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?
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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.

Kobe's Shameless Self-Promotion

This was Kobe's comment after yesterday's Lakers win:

"I rank this right up there with some of the biggest road wins we've had since I've been a Laker. Because in the past, we always had guys that had a lot of experience. Robert Horry, Rick Fox, Ron Harper, they've all been through this before. For our guys, this is brand new."

To me, this comment reveals that Kobe is very much aware that he is badly losing "the best baller in the world" debate to LeBron James. Part of the rationale for the emerging consensus on Lebron's supriority is that LeBron's and Kobe's teams have similar records but Kobe is doing it with another superstar (Pau Gasol), a borderline all-star (Lamar Odom), a future all-star (Andrew Bynum) and a strong bench, whereas LeBron is doing it with guys who have no business being on a championship contender.

By contrasting his current team with the Lakers' past teams, Kobe is trying to make his current roster look weaker than it is. If one accepts Kobe's premise that his supporting cast isn't that great because they have less experience than some of his past teams, then the inexorable conclusion is that Kobe must be doing something pretty special to have them winning so many playoff games. But alas, Kobe, we see right through you: Your supporting cast is the envy of the entire NBA, so please don't undervalue their skills.

The Lovers, The Dreamers, and Me

If you find yourself asking “Is that guy white or black?” (see: Shane Battier, Blake Griffin, Jason Kidd, Delonte West, Aaron Williams, Deron Williams, Mike Bibby, Jordan Farmar), the answer is almost always “he’s half and half.” Why is this complicated or surprising? Hey, it's 2009. Yet I hear this question all the time on internet discussions and, especially, in casual conversation from some close to me. Apparently "part this, part that" is not a psychologically salient category for many people: every human object of inquiry must be deemed one or the other. Of course, even Americans who phenotypically appear undeniably of either European or African descent probably have a little bit of ancestry from the other group.

(Being half one thing and half another, I hope I, Bhel, am insulated from charges that I am an obsessive racialist by dint of making these observations.)

Oompa Loompa, Doompadee Doo

ESPN’s television broadcast the morning of the final Bulls-Celtics game listed the results of a website poll whereby web readers could pick from among four predictions for the game: Bulls in regulation, Bulls in overtime, Celtics in regulation, Celtics in overtime. I don’t recall the precise numbers, and the poll does not seem to be available any longer online, but something like 30% of respondents predicted the Bulls to win in OT and 21% predicted the Celtics in OT. So more than half of poll-takers thought Game 7 would go to overtime! (In the event, Boston won 109-99, in regulation time.)

Now, the raw proportion of all NBA games across the land, across years that go to OT is probably no more than 5%. To the extent you know that two teams are evenly matched (and Chicago and Boston minus Garnett certainly are), you are probably on relatively safer ground to predict that the game will go to overtime. But I would think that for these even-steven Bulls and Celtics, the most prudently correct answer to the question “Will the next game go to overtime?” is surely “No”. So over half of poll-takers got it wrong, no?


At first glance, this looks to me like an example of the representativeness bias, whereby, e.g., if you ask a poll respondent, “Who would you more likely find in a library: (i) a woman, or (ii) a middle-aged woman environmentalist with glasses?” many respondents will choose the latter because it sounds more quintessentially library-esque. But, of course, back in the real world, maybe 55% of library patrons are women, while about 3% are middle-aged bespectacled tree-huggettes. People don’t handle probabilities well. An overtime game between the Bulls and Celtics feels more emblematic of that series, so people feel, however wrongly, that it will recur.

Perhaps my point is weakened because 4 of the first 6 Bulls-Celtics games actually did in fact go to OT, so out of that sample, it’s actually safe to predict extra minutes. But sometimes crazy shit goes down, just by fluke. It’s hard to believe that I should update my probabilistic expectation of overtime from 5% to 50%. What do the numbers say? Consider the following Bayesian probability formula:

Such an updating would require that the proportion of Bulls-Celtics games out of all the overtime games played in 2008-09 is roughly ten times the proportion of Bulls-Celtics games out of all the NBA games played this season. So let’s consider some data. (I obtained all these numbers from the wonderful basketball-reference.com.) In 2008-09, there were 1230 regular-season games and 45 first-round playoff games, for a total of 1275 games, of which 70 regular-season and 4 playoff, or 5.804%, were overtime games. Out of all those 1275 games, the Bulls and Celtics played 3 regular-season games and 7 playoff games, for a total of 10 games, which was 0.784% of the 1275 games. Out of the 74 overtime games, 4, or 5.405%, were Bulls-Celtics games. So, the answer to my equational riddle up above is 5.405% * 5.804% / 0.784%, which equals 40.0%. Hmmm, maybe I was too quick to criticize the masses. 40% is pretty close to 50%, so predicting an overtime game based on the available data is not such a stretch. What if we make the analysis more precise by truncating the data set just prior to May 2nd, the date of Bulls-Celts game 7? This would put us in the position of a Bayesian observer filling out that ESPN poll just after game 6. This only deletes two games from our data set — Bulls-Celts game 7 and Heat-Hawks game 7. Now the correct Bayesian probability of overtime is 44.4% ! Wow! My initial supercilious dismissal of the silly plebes was way off. It seems that ESPN web users internalized the available observations quite well. 44.4% is still not high enough to predict that Game 7 will go to OT, but it's dang close.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta-Miami series also seems to be indicative that the teams are evenly matched, but in a wildly different way. If Atlanta had won three games by huge margins and Miami had won three squeakers, then we might say that Atlanta is a better team and Miami has been touched by kind luck. But actually, the first six games were all settled by double-figure margins, and no game saw a lead change after the first quarter. We might say that the two teams are mediocre at best, and equally likely to suffer horrible mental holidays.

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UPDATE JUNE 17TH: I just became aware of this June 10th blog post from Northwestern University professor of economics Jeff Ely. Check out the two Youtube animated graphs, showing the how the distribution of score differentials changes in the last 60 seconds of an NBA game, averaged over 12 years of data. Absolutely amazing stuff. The basic gist is that tie outcomes after 48 minutes are far, far more likely than 1-point victories or 2-point victories. You should also read the comments, which provide some speculative explanations for that data. I don't think this new information contradicts anything in my original post above.

Into The Woods

Well, one of the Western Conference semifinal matchups is set, as both Houston and Los Angeles have finished off their foes. I lament Houston's lack of full strength. Los Angeles is hideously talented and athletic with Bynum, Odom, Ariza, Bryant, Gasol, and even quiet sojourners like Shannon Brown. Houston is very good, but consider that they have a four-time Defensive Player of the Year and a two-time NBA scoring champion sitting injured on their bench. Who will make key scores in crunch time for Houston? Who will contain the Lakers' tree trunks in the paint? Yao Ming is too stiff to effectively play Gasol and Bynum one-on-one without fouling his way to early departure. A contest between the strong and true Rockets and the extant Lakers would be awesome. As things stand, I predict the Lakers in five.

Thy Tears Are Womanish

Back in the last month of 2008, we gaped aghast when TNT’s Inside the NBA spent the whole evening ragging on Kenny Smith after he commented approvingly on Terrell Owens’s buff body. It was amusing once, but for several hours? Ernie Johnson, who really should police juvenile hijinks on his show, was actually quite glad to toss in purportedly hilarious gibes of his own.

Last night’s (April 22nd) edition of Inside the NBA moved from subjugated fear of man-love to an hour’s worth of penis worship. Charles Barkley began the show by relating an anecdote about a job he held as a teenager, hammering tar off of pipes on hot summer days down in Alabama. Kenny giggled and labelled Barkley a “pipe beater”, and for the next sixty minutes, Ernie and Kenny used every opportunity to utter a ‘pipe’-related phrase, including “Pipe down”, “piping hot”, “down the pipe”, and “pipe dream”. Smith also subtly hinted at old wives’ tales about masturbation, including blindness and hairy hands. Seriously, I’m not joking; watch the video!

How much homophobia / homoeroticism is acceptable on this show? At this rate, will Johnson, Smith, and Barkley be comparing the size and aromatic quality of their excrement next week?

How Do You Sleep?

Who voted Robin Lopez second on his or her Rookie of the Year ballot? My strong hunch is that the voter meant Brook Lopez, but had a cerebral malfunction. That's almost as bad as the elderly Jewish voters in Florida who meant to vote for Gore but somehow marked their ballots for noted philo-semite Pat Buchanan.

Hasenfeffer Incorporated

Well, congratulations to Cavs coach Mike Brown for winning Coach of the Year. But does this look like an NBA championship squad? From left, we have a Simpsons character, the hero of an after-school special, a Phil Collins lover, LeBron James, a would-be rapper, a leprechaun, and a 1980s-era pro wrestling villain. I'm just saying.

Kept In A Jar By The Door

Back in November, we bellyached about an advertisement near our home in Chicago wherein an image of Carmelo Anthony commanded us to drink a blue sports beverage. Why would Anthony consent to the use of his likeness without any charisma-enhancing performative oomph? Even more disturbing is a latter-day series of TV ads where a still photo of Chris Paul, twinned with an obviously not-Paul voice, endorses Right Guard deodorant.

We couldn’t find on Youtube the ad where a hopelessly smitten Chris Paul fan smothers his armpits into his buddy’s face. Right Guard’s website features a sadly static interactive exhibit where web visitors can learn a few factoids about Chris Paul, including his avid bowling habit. Isn’t that why Wikipedia was invented? In any case, the common feature of all of these advertising efforts is the absence of any active participation from Chris Paul himself (in addition to the rather odious presentation of Chris Paul's ’pits as something worth aspiring to). The association of a star athlete with, say, property insurance or underwear is always tenuous; the endorsement is a bit more convincing if the athlete feels like showing up for half a day of filming. (In the case of Dwyane Wade and his German mobile phone masters, how did he find the time to film all those spots with Barkley? Presumably they filmed them all at once last summer, but that must have taken at least three days with all the costume and scenery changes. That’s actually rather impressive for a guy defending against a bitter divorce and playing for Olympic gold.)

Anyway, Chris Paul needs a better agent.

In Which I Buck Your Wisdom

Other writers will preview the 2009 NBA Playoffs with greater care, but I wish to note the great burden that many of this year’s postseason teams surely feel: “Oh no, not this again.” Carmelo Anthony and his Nuggets have appeared in the playoffs in each of the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 seasons — and lost in the first round each year. The same goes for Yao Ming’s Rockets, although they missed the 2006 playoffs due to myriad injuries. Dallas lost in the first round in three of those years (2004, ’07, ’08). Chicago lost in the first round in ’05 and ’06, before winning one series in ’07 and crashing into the lottery in ’08.

These vernal weeks are filled with teams that surely wish to prove they belong with serious squads and did not merely “fake” their way to 50 wins. Some teams finally find the right mix for a deep playoff run after several years of futility, as the Minnesota Timberwolves finally did in ’04. But, like the Raptors of 2000-2001-2002 or the Grizzlies of 2004-2005-2006, some teams realize that their core stars are just not championship-caliber, and they feel compelled to churn their roster and start over.

Of Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Chicago, I believe that the Mavericks have the greatest chance of making the conference finals or the NBA Finals. Needless to say, Chicago will probably lose in the first round against Boston, even if Kevin Garnett cannot play. Houston and its hard-working center, sadly, will probably lose again, playing Portland on the road and without a top-level point guard. Even if Houston got past the Blazers, the Lakers would likely eat them up; Houston lacks the size to defend Gasol, Bynum, and Odom. Meanwhile, I don’t have a lot of confidence in Denver. They did secure the second seed in the Western Conference, but they actually had as many wins as the third and fourth seed, and only six more than the eighth seed. Their putative leader, Carmelo Anthony, has never shown the defensive leadership or offensive explosiveness required for playoff laurels. And do you really trust Chris Andersen, Kenyon Martin, and JR Smith to keep their heads cool for six weeks of piercing intensity? That leaves Dallas, which fields a former MVP, a former MVP runner-up, and seven guys with NBA Finals experience (eight if you count their coach). The Mavs won nine of their last thirteen games, capped by a rollicking come-from-behind victory against Houston on the season’s denoument. I like the Dallas Mavericks to defeat the Spurs in the first round and the Denver-New Orleans winner in the second round. Of course, I still think the Lakers will beat Cleveland in the Finals, like every other pundit.

Worst NBA Snub Ever

Christian Laettner instead of Isiah Thomas on the 1992 Dream Team.
Seriously, what the hell was that about?!

Ain't Never Caught A Rabbit

I’ve noticed lately that for the first time in a while, the best offensive players are also the best defensive players. Most of the current fad of selections for Defensive Player of the Year or All-NBA Defensive Team include some combination of Bryant, James, Howard, Wade, or Paul, who are also the top five contenders for MVP on most analysts’ ballots. Paul leads the league in steals, and Wade is second in steals and ranks 16th in blocks, amazingly enough. Howard leads the league in rebounds and blocks, and Bryant and James have become on-the-ball bad-asses.

The correlation between defensive and offensive dominance seems to flow in cycles in this league. In the early part of this decade, the perennial best defensive players were Bruce Bowen, Ben Wallace, Doug Christie, Andrei Kirilenko, Ron Artest, and Dikembe Mutombo, who are not known for being dominating offensive forces. (Yes, Duncan, Bryant, and Garnett also showed up with regularity on the All-Defensive Team lists, but the league’s top scorers like McGrady, Iverson, Carter, and Nowitzki were nowhere near those votes.) Back in the ‘80s, the top defensive players were Paul Pressey, Sidney Moncrief, Mark Eaton, Bobby Jones, Michael Cooper, and Dennis Johnson, who were not synonymous with the league’s top scorers like King, Wilkins, English, Dantley, Gervin. (To his credit, Larry Bird made second team All-Defense three times.) In the ‘90s, top scorers and team leaders like Michael Jordan, David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Gary Payton, Karl Malone, and Hakeem Olajuwon all routinely showed up on All-Defensive lists. On the other hand, other top scorers like Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, Mitch Ritchmond, and Clyde Drexler were not defensive standouts, but then they also were not seen as offensive juggernauts who could will a team to victory in a tight playoff series. (Remember how many times the Pacers failed in the conference finals!)

We may very well be in a Golden Age of NBA awesomeness. These playoffs should be great. LeBron vs. Dwyane in the second round? LeBron vs. Dwight in the conference finals? Bryant vs. Paul in the conference finals? All are very plausible, given the likely seedings.