NBA Age Minimum Redux

Buzz Bussinger's provocative piece in the NY Times, "Bring Back Basketball's Little Big Men", has already generated considerable buzz on this blog. I have been disturbed to read Bhel Atlantic's defense of Commissioner Stern's proposal to raise the NBA age minimum again -- this time to 20. For reasons mentioned below by my colleague Earl Da Goat, the age minimum smacks of paternalism and should be scrapped -- not raised.

I make three additional observations:

1. Who does David Stern think he is? Raising the age minimum is cruel to high school players who have the skill and desire to make the jump to the NBA. Many pro athletes come from poverty and have worked harder than Commissioner Stern can fathom to get to the point where they can take care of their families. For no good reason, the age minimum deprives these kids of their just rewards. One may argue that their opportunity to play in the NBA isn't denied -- just deferred. But let's not forget that every competitive basketball player risks a career-ending injury every time s/he steps on the floor. Commissioner Stern needs to realize that he is not the Great White Father of NBA players: he is an administrator. He should stick to hawking NBA merchandise in Europe and China rather than trying to play Daddy to a group of remarkable young athletes with whom he shares little.

2. Forcing athletes to go to college against their will doesn't help them. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for student-athletes going to college, getting an education and preparing for life after pro sports. But this is -- and ought to remain -- their choice.

Part of my revulsion for forcing athletes to attend college is because Division I NCAA sports are already exploitative. College athletes generate millions of dollars in revenues for their respective schools but are not allowed to be compensated. In light of this, forcing players to attend college smacks of indentured servitude.

Mr. Atlantic seems to think that NBA players will learn to behave like gentlemen if they go to college. He laments the high number of NBA players who father children out of wedlock and suggests that college will somehow teach them not to have sex with groupies. (I guess UNLV alum Larry Johnson skipped that class.). First, there does not seem to be any correlation between going to college and fathering out-of-wedlock children. Second, the suggestion that the NBA should be in the business of preaching abstinence and family values to its players is highly problematic. It is neither Mr. Atlantic's nor Commissioner Stern's business if NBA players have children out of wedlock. There is nothing illegal about it, and many men who never get married are excellent fathers. I am further curious about what other life skills Mr. Atlantic thinks the NBA should be teaching its young players -- classes on cleanliness? The notion that the NBA needs to civilize its players is downright offensive.

And even if you think that pro athletes need to learn some manners, it's not clear that college is the place to learn. Many players are more spoiled in college than they will be in the NBA. (In the NBA, there are no college coaches or university administrators to conceal who wrote your SATs or hide your drug abuse.)

3. The other supposed benefits of the age minimum are trivial. Bhel Atlantic is a smart guy but even he is struggled to identify the supposed benefits on an NBA age minimum. He argues that the NBA suffers if high school players can enter the draft: because nobody wants to miss out on drafting the next Kobe or KG, NBA teams draft "projects" right out of high school, some of whom will never amount to anything. Poor NBA owners and executives. So NBA scouts will have to get better at their job. Given the downside to the age minimum, that's a burden we should all be willing to live with.

The Best Is Yet To Come

Towards the end of Game 1 of the World Series a couple nights ago, commentator Tim McCarver noted that the Phillies had augmented a 2-0 lead to 6-0, with two runs in the top half of the eighth inning and two more runs in the top of the ninth. McCarver suggested that "Teams lose a lot of games because of tack-on runs." I found this analysis a bit quizzical. Sure, teams lose a lot of games by allowing runs late. But teams also lose games by allowing runs early. And allowing runs in the fifth inning ain't so good for ya, either. Apparently a baseball purist is to believe that no team worth its salt should be allowing runs late in games; perhaps the presence of an all-fastball-hurling relief pitcher like Mariano Rivera, who didn't even get on the mound that night, means that average runs-per-inning decreases later in the game. [I have looked on Google but cannot find statistics on average runs per inning in each of the 9 innings, aggregating all MLB games.] But why are these late runs by a leading team deemed so embarrassing or so illegitimate?

Presumably offensive players in baseball are slightly less motivated with a lead than they are while playing from behind; defensive players are more motivated when their team is behind. (But if the gap in the score is huge, offensive players and defensive players playing from behind could be demoralized and reduce their effort.) Perhaps we should be critical of the Yankees for allowing those late runs, but it hardly means that their performance was grossly negligent. The same dynamics likely govern in basketball, also.

Back in the NBA, one game I consider archetypal is Game 7 of the Orlando-Boston second-round series from last May. The Magic led by only five points after three quarters, and the whole Garden crowd was totally jacked to see the home side pound Orlando in the fourth quarter for a thrilling comeback. Instead, Orlando scored 11 unanswered points in the first two minutes of the fourth, and then their stifling defense convinced Boston that the decision was locked. Now, can we say that Boston lost because they got lackadaisacal for those two minutes? Were those 11 points equivalent to McCarver's "tack-on runs"? Alternatively, we might say that Orlando proved in those two minutes that they are the better team. Sometimes teams prove their superiority in the first quarter; Orlando proved it in the fourth. (Objectively, it would have been surprising if the Celtics, missing their defensive leader Garnett, had taken the series.) Additionally, let us consider the season debut of the Timberwolves on Wednesday night. The Timberwolves overcame a 16-point deficit with under 7 minutes to play, eventually edging New Jersey 95-93 with a emergency shot at the buzzer by Damien Wilkins. Predictably, Nets-oriented bloggers called the outcome a "punch in the gut". The Nets choked, in the usual vernacular. But it's more likely that this burst of performance from Minnesota evinced their superiority to New Jersey (at least on that night); perhaps New Jersey's ability to mount a 16-point edge was the real fluke.

Two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood

Inter alia, the 2008-09 NBA season saw two remarkable streaks: Cleveland won 39 of its first 40 home games (before dropping a meaningless finale by one point in overtime with bench players seeing the most court time) and Jose Calderon made an NBA-record 151 of 154 free throws. After two nights of this season, Cleveland is 0-2 (0-1 at home) and Calderon is shooting 60% on his free throws, having missed two of five.

Flipped coins don't have a memory of the prior flip, and so the probability of a given outcome (heads, say) is constant over time and independent of whatever happened earlier. Five heads in a row? Your chance of another head is still 50%. Yet athletic outcomes surely are not like that. Success breeds confidence and good habits, which breed more success; alternatively, an eternally wowing streak like 98 percent free-throw completion might weigh mentally and make a man more nervous. Clearly with Cleveland and Calderon, the positive-feedback side dominated last year. Yet in the season's first bounces, these guys collapsed on the metrics wherein they kicked butt in 08-09. That truly is surprising; their "memory" is now amnesiac. Much like children who have no books during summer vacation, basketball players apparently forget what made them great while they slumber in July and August.

Stern Apologists

I couldn't avoid being provoked by the attempted defense of Massa Stern by my colleague, Mr. B. Atlantic.

Even if you are in favor of the age limit, Mr. Atlantic's response reeks of paternalism and elitism. I suppose Mr. Atlantic's perspective is obvious given his off-hand (and perhaps unneeded) reference to coordination failures on Wall Street (or as some would say, Wall Cheat). But I wonder why the other side thinks that NBA players can't take care of themselves, and perhaps more importantly, why those players who are not on Mr. Atlantic's Eight Fold Path would be remedied by being forced to go to college for one year.

First, the elitism and tinges of racism. I'd be curious to know Mr. Atlantic: how many of these high school to pro players are coming from "rusty gyms in the Mississippi"? Indeed, what fraction of the players affected by the age limit are white? Even in percentage terms, this policy surely differentially hurts the African-American players.

Second, the analysis rests on shoddy counterfactual reasoning. I'm not convinced that LBJ, Howard and Ellis would have behaved any differently had they been forced to go to college. I could easily have imagined it the other way. Atlantic seems to forget the other iron law of unintended consequences. The policy leads to players going to Europe until they turn 19. Does he expect the players to get counseling on condom use on the French Riviera?

Finally, and most importantly, why is forcing someone to go to college for one year the best way to help someone get on the right track? That is, why doesn't the NBA provide more services for these young players, such as someone to help manage finances, the press, family obligations, etc. to get them on the Eight Fold path. What in particular do they learn in college that is relevant? There are much better ways to deal with the alleged issues than forcing someone to go to college.

The obvious answer as to why the NBA does not consider this is that it would directly take out of Massa Stern's pockets, something which he and the owners he represents are unwilling to do.

In Support of Stern

My colleague Earl da Goat, in his post immediately below, wants to know why the NBA is happy to re-distribute the rents from young players to the NCAA.

As Bissinger notes in the article, the NBA benefits from drafting proven talent with an existing popular following, rather than nobodies from rusty gyms in the Mississippi Delta. Of course, without the age rule in place, no GM wants to be the guy who misses out on the next Garnett, so he feels compelled to take the risk. The age rule in the collective bargaining agreement solves the coordination problem and achieves an outcome that is better for all teams. (It seems to me that a similar problem bedeviled Wall Street in recent years; traders, fund managers, etc. felt compelled to take on more risk to keep up with the Joneses [or the Goldmans] even as the collective volatility of portfolios became untenable.)

Additionally, it is not even clear that the NBA loses anything economically from forcing Derrick Rose, Kevin Love, etc. to delay their entry into the league by one year. Despite the extra mileage on their wheels from the college games, the players will likely play the same number of pro seasons as they counterfactually would have without college; everyone feels he is entitled to "get paid" a certain amount. Jersey sales and other merch will likely be the same over time, even discounting the cash flows.

As for "Why do the players agree to this nonsense?" have you ever heard of negotiation, Earl? You give some, you get some. In the last round of bargaining in 2005, players received a bigger cut of revenues and the NBA won shorter contracts (as well as the age limit and dress code).

I support the age limit, and furthermore, I hope the limit is raised to age 20, so that players are forced to spend at least two years in college. Or perhaps the NBA could adopt Major League Baseball's model, where high school players must choose to either enter the draft at age 18, or commit to three years of college. "One and done" players who show up on a university campus for eight months and don't even bother attending class during their second semester make a mockery of the whole exercise. I do believe that college is a useful transition period for young people to test their independence in a controlled environment and learn the folkways of adulthood. What's more, a variety of prep-to-pros such as LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Monta Ellis, and so on have become illegitimate fathers since entering the league. (To be fair, James reportedly spends time with his children.) Surely a bit of campus time with peer counselors waving around condoms could have helped them. Additionally, a little time with some college hotties would have relieved Young Mr. Bynum's hot desire to make a spectacle of himself at the Playboy Mansion.

Paternalism and "Massa" Stern

Today's New York Times has a piece by LBJ biographer Harry Gerard Bissinger III (also known as Buzz and author of Friday Night Lights) describing how we "got punked" by Massa Stern that is well worth reading.

Bissinger's piece displays a shrewdness which affirms his status to be the Kissinger of sport journalists. (I'll understand if you can't get past the paragraph that starts... "If David Stern truly cared about his players’ well-being...")

As BB argues, the age limit on players entering the NBA is obviously a bad policy: it simply takes the rents the players could have earned on their exceptional talents and distributes it to the NCAA. The puzzle for me is, why is the the NBA interested in subsidizing the NCAA?

There was one other place we got punked by Massa Stern and his paternalistic attitude to the NBA players: The NBA dress code.

Why do the players agree to this nonsense?

I'll Have What She's Having

Last spring I felt aghast as I read a whole literature of punditry expressing derision for any basketball fan who dares to follow the NBA regular season. The winter months are so long and tedious, goes the argument, that paying attention before the playoffs is hardly worth the notion. I congratulated myself for being a "real" fan and wondered who would have the temerity to switch on a May or June game after not paying any fealty to the league during the fall and winter.

Yet last night I stood transfixed in front of the tube, watching my beloved Yankees** defeat the Angels and advance to the World Series. As a child, I adored baseball, attended many Tigers games downtown in the D, studied every box score in the newspaper, and feverishly constructed score cards by hand while listening to Al Kaline narrate games on the black-and-white television in my room (if my parents allowed me to stay up past 10). Somehow I grew out of it with time (I suppose I have only time enough to follow one sport closely). If I'm asked now if I'm a baseball fan, I shrug and say "Pshaw, it's boring", or more wistfully, "Not anymore." Yet when October strolls in, I watch the games. I love the games! Every moment is so heavy – a strikeout could be triumphal, a triple disastrous.

I suppose many basketball fans treat the playoffs this way. The NBA season, for them, is a blur of injuries, trade demands, a slam dunk contest, and various acts of thuggery. Ball doesn't get good until the crap teams are out and the superstars remain. "The Highest Level Of Hoop", Ralph Wiley used to call it. The NBA playoffs are an especially happy time because they herald spring -- a flourishing, a re-naissance. And sure, I get that. I guess I like the NBA season because (unlike football) 82 games provide enough sample size to determine which teams are actually the best, and (unlike baseball) they don't play every damn day. And when it's cold, nothing tickles me more than a hot cup of cocoa and some TNT Thursday night. When I was young, I had a shower radio on which I listened to George Blaha announce Pistons games while I soaped myself clean each night, preparing for another day of fourth grade. Basketball still throws me back to those innocent days.

**My affinity for the Yanks stems from the year when I worked in the Bronx and was frequently mistaken (yes, really!) for Jorge Posada. Like a good Method actor, I began to identify myself with his troubles and travails.

Nocioni, Garcia, Garbanzo

In a recent post, The Hummus Blog quotes Israeli player Omri Casspi, now of the Sacramento Kings, lamenting the lack of authentic hummus found in US grocery stores. There are not many restaurants or fast-food establishments in the U.S. serving explicitly "Israeli" food; Sacramento appears to have none, and Chicago, my current locale, has only two. (The first hit on that Chicago list is not Israeli ... trust me.) Casspi likely will need to visit one of the many Arab dining spots in the Sacramento area, highlighted by this one, which happens, I think by random chance, to bear the same name (Malouf) as the Lebanese-American owners of his current club.

I suppose Israeli immigrants in general face this problem in the United States. The case of Casspi interests me greatly as a b-ball blogger because he is the first Israeli-born player, to my knowledge, to play in the Association. I credit Casspi for not advancing the chauvinistic and inaccurate claim that hummus is "Israeli food".

Transitive Gaijin

Strange stuff over at NBA.com's annual survey of general managers.

58.6 percent of GMs believe that Tim Duncan is the best power forward in the league. 10.3% (about 3 respondents out of 29?) favor Dirk Nowitzki, and Pau Gasol earns honorable mention.

Meanwhile, 64.3 percent of GMs believe that Dirk Nowitzki is the best international player in the Association, with Gasol second at 10.7% (3 votes out of 28) and Duncan last with 7.1% (2 votes).

How can GMs rank Duncan > Nowitzki > Gasol in one setting, and Nowitzki > Gasol > Duncan in another? It is possible that ballots were completely open: rather than providing a list of candidates, the survey makers asked GMs to fill in their own answers. If so, it suggests that few people think of Tim Duncan as an "international" player. And rightly so, for this purpose: while there is certainly a centuries-old local culture in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the territories are sufficiently Americanized that b-ball development is not much different from its mainland form. Another possibility is that the ballot did provide explicit choices, but Duncan seems to stand out in respondents' minds as more quintessentially power-forward-ish, yet not so fundamentally foreign-ish. Thus, the reversal in the preference ordering may reflect how intensely the respondents associate Duncan with those respective properties.

What I'd like to know is: what's up with Dirk's new haircut?

Tears in Heaven

Of the Spurs, Lakers, Cavaliers, Celtics, and Magic, at least one team will suffer a serious injury to one of its best players this year. At least, the probability of that statement, based on past experience, is somewhere above 90%. (I will gladly take bets on that statement from my co-bloggers.) This year's champion will be "tainted" in some way due to poor competition.

But is this not always true? The 2009 Lakers were pushed to seven games by a Yao-less and un-Mac'ed Houston team; what could the Rockets have done with those guys? L.A. also was lucky that their Finals foe, Orlando, featured a point guard who hadn't played since mid-winter with a shoulder problem. In the East, Boston also was deathly without Garnett, compared to their former vigor. In 2008, the Lakers were lucky that their conference final foes had a hobbled Ginobili. In 2007, the Spurs possibly beat Phoenix due to Steve Nash's bloody nose. In 2006, Miami defeated a Mavericks team that had just ousted Phoenix sans Stoudemire. In 2005, Shaq and Wade suffered thigh and rib injuries, respectively, in the Pistons series, clearing the way for San Antonio to take the trophy after the Spurs had nailed a Joe Johnson-less Suns team. 2004— Detroit was lucky to beat New Jersey with their star guard, Jason Kidd, needing looming microfracture knee surgery. Karl Malone, too, rendered the Lakers punchless with his pallid play in the Finals due to a torn knee ligament. 2003— Dirk Nowitzki's knee injury allowed the Spurs to slip into the NBA Finals. (Not to mention Chris Webber's knee injury against Dallas in the second round.) In 2002, injuries to Peja Stojakovic helped the Lakers slip past Sac. 2001 saw Allen Iverson crack his ribs in the deciding game against L.A. In 2000, the Lakers breezed through the Western playoffs when Tim Duncan bowed out. The Spurs of '99, featuring Robinson and Duncan at their greatest powers, faced a Knicks team missing its Hall of Fame center. Heck, the 1988 Lakers beat Detroit after Isiah Thomas injured his ankle, and the '89 Pistons returned the favor when both Magic and B-Scott tore their hamstrings.

One could argue, of course, that avoiding injury is part of the competition. Still, this season will be just as marred, and I'm already sad.

Nothing Could Be Finer

I would like to fully associate myself with the opinions of Adrian Wojnarowski regarding Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame speech. I've heard some awkward wedding speeches ... heck, I've even made some awkward wedding speeches ... but unlike nuptial toasts, Jordan had many months to prepare this one. Rather than sounding inspirational or grateful, all he thought to do is prod and provoke anyone who may have slighted him in the past 30 years.

It may be that Jordan's talent is singular (in which case inspiration would be a mere fiction) and his doings were entirely from his own assiduity (in which case no one deserves thanks). Still, a few white lies for the occasion would harm no one, and leave several folks feeling glowy. Jordan blew it. (But again, look at our URL; we're on to this guy.)

Don't Wanna See No Blood

I am keen to convince the world that this is not an Orlando Magic blog, so let us today look at a different part of Florida. Dwyane Wade told the Associated Press today that he will re-sign with Miami next summer only if his team is poised to be a championship contender. As the article notes, the roster boasts little after Wade; 2008-09 rookies Chalmers and Beasley might make big strides in the coming season, but perhaps not. Jermaine O'Neal will be a free agent next summer, and is old and slow anyway. The glut of unrestricted free agents next summer will create an intensely complicated negotiating environment. Dwyane Wade would stay with Miami if his team could sign a good free agent from the pool of James/Bosh/Stoudemire/Nowitzki/J.Johnson/McGrady/Nash, but he would sign elsewhere (possibly with the existing team of one of those aforementioned guys) if Miami management cannot lure another star. Each of those other seven guys probably has precisely the same viewpoint as Wade.

Thus, each player's decision will hinge on what the other players in that pool do; and each team's strategy will be a frenzied effort to strike first before the competition strikes you. The general manager of, say, Dallas might promise Dwyane Wade that Wade can win championships playing with Dirk Nowitzki -- but meanwhile, Dirk Nowitzki might be negotiating to sign with the Bulls. Chris Bosh might explore signing with Cleveland to play alongside LeBron, but Bosh would be dismayed if LeBron were simultaneously talking turkey with New York. This dynamic lends itself to collusion and "side deals" whereby two players informally agree to form an alliance and collectively choose one team to play on. However, as we saw in the summer of 2008 with Baron Davis and Elton Brand, those alliances are often not credible; a player might defect from such a deal for economic or more mercurial reasons. The non-public and non-legal nature of such an agreement makes it easier to breach.

We could add to this analysis that teams who currently hold the rights to James, Wade, Bosh, etc. have an ability to trade such a player in the next 12 months if such team believes that the player will leave as a free agent. However, this is probably a bad strategy; there are very few players who give you a chance to win championships, and a team should do everything possible to retain such a player, even at the risk of a catastrophic outcome (losing the player for nothing). Other than the 2004 Detroit Pistons, every NBA champion boasts at least one Hall of Famer, and usually two. Consider the Minnesota Timberwolves, who traded Kevin Garnett for Al Jefferson and some low-value draft picks; two years later, they have virtually no hope of making the playoffs in the coming season, and probably not the season after that.

There is probably a more rigorous game-theoretic model to describe and analyze the scenario outlined above. I would appreciate any additional thoughts in the comments.

Hangin' Out The Passenger Side

Orlando has already lost 50% of their ten-man Finals rotation: Battie, Alston, Lee, Turkoglu and Gortat will all be playing elsewhere next year. That leaves just Howard, Lewis, Nelson, Redick, and Pietrus (plus Anthony Johnson, who saw no floor time in the Finals). Other than the 2006 Miami Heat, I can't think of any past champions that radically switched their supporting cast in the previous summer. Now, Vince Carter and Ryan Anderson are fine additions, but that's still only eight players under contract, who comprise salaries of about $66 MM. The league minimum of players is 13. While there are plenty of bench-level free agents to be had, I wonder how many of them can be contributors to a championship team. Robert Swift? Brian Skinner?
.............................
UPDATE July 20th: I was wrong. I wish to amend my above post. Orlando re-signed Gortat, surprisingly. The loss of Alston is really not a dear blow, given that Orlando also has Tyronn Lue and Johnson on the bench to play PG. Orlando has also signed Brandon Bass and Matt Barnes as free agents. Both Bass and Barnes are good perimeter shooters, which fits with the team's current strategic model. This was actually a very good summer for Orlando, at least on paper. The loss of Turkoglu will hurt, but adding Vince Carter is spectacular.

Those Magic Changes

As the ’00s (the “oughts”, right?) near their end, I anticipate a host of popular journalism reviewing the best of the decade in a variety of fields: business, music, film, politics. Sadly, these were not ten great years for innovation or domination. The Big Three car companies in the U.S. gave us nothing good, and now face bankruptcy. Microsoft still can’t make a satisfying version of Windows. Besides teeny boppers and Idol champs, have any great musical heroes or new genres of songsters emerged? Hip-hop lost its roots as a genre fueled by exhorting prophets, and now, apparently, seems merely a marketing tool for the hard liquor industry. Besides Barack Obama and Junichiro Koizumi, there were no political leaders who inspired us or threw fresh ideas into the pot. Arnold Schwarzenegger has run his state into fiscal hell. (Unfortunately for California, the federal bankruptcy code only covers towns, not states.) In the prior decade, we had Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Mike Harris, Newt Gingrich, Mohammed Khatami, Boris Yeltsin, and even the Texas-era George W. Bush, who introduced useful reforms on school accountability.

Basketball is no more or less susceptible to whitewater rapids trips down the chasm of greatness. The ’80s gave us Bird, Johnson, McHale, Thomas, Worthy, Wilkins, Drexler, Barkley, Jordan, Olajuwon, Stockton, Malone, Ewing, Dumars, Pippen, Robinson. [I am fudging a bit on Bird and Magic, given that they debuted in the fall of ’79.] The Nineties, though… well, can you name five Hall of Fame-level players drafted in that decade? O’Neal, Garnett, Bryant, Duncan for sure. Maybe Payton, Kidd, Nash, Allen, Iverson, Billups, Pierce, or Nowitzki, but maybe not. Bonfires of raw ridiculousness like Webber, Mourning, McGrady, Hardaway, and Hill saw their careers curtailed by injury.

(Compare this to the babies of the Oughts, full of probable all-timers: Gasol, Yao, Ginobili, James, Wade, Anthony, Howard, Paul, Roy, Durant, Rose. Others like Parker, Arenas, Stoudemire, Bosh, D.Williams, and even Blake Griffin might get there if they raise their game in coming years.)

As a result of the dearth of quality talent among Nineties-vintage stars,this past decade was simply not an exciting time for pro basketball. Shaquille O’Neal and Tim Duncan won eight championships in the nine seasons after Michael Jordan left the Bulls, and their Finals foes were never very intimidating.

Instinctually, it seems that the team of the decade was the San Antonio Spurs, the only team to win 50 games in each of all ten seasons. Three of those ended with a title. The Spurs actually presaged their dominance in the abbreviated 1998-99 season, as Duncan and Robinson obliterated their competition on their way to a championship.

The Shaq-&-Kobe-powered Lakers reached 50 wins in each of the first five years of the decade, and then Bryant plus Gasol and Odom did it again in 2007-08 and 2008-09. They also made the playoffs in ’06 and ’07, as Bryant led a team of laggards including Kwame Brown and Smush Parker to the first round. The Lakers reached (and won) six conference finals, and won four of the six NBA Finals they played in. Had Shaquille O’Neal not left the team in 2004, the Lakers probably would have amassed five or six total championships.

Various Western teams threatened the dominance of L.A. and San Antonio. Phoenix reached 50 wins with Jason Kidd in ’00 and ’01, then had four hot years in the middle of the decade with Steve Nash, but never reached the NBA Finals, due to untimely injuries, bad luck, and general nincompoop-ism. Sacramento won 50 games in each season from 2000-01 to 2004-05, but quickly fell off a cliff after trading Chris Webber and discarding the rest of their core. Utah won 50 games with the fading Stockton-Malone system in ’00 and ’01, and more recently won 50 in each of the last three seasons with Boozer, Williams, and Kirilenko. However, the Lakers and Spurs easily repelled Utah in the postseason following each of those latter campaigns. Houston won 50 games with their Yao-McGrady teams in each of ’05, ’07, ’08, and ’09, but could not go far in the playoffs, usually because Yao or McGrady or both were injured.

Actually, the second team that maintained greatness throughout the decade (besides the Spurs) was not LAL, but DAL. This past April, Dallas reached 50 victories for, incredibly, the ninth consecutive season. In those nine seasons, they made the playoffs nine times, reached two conference finals, reached one NBA Finals, and rocked to the best record in the league in ’07. For critics who call Dirk Nowitzki soft, that is an amazing record of achievement.

In the East, there’s not much greatness to be found. Orlando was okay with Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady, then good-to-great with Dwight Howard. New Jersey somehow won two conference titles with only 52 and 49 wins, then hovered in the forty-something win range during four more years until Jason Kidd left. Boston was, frankly, quite sucky with Paul Pierce (averaging only 37.8 wins in the eight seasons before Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen moved there), then had two great years.

Two teams really stand out as attaining some level of sustained excellence in this decade: first, and most obviously, Detroit attained 50 wins for seven consecutive years from 2001-02 to 2007-08. Detroit made the playoffs in every year of this decade but 2000-01 (a Grant Hill-led team squeaked into the playoffs in ’00 with a 42-40 record). The Pistons made two NBA Finals and won one, losing Game 7 in their effort to repeat. That’s really quite stunning for a team lacking a super-duper star. What’s more, they accomplished this under three different coaches!

Second, the Miami Heat had a desultory series of moments, reaching the playoffs with very different looks: first, the Mourning-Hardaway-Brown-Mashburn squad that achieved so much success in the late ‘90s; then a brand-new team of Bruce Bowen, Brian Grant, Eddie Jones, and Anthony Mason plugged in around Hardaway; then the jolly rogues of Dwyane Wade, Caron Butler, Lamar Odom, Udonis Haslem, Grant and Jones; then the golden aspirants of Wade, Haslem, Jones, Shaquille O’Neal, and Mourning; then the previous quintet minus Jones and with Gary Payton, Antoine Walker, Jason Williams, and James Posey; and finally, in 2009, a stripped-down bunch with Wade, Haslem, and a buttload of rookies. Ultimately, Miami reached the playoffs in seven of ten seasons, and secured a championship at its highest point.

Anyway, raw data showing the win totals for every NBA team in every season of this decade (1999-2000 through 2008-2009) can be viewed at this Google Docs spreadsheet. Any errors are mine; I constructed the spreadsheet by hand from data on basketball-reference.com.

What numerical conclusions can we draw? The teams with the greatest variance in performance were Sacramento, Cleveland, Miami, and Minnesota, which had some spectacular seasons (with Webber, James, Wade, and Garnett, respectively) and some horrendous seasons without them. Memphis’s variance is slightly below that, which surprises me, given that the Grizz had seven 20-win seasons and three playoff seasons. I would have expected them to have, numerically, the greatest win variance of any team.

The most consistent teams in terms of variance are the Spurs (consistently great), the Bobcats (consistently putrid), then Philadelphia (always mediocre), Dallas (consistently great), and Milwaukee (also always mediocre, making the 2001 Eastern Conference Finals the blandest big-time playoff series ever).

The most successful teams over the decade are the Spurs (57.6 wins on average), the Mavs (54.8 wins), the Lakers (53.0), the Pistons (49.7), and the Suns (49.1). No other team comes particularly close to the Suns’ mark. The worst teams are the Bobcats (natch) with 28.8 wins, Atlanta, Memphis, the Clippers, and Chicago. How embarrassing for the Bulls: after dominating the ‘90s, they were in the league’s bottom five the following decade. Even top-five draft picks in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 (not to mention the 7th pick in 2003) could not vault them to one single fifty-win season.

It is easy to predict the best teams of the coming decade. Miami with Dwyane Wade, Orlando with Dwight Howard, Portland with Brandon Roy, and Chicago with Derrick Rose will be awesome. Chris Paul, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant will be on that list, but we must first wait to learn whether they will stay with their current small-market teams. The L.A. Lakers will likely do very well in the first part of the decade, but may suffer some privations when Kobe Bryant eventually quits. Boston has one or two strong seasons left, but will then crumble to dust when its aging stars leave or retire. Same for the Spurs; like Rajon Rondo, Tony Parker is no Isiah.

Check jordanpushedoff.com in June of 2019 for an evaluation of these predictions!

Gog and Magog

The potential clinching game of the NBA Finals is tonight. Yet why is this the headline on ESPN's NBA homepage? Weren't these guys finished weeks or months ago? Note that to find content about the Magic and Lakers, one needs to click the link just below "The Taking of Pelham 123". Funny enough, that movie was originally released in 1974, shortly after Shaquille O'Neal's birth.

So long, Magic Dynasty

Magic fans will likely be hurting from Thursday night's collapse for years. For the Magic, there is no "wait til next year" because their best scorer, Hedo Turkoglu, will be wearing another team's colors come next season.

Turkoglu has a player option for the 2009-10 season for $7.36 million, but recent reports indicate that he will opt out of his contract. And let's be honest: he'd have to be crazy not to do so. Turk has shown his mettle these playoffs, solidifying his place in the game as one of the game's best clutch shooters. The playoffs have also given Turkoglu to showcase his other talents -- his ability to get off his own shot from anywhere on the court; his ball handling skills (the Magic's offense flows through him on most of the Magic's half-court sets); and even his hitherto unknown defensive talents (that block on Kobe in Game 2 will have Kobe seething for months). Make no mistake: This is Superman's team, but when the Magic need to score, the ball will be in Turkoglu's hands.

The Magic just can't afford to re-sign Turkoglu at market price. The Magic's GM, Otis Smith, assured this two years ago when they inked Rashard Lewis to a 6-year $113 million max contract. I'm sure that it's not lost on Turkoglu (or on Dwight Howard) that one-dimensional, inconsistent Rashard Lewis makes significantly more than anyone on the team. But egos aside, with Dwight Howard on the books for $15.1 million next season and Lewis set to make $18 million next season, the Magic don't have space for a third player making near-max money. (Magic management have already indicated that they are loath to pay the luxury tax. )

Look for Turkoglu in a Raptors uniform next season. In addition to GM Bryan Colangelo's European fetish, the Raptors are badly in need of someone who can create his own shot and someone who can handle the ball. Turkoglu does both.

Still Just A Rat In A Cage

This is hardly an Orlando Magic blog – far from it. I revealed long ago that my sympathies belong with the Pistons (and my somnolent co-bloggers are fans of the Celtics and Raptors). But the Magic’s presence in these Finals has provided a stready stream of megajoules to my blogging circuitry. There is just so much to say about them.

I have to admit that I love this VitaminWater commercial featuring Dwight Howard.



The production costs for this 30-second spot were likely far below the cost to animate the “Most Valuable Puppets” or to shoot Chuck and Dwyane “eating the head!” in a Chinese restaurant. The producers simply sat Howard down, gave him a couple changes of clothes, and asked him to recite a few goofy lines. (Here is a video of the outtakes from filming, which suggests to me that there wasn’t much of a script.) Total filming time, including lighting and set design, was probably no more than a couple hours.

The music also adds much to this spot, adding a purpose and nobility to the absurd content of his ravings. I like how the strings slowly build to a crescendo, upon which we learn that Dwight “definitely gets his vitamins.”

As a postscript, what’s up with the use of “Glaceau” as the parent brand of VitaminWater? This is a Coca-Cola product, as are Dasani, Sprite, Schweppes, Thums Up, Nestea, Odwalla, Minute Maid, Powerade, A&W, Fanta, Fresca, Dr Pepper, Canada Dry... Incidentally, the inattention of federal regulators to antitrust/competition law during the entire Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era gave us monstrous creatures like Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Time Warner-Turner, Citicorp-Travellers, Pfizer-Wyeth, and Pepsi-Quaker Oats. In the beverage space, Coca-Cola seems to control every non-alcoholic drink known to man. This cannot be wise.

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Men Have Named You

Q: What do Hedo Turkoglu, Rafer Alston, Dwight Howard, Mickael Pietrus, Tony Battie, and J.J. Redick have in common? (in contradistinction to their teammates Nelson, Lewis, Lee, and Gortat?) Answer below.

A: None of them has a tattoo!

Straight, No Chaser

Towards the end of overtime in last night's Game 2 of the NBA Finals, the Lakers took the ball with about 27 seconds left and a 3-point lead. ABC's Jeff Van Gundy (or was it Mark Jackson?) argued that Orlando should foul immediately. I thought this was bad advice. If you foul an 80% free-throw shooter, then there's a 64% chance that he'll make both shots and you'll be down by 5 points, and a 32% chance that he'll make only 1 shot and you'll be down by 4 points. There's only a 4% chance that he'll miss both shots and you'll have a chance to tie the game! My advice would be to try for a defensive stop and get the ball back. Granted, as Van Gundy observed, if the Lakers simply held the ball for 24 seconds, they would leave Orlando with only 3 seconds remaining to put a shot together. But they probably would not do that; rather, they would try for a score to augment their lead. This gives Orlando opportunity to either get a steal or a stop well before 24 seconds elapsed. It might not work, but the probability of success would probably be over 4 percent.

In the event, Orlando adopted perhaps a compromise strategy between my advice and Van Gundy's: they trapped the Lakers on the inbound pass (which was in the backcourt) and tried to effect either a steal or an 8-second violation. When this failed and the Lakers successfully advanced the ball across the half-court line, Orlando immediately fouled with 22 seconds left. They smartly chose to foul Lamar Odom, who is only a 62.3% free throw shooter (thus, a 14% chance that he would miss both, but an 86% chance that he would make at least one shot and make it a two-possession game). In the event, Odom made two free throws, Redick and Lewis missed three-pointers, and the ballgame ended as Jack Nicholson rose to congratulate the Magic's stars. A Coach Bhel would have handled things differently.

One Long Sleepless Night

What I find most amazing about Orlando’s success is that it comes despite a series of terrible decisions by the general manager, Otis Smith. Firstly, he tried to hire University of Florida basketball coach Billy Donovan as his new coach in 2007, before Donovan changed his mind five days after signing his contract. If you have an MVP-caliber player on your roster, your next coaching hire should represent an affirmative answer to the question, “Could I imagine this coach leading us to victory in the NBA Finals?” While Donovan won two championships as a college coach, the list of college coaches with NO pro experience who have succeeded in the big leagues is nil, to the best of my knowledge. Smith was rescued from his enormous blunder when Donovan took a hike and Stan Van Gundy agreed to coach Orlando. Van Gundy had already proved he could manage a team of raging adults when he took a young Butler-Odom-Wade-Jones-Haslem-Grant team to the second round of the playoffs in 2004 and took a team of Shaquille O’Neal plus Wade, Jones, and Haslem to a couple smiles of fortune away from the NBA Finals against the Pistons the next year. All parties are better off with the eventual coaching allocation.


Orlando, under previous general manager John Weisbrod, had a great summer in 2004, hauling two good draft picks in Nelson and Howard, and signing Hedo Turkoglu as a free agent. When Smith took over in June 2005, though, the general tenor of team management turned awful (or offal?). Orlando’s 2005 draft pick, Spanish center Fran Vázquez, refused to leave Europe despite earlier americophilic statements, and 2006’s draft pick, college yeoman J.J. Redick, proved to be a small and jittery shooter in the pros. In place of Vazquez, Orlando could have taken Danny Granger, Nate Robinson, Jason Maxiell, Linas Kleiza, David Lee, Monta Ellis … or if a center Smith coveted, Andray Blatche and Ronny Turiaf were available. In Redick’s stead, Orlando could have chosen athletic off-guards like Ronnie Brewer or Thabo Sefolosha. A host of point guards, including guys now manning contenders including Rajon Rondo, Jordan Farmar, Shannon Brown, and Kyle Lowry, were available in '06 as well; it would have been nice to have a feisty backup when Jameer Nelson was injured in February 2009.

Smith had a fine 2007, picking up Rashard Lewis and Marcin Gortat as free agents. However, he blundered quite a bit in trading Trevor Ariza, a skilled wing defender, to the Lakers for Brian Cook and Maurice Evans, neither of whom provide any of the oomph that T.A. does. To be sure, Ariza never showed any aptitude for three-point shooting or steals in the early part of his career, and he has burnished those skills in Los Angeles through extensive and patient practice. Still, Ariza was too athletic to discard so quickly. The 2008-09 period also worked out well for Smith, as described here: he drafted Courtney Lee and signed Mickael Pietrus and Anthony Johnson; later, he acquired Rafer Alston by trade when Nelson injured his shoulder.

I think this story illustrates that blunders in roster management are easily fixable. If Ariza were still on the roster, Smith would not have had reason or financial room to sign Pietrus; if a young PG like Farmar were understudying Nelson when the latter got injured, Farmar would have been thrust into the starting role, which frankly would not have got them to the Finals. (And acquiring Brian Cook later helped Smith acquire Alston.) It would have been nice if Fran Vazquez decided to play Stateside, but Marcin Gortat ably fills his role. But, but! — not all general managers are able to cleanse their errors. Whether out of misguided loyalty, unreasonable optimism, or a refusal to recognize one’s own poor judgment, many GMs choose to stick with their bad moves for far longer than is justified.