the "best four guys plus one of Washington's crappy big-men" lineups are all better. Arenas-Daniels-Butler-Jamison-Haywood is +37, Arenas-Daniels-Butler-Jamison-Ruffin is +58, and Arenas-Daniels-Butler-Jamison-Thomas is +34. Plus/Minus stats are a little hard to interpret, but that seems fairly conclusive especially since there was never serious dispute that Daniels is a better individual player than Jeffries.

UPDATE: Bill Walton is really a moron. Brendan Haywood makes a nice play and he remarks -- without irony -- "shades of Hakeem Olajuwon." Uh huh. If Haywood were in any way comparable to Hakeem, the Wizards would be a pretty damn great team.

UPDATE II: He just did it again!

At Last...

... a blog willing to take on the important questions.

I Am Fucked

Was talking to the roommate yesterday about how U Street obviously isn't very cool any more and we really ought to move to that "just east of the Convention Center" area. And now the definitive proof -- NYT proclaims U Street cool. This passage documents many deplorable neighborhood trends (emphasis added for deplorability):

"When I come to U Street, I'm coming more for a laid-back, jazz kind of thing," said Katarro Rountree, 24, a Georgetown University graduate student dressed preppily and drinking a Corona beer at Busboys and Poets, a bookstore, cafe and performance space that opened in September at 14th and V Streets. The cafe's high-ceilinged, loftlike space would be at home in San Francisco or Seattle, and it draws a multicultural stew of aging liberals, young antiestablishment types and college students. Although he likes hardcore partying in Georgetown, Mr. Rountree said, he prefers U Street for food, music and date nights.

Oy.

UPDATE: Bonus complaining -- the article states that "Ms. Sullivan had come on the recommendation of the bartender, whom she had known in his previous job at the upscale Marcel's in the nearby West End" which involves an odd conception of "nearby."

Élan Vital

Pretty Girls Make Graves debut something of a new sound on their new album. Generally speaking, I'm opposed to bands developing new sounds, "maturing" or anything else. I say, make three good albums then break up and/or have crucial members die in a tragic manner. Consequently, I found Élan Vital a bit unsettling on first listen. That said, the sound isn't really all that new. The only real problem with it is that the changes mostly seem to be in the direction of making the band less distinctive -- there's a lot less of the signature shriek/sing thing that you see on the first two albums. But it's still a solid album -- "Parade" and "The Number" definitely stand up to the best of their earlier work, and possibly more songs will grow on me as time passes.

A Bad Plan

Chad Ford writes of the Sonics' draft dreams:

This one's a no-brainer. Now that Chris Wilcox has come in and answered their biggest need in the post, it's time to fill the Sonics biggest need off the court -- an identity. Ever since Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp left town, the Sonics have been a team searching for a fan base. Morrison is wildly popular in Washington and would draw the fans back into the arena. What happens to Rashard Lewis? His trade value has never been higher. The Sonics could easily turn him into a much needed frontline piece.

What you've got in Seattle right now is a quite good offensive team whose defense is so bad -- historically bad, the worst defense an NBA team has ever fielded -- that the team is pretty awful notwithstanding the offense. Adding Adam Morrison into the mix is, to put it mildly, not going to help on that score at all. In the Sonics' context the whole question of whether or not Morrison's scoring ability will translate into the NBA is basically irrelevant, the team's already got the #4 offensive efficiency in the league, it's not likely to get much better even by adding an excellent scorer. Meanwhile, there's just no way to win games when your opponents are scoring 111.7 points per possession. That's terrible. The best offense in the league (Phoenix) scores 109.5 per possession.

Holy Fuck: WTF

Forgotten in my Wolf Parade post was an important point raised by the estimable Tom -- WP's opening act, Holy Fuck, was truly, madly, deeply terrible. It's possible, in fact, that the Wolf Parade show wasn't actually nearly as good as I thought and that its apparent goodness was actually just a contract effect with the unmitigated badness of the opener. They must be stopped.

Wolf Parade

I've been complaining for months that their album, while good, is overrated. But last night's show was kind of awesome . . . better than live performances I've seen recently from bands I ostensibly like more. But I think I'm sticking with my original assessment and just giving them props for the live performance.

MVP

Rick Bucher writes:

From all the conversations I've had on the MVP subject -- and, trust me, I've had five for every comment I've made on air or online -- MVP has a variety of meanings. For some, it's MEP, or the league's Most Excellent Player. For others, it's MVPOAWT, or Most Valuable Player on a Winning Team. Here's a popular one: MSIPOATTWBTE or Most Statistically Impressive Player on a Team That Was Better Than Expected. Generally, the easiest and safest pick is MVPOTBT: Most Valuable Player on the Best Team. This year has brought a new one to the mix: MDPDTSOATTFS, or Most Dominant Player Down the Stretch on a Team that Finished Strong. And, finally, there's MIP, or Most Indispensable Player, as in the guy whose team would absolutely fall apart without him.

This is amusing, he then comes up with this list:

MEP --Kobe Bryant.
MVPOAWT -- Dwyane Wade.
MSIPOATTWBTE -- Elton Brand.
MVPOTBT -- Chauncey Billups.
MDPDTSOATTFS -- LeBron James.
MIP -- Steve Nash.

It occurs to me, though, that the Lakers are a winning team, which would seem to make Kobe just as good a candidate for MVPOAWT as Wade is. Similarly, I think it's clearer that the Lakers would "fall apart" sans Kobe than it is that the Suns would fall apart sans Nash. I mean, Marion's an all-star and Phoenix has a bunch of solid dudes who all seem better than the third-best Laker. I think the problem here is that "winning team" is too loose. One prominent line of thought holds that, roughly speaking, the MVP should be a player on a semi-legit championship contender, which LA certainly isn't. My inclination would be to vote for Nowitzki on the grounds that he's the lone all-star caliber guy on an elite team, but obviously it's hard to say what the "right" standard is.

Cavs Hype

I think putting Cleveland at number five on the Power Rankings is a bit silly. The Cavs are much more likely to lose to the Wizards in the first round than they are to win the championship (note that this doesn't require an especially optimistic take on the Wiz's chances). This is definitely not true of Miami and Phoenix, both of whom are related below the Cavs.

Moving to Denver

I find the District's perennial status as one of the top five cities to be single in a perennial source of depression. So much more fun to simply blame one's surroundings for one's problems. Even worse, one of the higher-rated cities is Boston where I've also already lived. Obviously, my only hope in life is to move to the thrilling Denver-Boulder metropolitan area.

Art Brut / Rogers Sisters

I'm an Art Brut fan. The obvious criticism is that they're very schticky, which is true, but it's good schtick. I was unsure of how well that would translate into a live show. The answer is -- "pretty damn well." The band takes advantage of the live format to add new elements to their deconstruction of indie rock; the frontman has both real charisma and a fantastically silly moustache. The basic problem is that I'm not sure how much Art Brut one needs to here in any given sitting. I like to toss a song or two onto an iTunes playlist to mix things up and bring a little levity to the situation, but I've rarely felt compelled to sit down and listen to the whole album all the way through and not because it features any particularly weak songs. I thought the show had that basic problem, really the only way they were able to hold my interest for the full set was to make sure to play their two best songs ("Good Weekend" and "18,000 Lira") last. It'll be interesting to see what kind of success they have putting together a followup. In a lot of ways, I think it's good for a band's first album to fall into the good-but-not-mindblowingly-awesome category and leave some room for growth.

Also at the Black Cat last night was the Rogers Sisters and I saw most of their set. This definitely seemed to fall into the aforementioned category of bands that should make the dude shut up and let the woman sing more. They had some totally rocking moments and I feel like the whole situation could withstand some more scrutiny so I'm gonna try and listen to some recorded work.

Reality

Well, that first quarter of Wizards-Heat action really got my hopes up. The subsequent three quarters . . . not so much. Of course, as everyone knows the Heat are a really bad matchup for the Wiz and needing to operate sans Butler and Thomas hardly helped matters. Still, this is a really bad matchup for the Wiz under all circumstances. I'm still left wondering if the team is better off with the five seed or the six seed. I think New Jersey is a better matchup than Cleveland in the first round, but Detroit's a better matchup than Miami in the second round. The difference in both cases is that teams featuring a good low-post offense create big problems. If I'm an optimist, I want the five seed because that maximizes the odds of reaching the conference finals. If I'm a realist, I want the six seed because that maximizes the odds of reaching the second round and despite the regular season record I can't imagine the Wizards beating the Pistons in a playoff series.

Show Your Bones

Unlike Rainer Maria, I think the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs are still cool, but their new album's good to. In general, I think bands with female singers are better than those without. And yet, most rock songs are sung by men. (Indeed, some bands like Rilo Kiley have women singers but also feature songs where the lead vocalist is male, producing what's known in the music industry as "the bad Rilo Kiley songs.") This is evidence of discrimination, no? Like in the early days of baseball integration when there were only a few black players and they were much better on average than the white ones (is this true again now that black players are getting rarer again?).

Wizards Offseason

I think Rick Bucher needs to think harder about this:

ernie grunfeld(verizon center): Ric, can you tell me if Caron Butler can be a full-time "2" allowing me to move Jamison to the "3" which in turn allows me to sign the strong, athletic big forward we desperately need in Chris Wilcox provided that our salary cap is in good shape this summer.

Ric Bucher: Good to know GMs are coming to this chat for advice. The way the game is played now, Caron and 'Tawn as the 2-3 is, as Silvio would say, "a no-go. Can't be accommodated." With the defensive rules, you need two perimeter dribble penetrators. Caron, Jamison and Arenas would leave you with one. That would be a killer no matter who the PF is.

The current starting lineup is Arenas, Butler, Jamison, plus Jared Jeffries and Brendan Haywood. Presumably, we're talking about starting Wilcox instead of Jeffries. So Bucher's theory makes sense if and only if Jeffries is a perimeter dribble penetrator, which he most certainly is not. As it stands, the Wizards starting lineup more-or-less involves three small forwards and no real 2 or 4. Since Jeffries isn't very good, it seems to me that if a legitimate power forward is gettable it would make sense to make the switch and use Jeffries as a flexible bench player.

See You In Alero!

I just lack the skills as a writer to convey why, exactly, this article promising readers of The Hill "The Flavor of U Street" is so terrible. But if you know the area, and read the piece, you'll know -- it sucks. I just can't quite describe it, though the oozing condescension of this graf is certainly part of the problem:

However, the U Street corridor has become a new choice for upscale eating excursions. There are a handful of places whose food will not leave you wanting for the more traditional high-end establishments and where you will be comfortable wearing your better evening attire.

Oy....

At any rate, Hill staffers have legendary reputations for being lame assholes, but given that this sort of thing is their main source of information it's hard not to sympathize.

Jews and Immigration

Lurking in the midst of a long rambling post, Steve Sailer wonders why American Jews love immigration so much:

To be frank, much of what we see in the press appear to be examples of Jewish-American ancestor worship, a bizarre religious urge to make Ellis Island into a sacred site. Other groups, such as the Italian and Irish, share this to some extent, but Jews with their vast talent at nostalgic myth-making seem much more taken in by their own concoction than are Catholic ethnics, who are, sensibly, more focused on the future than the past. On the right, the main cheerleaders among journalists for massive immigration have been Jewish neocons like William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Tamar Jacoby, Michael Barone, and James Taranto.

Is unchecked immigration good for the Jews? Of course not. It will bring in more anti-Semites and terrorists, like Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who murdered two Jews at the Israeli El Al Airline counter of LAX on the July 4, 2002.

I don't think this is even remotely puzzling. First off, as a high-income, high-education group, most American Jews derive direct financial benefit from high immigration policies. Second, as a historical matter nationalism has been Bad For The Jews. Third, the general understanding in the American Jewish community is that restrictions on immigration and, in particular, the restrictions the USA imposed in the 1920s are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust who otherwise would have followed their American cousins out of Europe (this is perhaps empirically mistaken in some respects, but it's certainly the general understanding). Fourth -- and relatedly -- the earlier immigration clampdown is understood by American Jews to have been largely motivated by anti-semitism raising suspicions about the motives of present-day restrictionists. Fifth, things might be different if most immigrants to America were Arabs or Muslims but when people think "immigrant" they think about Mexicans and Asians not Egyptians; Jews have no particular beef with Mexicans and identify pretty strongly with Asians.

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together

I know they're not cool anymore, and I know Pitchfork hates them, but I like Rainer Maria, damnit. Got their new album Catastrophe Keeps Us Together yesterday and it's good. You can hear the lead track on their website. That is all.

Baseball Balance

Aha! An interesting quantitative discussion of the competitive balance issue in baseball:

Of course, in any given year, most teams won't come close to making the playoffs. A more significant measure is whether poor revenue potential is locking teams out of pennant races for years at a time. The numbers here are less clear: Since the expanded playoffs began in 1995, twenty-two of the thirty big league teams have reached the postseason at least once; two of the remaining eight, the Phillies and Blue Jays, had just met in the final World Series under the old setup. Compare that to baseball's "golden age," when the Phillies once went thirty years without finishing higher than fourth while teams like the St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators rarely even sniffed a pennant race.

That said, the Yankees are one of two teams never to have missed the postseason under the current system (the Braves are the other). If we chart postseason appearances against average team revenue, we find that a little more than half of getting to the postseason is determined by team revenue.

But there's a problem here. High revenue may help lead to the postseason, but postseason appearances increase revenue as well. Not only are playoff tickets a lucrative item, but a winning team typically sees regular-season sales soar. To avoid this dilemma, we can compare postseason appearances not with revenue but with TV market size. Beyond the obvious -- you really don't want to play in the tiniest markets, or in Canada -- the correlation between market size and playoff appearances is extremely weak. What explains the Cardinals' or the Indians' success, or the Phillies' lack of it? Market size accounts for 11 percent of the cause -- meaning anyone who's tempted to place bets on division winners based solely on TV market size is kidding himself.

Well off course placing bets on division winners based solely on TV market size is a stupid idea. But if 11 percent of the variation in playoff appearance really is accounted for by variation in TV market size, that's a pretty big effect. Someone should run that with the other sports.

Joakim Noah

I see why teams wind up drafting guys like this, but I feel like really tall dudes whose "raw" moves need a lot of work to turn them into effective post players have this way of not working out in the end. I think that what happens oftentimes with these "project" big men is that there's a lack of coordination between drafters and coaches about organizational priorities. There's absolutely no point in picking someone like that unless you're actually planning to try and develop them. And the only way to develop them is to not just give them some minutes, but run plays designed to feed it to them in the post. And running a low-post play for a young guy whose low post game needs work is rarely going to be the smartest thing to do in an actual game situation. But if you're willing to pay that price, it at least might pay off in a serious way. But the organization needs to seriously consider whether or not that's what they want to do. Otherwise you just kind of have these dudes hanging around being useless.

Records

Okay, fuck it, more baseball-bashing. On SportsCenter just now they're talking about Barry Bonds on the career home runs list and calling Hank Aaron's record "the most hallowed record in all of sports." Most hallowed according to who? No doubt there's some soccer record of some sort that's extremely hallowed outside the USA. The whole thing wreaks of typical MLB arrogance. At any rate, I take it that Bonds stands a good chance of breaking Aaron's record. Wilt's 100 point game is something I think may really never be surpassed.

It was alleged to me yesterday that nobody will outdo Oscar Robinson by averaging a triple-double for a season, but upon reflection I could totally see LeBron doing it. Word on the street is that perimeter players peak at around age 27. If that's actually true (but is it actually true?) then someone who's averaging 31.5, 7.3, and 6.7 six or seven years before his peak seems to stand a decent chance.

Opening Day

As a union advocate, I must admit that salary caps rub me the wrong way. On the other hand, checking out some commentary as the baseball season begins there seems to be something a little ridiculous about a sport where insofar as your owner is just willing to spend a ton of money there's nothing stopping him from signing up star after star. Obviously, the NBA has its payroll disparities. But not only are high payrolls no guarantee of success (that's true in MLB as well) but the cap rules put meaningful restraint on the ability of a big spending owner to make moves and turn a bad situation around in the short term. I think that if I were, say, a Blue Jays fan I'd find it unendingly frustrating to realize my team's just stuck in a structural situation where they're always going to be badly outspent by not one but two teams in my division.

In addition (and I'm not a baseball fan, so I'm open to being corrected on this point) but my sense is that this is exacerbated by the fact that baseball is the least team-ey of the major team sports in that the players don't really need to cooperate actively in the way basketball and football players do.

Anyways, baseball-bashing is even more boring than baseball, so I'll leave it at that.

WTF?

On my local ABC affiliate right now: Lakers-Rockets, as it should be. On my local ABC affiliate's HD channel right now: Silent footage of a space shuttle launching, occassionally interrupted by creepy audio. "This is the stereo left channel," it says, out of only the left speaker. "This is the stereo right channel," out of only the right speaker. Then more soundless NASA footage. Where's my basketball?

Heat-Cavs

Ultimately, there's not much to my case against college basketball. If you like basketball, you should want to see the best basketball players in the world playing basketball. If you don't want to see the best basketball players in the world playing basketball, you don't really like watching basketball. To wit, yesterday's Cleveland-Miami game featuring spectacular performances by Dwyane Wade and LeBron James performing feats the likes of which are not to be seen in the so-called "March Madness." Or, to put it another way, holy shit those guys are good. ESPN offers comparisons to the Magic-Bird matchups of yore. I didn't actually see those matchups, but that doesn't seem especially correct. Wade's all short and stuff and while LBJ does point guard stuff very well for a tall guy Magic was a great point while being tall, which is different. King James scores a lot more and doesn't put up nearly the kind of assists that Magic did. Now, maybe in an alternate universe with different teammates James could do that, but maybe not, and that's not the universe he exists in.

Season Six

I watched episode four on my DVR last night in preparation for tonight's episode. There's no denying that this is still a very good television show, probably better than the best of what non-HBO TV has to offer (Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica) but compared to its earlier seasons or the best of post-Sopranos HBO (The Wire, Deadwood, etc.) it's clearly falling off. The two episode long dream sequence was appalling and the actual payoff at the end was so banal that the writers couldn't possibly have even believed they were doing something clever and important. Not only was it unethical for Dr. Melfi to be treating Carmela, but that specific issue had been addressed earlier in the show and they pretty clearly put that scene in just to give Melfi a scene.

And Vito and Paulie's efforts to hold out on Carmela didn't really make any sense. They knew at the time that Tony might recover, in which case it was a bad idea. They were also under orders from the acting boss and had to know that if Tony did die there was at least a non-trivial chance that Silvio would take over, in which case it was a bad idea. What's more, Vito was clearly hoping that were Tony not to die, he'd get a chance to take control of the family. But if you were trying to take over as boss, the last thing you'd want to do is immediately establish a reputation as an untrustworthy, disloyal person who'll break the most basic elements of the "code" to make a cheap buck. After all, the principle that the "family" should take care of the family of a dead or deceased member has to be pretty integral to making the system work -- nobody's going to take life-threatening risks for an organization that's going to sell out their wife and kids.

Paging Doctor Marx

Matthew Scully, writing in The Wall Street Journal doesn't care for Hugh Heffner:

He is not the worst of America's celebrity pornographers, though being the first is no great distinction either, and but for Hef a few standards of public decency might actually have held awhile. Without his pioneering vision, we might, in our own time, rise every morning to face a world without "Girls Gone Wild" or Sex.com, without cable or Internet porn for all hours and all ages. Whatever the problems of those repressed, Puritanical types that Mr. Hefner is still using as strawmen, they did somehow manage to fill their days without such things, and we could use a little more of their self-restraint and modesty.

I don't share Scully's sense that pornography is a terrible thing. But leaving that episode aside, I think the really fascinating error here is that Scully seems to seriously believe that Hugh Heffner actually caused the cultural shifts he doesn't approve of. Like if Heffner had never been born or had just decided to sell used cars you'd actually be unable to see porn on the internet.

Disturbing Allegations

It seems that on tour with the Watson Twins doing her alt-country album, Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis is faking a southern accent during her between song banter.

Efficiency

I'm always interested in the offensive and defensive efficiency statistics -- points per 100 possessions, in other words, that lets you compensate for the vagaries of pace. So here they are for the top five teams in the league:

San Antonio -- 96.4 defense, 105.1 offense (8.7 differential).
Dallas -- 101.9 defense, 108.7 offense (6.8 differential).
Detroit -- 99.9 defense, 108.1 offense (8.2 differential).
Miami -- 101.6 defense, 107.1 offense (5.5 differential).
Phoenix -- 102.3 defense, 109.3 offense (7 differential).

A couple of things jump out here. One is that contrary to what their evenly spaced records would indicate (Detroit 58-14, San Antonio 56-16, Dallas 54-19) there's a big gap between San Antonio and Detroit on the one hand, and Dallas on the other. The other is that Miami, rather than Phoenix, looks like the team that arguably doesn't belong here. What follows from this, I couldn't quite say since it seems to support the banal conclusion that the likeliest outcome is a very competitive NBA finals between Detroit and San Antonio which is exactly what someone would have said before the season started. It does remain noteworthy (though everyone who reads stats knows this) that contrary to its rep, the New Model Pistons are a team that's winning with offense. If you think it's true that "defense wins championships," San Antonio is now clearly better on this score than Detroit. Indeed, San Antonio is way better than anyone else -- it's a three point gap between them and number two Indiana.

It's not totally clear to me what the evidence for the "defense wins championships" proposition is supposed to be, though. It's not even clear to me what it's supposed to mean. On one construal, it's simply the observation that since offense is more obvious when you're only watching a game casually that a team can put together a lot of good-looking plays and still stink (see, e.g., Toronto and Seattle) whereas a really ugly-looking team (Indiana) can actually achieve "pretty good" status through easy-to-ignore top-notch defense. But people seem to be making a stronger claim.

The Return

Well, I'm back! Time to catch up on my NBA-blogging. I guess Amare's return didn't go as well as one might have hoped. Meanwhile, I find myself surprised by the Nets' hot streak. I guess the Wizards had really better keep their shit together and try to hang onto that fourth seed.