The question is this: If a given NBA team had all of its players in their primes, how good would it be?
Example: Last year's Warriors were really good. But imagine how good they would have been if Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston, and David West were in their primes? But we can't just say "in their primes," because we're not lazy, so instead we'll pick years. For instance, we'd take '08 Iguodala, '16 Livingston, and '13 David West. The answer, by the way, to how good they'd be is "slightly better, but not enough to be interesting." So let's get to the interesting ones.
(N.B. By its very nature, this question is almost impossible to answer without analyzing virtually every year of every team. I'm not going to do that, so what we have instead is a number of very strong and/or interesting choices I've selected. But I definitely missed a lot of good teams, some of which might even contend.)
The Favorites:
2004 Los Angeles Lakers
PG: '96 Gary Payton, '09 Derek Fisher
SG: '03 Kobe Bryant, '07 Ime Udoka
SF: '97 Rick Fox, '02 Devean George, '00 Byron Russell
PF: '97 Karl Malone, '06 Brian Cook, '04 Stanislav Medvedenko
C: '00 Shaquille O'Neal, '92 Horace Grant
(I'm leaving off a couple guys but we have the ones we need.)
Holy shit, this team dominates. '96 Payton is the best defensive guard season ever, '03 Kobe is one of the best guard seasons ever, '97 Malone is extremely dominant, and '00 Shaq makes Malone look like a small child. Plus we have the underrated '09 Fisher, some solid forward play in George, Russell, and Cook, and then our secret weapon: Horace Grant, one of the most underrated players in NBA history. There's absolutely no one who's stopping this team on offense, and virtually no one who can score on their D. Payton and Bryant form, by far, the best defensive guard duo in NBA history, and Malone, Shaq, and Grant are all defensive presences in their own right.
The one evident weakness is at the 3, where we don't have an all-time great player to slot in. This is a little surprising, given how ridiculously strong the rest of the team is. But Fox is a very strong role player and we have tons of depth here. Kobe can slot in at 3 if need be, but there really isn't a better choice at 2. Still, Fox is solid on both sides of the ball, and it's not like there are any other holes of any kind on this roster.
And out of left field comes...
The (Extremely) Dark Horse:
2014 Brooklyn Nets
PG: '08 Deron Williams, '16 Shaun Livingston
SG: '05 Joe Johnson, '07 Jason Terry, '10 Marcus Thornton
SF: '02 Paul Pierce, '04 Andrei Kirilenko
PF: '04 Kevin Garnett, '13 Andray Blatche, '13 Reggie Evans
C: '13 Brook Lopez, '16 Mason Plumlee
Right? Where did this come from? This is a team that won, in real life, 44 games. But in our fun little exercise here, suddenly they have Williams, who was at one point (though we've collectively decided to forget it) considered juuust a step below Chris Paul; Joe Johnson, who is the poster child for being just good enough not to make the Hall of Fame (bkref has his chances at 50.6%); Jason Terry, who is one of the best sixth men ever; Paul Pierce; Garnett, who had one of the most dominant seasons of any PF ever in '04; Brook Lopez, who is a little bit of a weak point here; and Andrei Kirilenko, who was actually pretty good back then.
This team is not on par with those Lakers. They're significantly worse at 3/5 positions and only slightly better at the other two (maybe I'm being unfair to Paul Pierce, but in my defense, fuck Paul Pierce). They're here because it's interesting that such a bad team had such a ridiculous amount of non-prime talent.
The Old School:
1972 Los Angeles Lakers
PG: '66 Jerry West, '75 Jim Cleamons
SG: '72 Gail Goodrich, '70 Flynn Robinson
SF: '63 Elgin Baylor, '74 Jim McMillian, '74 Keith Erickson
PF: '74 Happy Hairston
C: '67 Wilt Chamberlain, '68 Leroy Ellis
And I mean old school. This team was already one of the greatest of all time, so all we're really doing is youthifying it a bit. We bring West back into his supposedly-athletic-but-who-can-know-for-sure prime, and we take a nice, prime, athletic Baylor season in the hopes that he can finish out the year with the team and win the ring he so richly deserved. Goodrich and Hairston were already pretty much in their primes, as was most of the bench. The keys here are West, Baylor, and Chamberlain.
We take Chamberlain from '67, which is slightly after his physical prime and not his most dominant season (that would be '62). But '67 is also the year that he became an exceptional team player (7.8 assists per game), while also retaining his scoring touch (24.1 PPG on 68.3% shooting) and rebounding (24.2 RPG). Nor was he quite the defensive presence in '67 that he was in his younger years, but he was still an elite defensive pivot and will do fine for this roster. There's also a sentimental reason here: '67 was the year that Chamberlain and the Sixers beat the dynastic Boston Celtics, the only championship Boston lost in the '60s.
So on this team we have West, one of the best guards ever in his absolute prime, a great shooter, passer, and (supposedly) defender; we have Baylor, the first of the athletic wings, a full decade before Dr. J came along and lit up the league; and we have Chamberlain, the most dominant force the NBA has ever known, with his perfect combination of utter physical dominance and elite passing skills that made him such a unique threat in NBA history. The depth on this team is also going to be really underrated, because you and I both have never heard of them but they were pretty solid, moreso than most of the other teams on this list.
The Other Lakers Team:
1999 Los Angeles Lakers
PG: '90 Derek Harper, '09 Derek Fisher
SG: '03 Kobe Bryant, '00 Eddie Jones
SF: '97 Rick Fox, '95 Glen Rice, '00 Ruben Patterson
PF: '92 Dennis Rodman, '98 Robert Horry
C: '00 Shaquille O'Neal, '96 Elden Campbell
Haha, I say "the other" Lakers team as if this is going to be the last Lakers team in this article. It probably won't. But this team is deceptively interesting. The key is Rodman. Rodman is by far the best rebounder ever and one of the best defenders ever, and him being in his prime for this Lakers team massively boosts their performance. Suddenly the Lakers have by far the best frontcourt in NBA history.
Then we shift everyone else into their primes, leaving us with an extremely strong starting roster with ridiculous depth. Fisher, Jones, Rice, Horry, and Campbell are the best bench rotation of any team listed so far, and the core of prime Bryant, Rodman, and Shaq is hands down the best trio we'll see. Then you have Harper, an excellent starting guard, and Fox, who we already talked about.
I actually think this team is a strong sleeper to win it all. They match up well with almost anyone, and their depth is positively elite. The one "weakness" they have is two non-elite starters, as opposed to the '04 Lakers' one (plus '99 doesn't have a bench player as good as Horace Grant), and maybe that's enough to change the balance of the game. Or maybe not.
The Bad Guys:
1988 Boston Celtics
PG: '81 Dennis Johnson, '84 Jerry Sichting
SG: '92 Reggie Lewis, '83 Jim Paxson, '88 Danny Ainge
SF: '86 Larry Bird, '85 Darren Daye
PF: '87 Kevin McHale, '91 Fred Roberts
C: '72 Artis Gilmore, '81 Robert Parish
If you've ever before dealt with the question posed by this blog post, or read Bill Simmons's Book of Basketball, you might be wondering why this isn't the 1986 Celtics. After all, that was a legendary team as it was, and they would get to add a better version of Bill Walton, who was an excellent center in his very brief prime. But this team is better.
The key is Gilmore, who, in his 1972 season (sixteen years before the season in question) put up one of the most dominant seasons of all time by a center not named Wilt, Kareem, or Shaq. And yes, it far outstrips Walton's best season. The other big advantage here is Reggie Lewis at SG, which means we get to have Paxson and Ainge, both of whom are very capable starter-level SGs, in our bench unit. Which is good, because besides them and Parish, the bench here is pretty shallow.
I hope, though, that I don't have to (further) explain how good this starting lineup is. Johnson is an elite defensive guard (although not on the level of Gary Payton), Reggie Lewis was very good, Bird is a legend, McHale was dominant on both ends of the ball, and Gilmore, as I just described, is one of the more underrated centers to ever play. I don't think this is the best team here, but they're probably better than you think.
The Other Dark Horse:
2009 Houston Rockets
PG: '16 Kyle Lowry, '07 Rafer Alston, '10 Aaron Brooks
SG: '03 Tracy McGrady, '02 Brent Barry, '07 Luther Head
SF: '04 Metta World Peace, '06 Shane Battier
PF: '09 Luis Scola, '10 Carl Landry, '06 Brian Cook
C: '97 Dikembe Mutombo, '04 Yao Ming, '11 Chuck Hayes
Interesting. Let's look at what we've got here. Lowry isn't elite, but he's effective at the 1. (Of course, being "effective" is far from being deserving of inclusion in this article, but he isn't that huge a weak point.) McGrady is elite, and his '03 season is one of the better ones on record. Artest is a defensive monster, probably the second-best defensive wing ever (after Scottie Pippen), and Battier is very good at the same.
I think Scola is actually a bit overrated, but the really interesting part here is the center position. Mutombo is dominant, one of the best shot-blockers of all time and an elite defensive pivot, and then you have Ming, who's 7'6 and skilled for his size. That's a devastating combination, although they probably can't occupy the floor at the same time; it's nice to have a seven-footer-and-then-some on the court at all times.
This team probably isn't as good as most of the others here, but it's very interesting. There's a lot of defensive talent here, between Artest, Battier, and Mutombo, and just as much offense, with Lowry, McGrady, and Ming. The question is, are the massive matchup problems that this roster can create enough to overcome the quite frankly large talent disparity? Honestly, I doubt it.
Showtime, Baby!:
1983 Los Angeles Lakers
PG: '90 Magic Johnson, '79 Norm Nixon, '80 Eddie Jordan
SG: '84 Michael Cooper, '81 Billy Ray Bates
SF: '90 James Worthy, '80 Jamaal Wilkes, '76 Steve Mix
PF: '75 Bob McAdoo, '89 Kurt Rambis
C: '72 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
I found the perfect year. This is Showtime, distilled into all its glory. This team is utterly and completely unstoppable. Let's take a walk. We have:
Magic Johnson, in the prime of his abilities ('90 gets underrated because the Lakers were pretty old and beat-up by that point, but Magic himself was phenomenally good still), with Norm Nixon as his excellent backup; the solid Michael Cooper, who was a lock-down defender, at SG; both of the Lakers' excellent wings in Worthy and Wilkes; and then the centers. Oh, the centers.
Kareem is God; we all know this. And '72 Kareem is one of the most unstoppable forces in NBA history. But then we have McAdoo, who was devastatingly good (and underrated) in his best season in '75. McAdoo also has the ability to slide to four, or we can play him off the bench with both Worthy and Wilkes starting. Either way, we have a lineup that A) is stacked with talent, top to bottom, and B) plays beautifully together as a team, as the Showtime Lakers played basically the best team ball we've ever seen.
Honorable Mention: The Near Miss
1997-99 Houston Rockets
PG: '95 Brent Price, '97 Matt Maloney
SG: '88 Clyde Drexler, '01 Cuttino Mobley, '00 Michael Dickerson
SF: '97 Scottie Pippen, '83 Eddie Johnson, '97 Mario Elie
PF: '90 Charles Barkley, '94 Kevin Willis, '93 Antoine Carr, '03 Othella Harrington
C: '93 Hakeem Olajuwon, '93 Stanley Roberts
(This is a mashup of two seasons, '98 and '99, but if I wrote '98-'99 it would look like I'm talking about just the '99 season.)
What could have been (in this article). In '98 the Rockets had the dynamic-postprime-trio of Hakeem, Barkley, and Drexler. The next year Drexler retired and the Rockets acquired the 33-year-old Scottie Pippen, also solidly past his prime. If only Drexler and Pippen had been on this team at the same time, we could have had a real contender!
Instead, what you end up is either a team with Hakeem/Barkley/Drexler or Hakeem/Barkley/Pippen and two pretty big weak points at the 1 and either the 2 or the 3. That's hard to overcome, even though those triads are still very strong. It's possible that one of those teams, e.g. '99 (with Pippen), could be strong enough to upset one of our other teams (like the '14 Nets), but it's much more interesting to talk about what could have been.
Honorable Mention: The Very-Nearly Unbelievably Dominant Juggernaut
1995-97 Los Angeles Lakers
PG: '90 Magic Johnson, '97 Nick Van Exel, '09 Derek Fisher, '92 Sedale Threatt
SG: '03 Kobe Bryant, '00 Eddie Jones, '88 Byron Scott
SF: '96 Cedric Ceballos, '01 George Lynch, '88 Jerome Kersey, '96 George McCloud
PF: '96 Elden Campbell, '98 Robert Horry, '98 Derek Strong, '89 Larry Krystkowiak
C: '00 Shaquille O'Neal, '95 Vlade Divac
(Again, this is a mashup of the '96 and '97 Lakers.)
Okay, so I'm not actually as sold on this team as I was when I wrote this title. The point, of course, is that we have Magic, Kobe, and Shaq holding down the starting spots, with absolutely absurd depth: Van Exel and Jones are All-Stars, Horry is Horry, and Divac is very solid at center. The problem, also of course, is that the forward spots aren't exactly strong. There's a massive disparity in talent between, on one side, the unfairly-stacked PG, SG, and C, and on the other side the solid-but-not-great SF and PF positions.
There is some hope that Magic can make the offense function. In fact I think the offense will be absolutely fine. The problem would be defense, and in matching up with some of the stacked teams here. Mostly this was about getting Magic, Kobe, and Shaq on the same team.
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
NBA Exercise: Draft Picks Adding Up To 200+
So this reddit post happened recently. The question is this: Make the best starting five you can whose draft positions add up to 200 or greater. So Magic would add 1, Darko Milicic would add 2, Kobe would add 13, etc. I saw this question, was interested in it, and knocked it out of the park. Unfortunately I got there late. So here's my answer, which I'm posting in blog form because I'm self-indulgent like that.
PG - Magic Johnson (1)
SG - Manu Ginobili (57)
SF - LeBron James (1)
PF - Dennis Rodman (27)
C - Artis Gilmore (117)
Total: 203
Okay. So most people in this thread fucked up spectacularly. There were two common mistakes. First, to take a bunch of late-first-to-second rounders and try to make the best of what is truly a pretty weak crop of players (think Isaiah Thomas at #60). This is a bad choice because basketball is predominantly about top-level talent and frankly there isn't much of that outside of the first round.
The second mistake was to assume no one good was drafted late and "punt" a position while getting the maximum value from your other players. This is fine if you punt it right (e.g. Gilmore), but if you end up with a garbage player in your starting 5, that's going to hurt.
Here's the winning strat: Recognize that value here comes from getting a few players drafted very late who are still very good. That is to say, not worthless sixth-rounders, but also not guys who are very good but drafted not-so-late (like Draymond or Isaiah, the latter of whom really isn't good enough to merit inclusion in this conversation). Gilmore is comfortably the best-value draft pick I saw -- he was taken in the seventh freaking round, and he's arguably one of the ten best centers ever. (This may not sound that impressive, but recognize that the top of that list goes, in some order, Kareem Wilt Shaq Russell Hakeem, and then guys like Ewing, Parish, Robinson, Malone, et al. vying for the last few spots.)
There's one caveat with Gilmore, and that's that he was also drafted by, and played for a number of years in, the ABA. So that 117 might potentially be influenced by the possibility that he wouldn't go to the NBA. I don't know; I can't find sources from that far back. During the NBA-ABA merger, he was actually taken 1st overall, and he went pretty early in the ABA draft (not sure exactly where). But frankly, I don't care. 117 is his official NBA draft position, listed on BBRef and his Wikipedia page. Him getting drafted 1st in the ABA dispersal draft, after playing an extraordinary 5-year career in the ABA, really doesn't matter here, nor does his ABA draft position. I get him and it counts for 117.
Next up, I tried to find a high-value player from the late second and beyond, and who should pop up but Ginobili. This guy has super high value, as probably everyone who's watched basketball in the past 15 years knows, and is pretty much the perfect teammate. He's also an elite 2-guard, and while he's not at the Kobe level, his value at 57 is super high.
Now we're in a nice position. Artis and Manu add up to 174, meaning if we can get a pick at 24 or later, we get to finish up with two first overalls. First overalls, in basketball, are extremely valuable; basically half of the all-time greats were taken #1 overall. Fortunately, there's a great choice: Dennis Rodman at 27, who puts us over already and who is arguably the most valuable player in NBA history. He's an all-time great defender and the GOAT rebounder, and he fits beautifully in with this team, as he does with almost any team.
That leaves us with the freedom to go nuts with our last two picks, so we're taking Magic and LeBron, two of the greatest players ever and easy choices at the 1 and the 3. And so we arrive at our final roster. Notice how not only do we have an absurd level of talent (Manu and Gilmore are the two worst players on this roster, and they're both comfortably Hall of Famers), but we also have a beautiful balance with respect to roles, ball-dominance, offense-vs-defense, and leadership.
Magic is going to run the offense with LeBron slotting into his ideal role as a multitalented genius player on the wing. The fastbreak is going to be utterly unstoppable and the half-court is pretty absurd too. Gilmore is our main scorer inside, with LeBron and Manu taking lead perimeter scoring roles. Magic can do whatever he wants (which is usually to pass, but remember that time he started at center in the decisive Game 6 of the 1980 Finals, and won, with a 42/15/7? That happened), and Rodman can do whatever he wants (which is to play lockdown defense and rebound, which is why Rodman is the most valuable player ever).
Magic and LeBron both love to control the ball, but they're both also very effective playing with other players who can control the game, so they'll work fine together. Manu and Gilmore are relatively low-usage players, so they won't miss touches. And Rodman is obviously crazy-low usage (which, again, is part of the reason why he's so valuable). So basically, we have an unstoppable one-two punch, we have perfect third and fourth options, and we have the greatest glue guy in NBA history.
Our offense is going to work beautifully, because we have Magic, LeBron, Manu, and Gilmore. All four of those guys are offensive savants -- Gilmore's the one you might not know, but he's ridiculously efficient on reasonably high volume. We're also set defensively, since Gilmore is a great defensive center, Rodman is one of the greatest defensive players ever, LeBron can lock down anyone on the wing, and hopefully Magic and Manu will keep up. (We're handwaving this because interior defense is more important and we dominate at it.)
And finally, we shouldn't have any problems at all in the locker room. Magic is whatever the opposite of locker room cancer is (locker room chemo? locker room radiation therapy?), LeBron seems to get along well with everyone besides Kyrie, Manu is great, and whatever, I'm done talking.
PG - Magic Johnson (1)
SG - Manu Ginobili (57)
SF - LeBron James (1)
PF - Dennis Rodman (27)
C - Artis Gilmore (117)
Total: 203
Okay. So most people in this thread fucked up spectacularly. There were two common mistakes. First, to take a bunch of late-first-to-second rounders and try to make the best of what is truly a pretty weak crop of players (think Isaiah Thomas at #60). This is a bad choice because basketball is predominantly about top-level talent and frankly there isn't much of that outside of the first round.
The second mistake was to assume no one good was drafted late and "punt" a position while getting the maximum value from your other players. This is fine if you punt it right (e.g. Gilmore), but if you end up with a garbage player in your starting 5, that's going to hurt.
Here's the winning strat: Recognize that value here comes from getting a few players drafted very late who are still very good. That is to say, not worthless sixth-rounders, but also not guys who are very good but drafted not-so-late (like Draymond or Isaiah, the latter of whom really isn't good enough to merit inclusion in this conversation). Gilmore is comfortably the best-value draft pick I saw -- he was taken in the seventh freaking round, and he's arguably one of the ten best centers ever. (This may not sound that impressive, but recognize that the top of that list goes, in some order, Kareem Wilt Shaq Russell Hakeem, and then guys like Ewing, Parish, Robinson, Malone, et al. vying for the last few spots.)
There's one caveat with Gilmore, and that's that he was also drafted by, and played for a number of years in, the ABA. So that 117 might potentially be influenced by the possibility that he wouldn't go to the NBA. I don't know; I can't find sources from that far back. During the NBA-ABA merger, he was actually taken 1st overall, and he went pretty early in the ABA draft (not sure exactly where). But frankly, I don't care. 117 is his official NBA draft position, listed on BBRef and his Wikipedia page. Him getting drafted 1st in the ABA dispersal draft, after playing an extraordinary 5-year career in the ABA, really doesn't matter here, nor does his ABA draft position. I get him and it counts for 117.
Next up, I tried to find a high-value player from the late second and beyond, and who should pop up but Ginobili. This guy has super high value, as probably everyone who's watched basketball in the past 15 years knows, and is pretty much the perfect teammate. He's also an elite 2-guard, and while he's not at the Kobe level, his value at 57 is super high.
Now we're in a nice position. Artis and Manu add up to 174, meaning if we can get a pick at 24 or later, we get to finish up with two first overalls. First overalls, in basketball, are extremely valuable; basically half of the all-time greats were taken #1 overall. Fortunately, there's a great choice: Dennis Rodman at 27, who puts us over already and who is arguably the most valuable player in NBA history. He's an all-time great defender and the GOAT rebounder, and he fits beautifully in with this team, as he does with almost any team.
That leaves us with the freedom to go nuts with our last two picks, so we're taking Magic and LeBron, two of the greatest players ever and easy choices at the 1 and the 3. And so we arrive at our final roster. Notice how not only do we have an absurd level of talent (Manu and Gilmore are the two worst players on this roster, and they're both comfortably Hall of Famers), but we also have a beautiful balance with respect to roles, ball-dominance, offense-vs-defense, and leadership.
Magic is going to run the offense with LeBron slotting into his ideal role as a multitalented genius player on the wing. The fastbreak is going to be utterly unstoppable and the half-court is pretty absurd too. Gilmore is our main scorer inside, with LeBron and Manu taking lead perimeter scoring roles. Magic can do whatever he wants (which is usually to pass, but remember that time he started at center in the decisive Game 6 of the 1980 Finals, and won, with a 42/15/7? That happened), and Rodman can do whatever he wants (which is to play lockdown defense and rebound, which is why Rodman is the most valuable player ever).
Magic and LeBron both love to control the ball, but they're both also very effective playing with other players who can control the game, so they'll work fine together. Manu and Gilmore are relatively low-usage players, so they won't miss touches. And Rodman is obviously crazy-low usage (which, again, is part of the reason why he's so valuable). So basically, we have an unstoppable one-two punch, we have perfect third and fourth options, and we have the greatest glue guy in NBA history.
Our offense is going to work beautifully, because we have Magic, LeBron, Manu, and Gilmore. All four of those guys are offensive savants -- Gilmore's the one you might not know, but he's ridiculously efficient on reasonably high volume. We're also set defensively, since Gilmore is a great defensive center, Rodman is one of the greatest defensive players ever, LeBron can lock down anyone on the wing, and hopefully Magic and Manu will keep up. (We're handwaving this because interior defense is more important and we dominate at it.)
And finally, we shouldn't have any problems at all in the locker room. Magic is whatever the opposite of locker room cancer is (locker room chemo? locker room radiation therapy?), LeBron seems to get along well with everyone besides Kyrie, Manu is great, and whatever, I'm done talking.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
This Weird Celtics Trade
The Celtics just traded down two places in the draft in exchange for one (1) future first-round pick. This will be the '18 Lakers pick if said pick falls between 2-5 overall, otherwise it will be the '19 Kings pick. In exchange the '76ers will pick Markelle Fultz first overall.
The weird part isn't that the Celtics are trading down; I actually like the decision to pass on Fultz, although I think they could probably have gotten more for it (Kings' #5 and #10 and a future first might have been attainable). The weird part is that, by all accounts, the Celtics are doing this because they want to draft Josh Jackson.
Why???
I'll admit, the first time I saw Jackson's tape I was impressed. He's a very athletic wing who can dunk spectacularly. But that's about all I see from him as a prospect, and it's not like being very athletic has historically been enough to manifest a high-level NBA player.
Here's what Jackson can't do:
- His handles are mediocre, as he himself has admitted, and his passing isn't elite (that is to say he's not Ben Simmons);
- He's not a consistent shooter, and will probably face problems adjusting to NBA defenses and range;
- He's athletic and has a high motor, and scouts say he looks great on D, but his short wingspan (6'10 on a 6'8 frame) means he's not going to be a defensive game-changer at the 3 like Kawhi Leonard or even LeBron;
- He's a weird sort of tweener, because he's not long enough to defend 3s, but you wouldn't want to play him at 2 when he can't shoot very well.
Let's take a moment and think of all the great athletic forwards with no shot, no handles, and a non-elite wingspan who have made it in the league. Here's my list of the best ones:
1.
Oh, right.
The rest of the draft:
I desperately hope the Lakers take Lonzo Ball. There are three reasons for this: First, I think he's the best prospect in the draft. Second, I think Jackson is going to bust. And third, if Lonzo becomes a star (as I think he will), I would detest seeing him on the Celtics. That would be the worst possible outcome.
Fortunately, the Lakers are in a position now where they have an extremely good chance of landing Lonzo, which is something I've wanted since even before the draft lottery. The dream would be that we take Lonzo, we overperform next year and give a late lottery pick to the Sixers (and not the Celtics), and Boston fades back into obscurity (and, preferably, the Atlantic Ocean).
There aren't a whole lot of other prospects I'm high on in this draft, but I haven't looked that deep, either. The one guy I really like is Malik Monk, who looks like an elite shooting guard who was unfortunate enough to end up in a 6'3 body. I hope he ends up somewhere nice, preferably somewhere with a big guard to put on 2s so Monk can guard 1s. You know, like the Lakers.
That's mostly a joke but I have actually looked into scenarios. The most plausible would be swapping D'Angelo Russell for, say, the Kings' 5th and 10th picks. But that backcourt is extremely questionable defensively and anyway I'm excited to see what Russell can do as a primary 2-guard.
It's weird, actually. I've seen a lot of people, including plenty of Lakers fans, ask whether Russell can play SG. He literally played it his entire life until he landed on the Lakers. He was the inaugural winner of the Jerry West Award for the best SG in the country. (Which is a little ironic, because West is the prototypical combo guard and played a lot of his pro career at point. The most recent winner of the award, by the way, is Monk.) Russell will survive and thrive as a 2-guard who just happens to be an excellent passer.
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Lonzo and the Lakers
I like Lonzo Ball. I like him so much that I wrote about him before the draft lottery as the best prospect in this year's draft, a belief I still hold. More than that, I think Lonzo has the potential to be one of the best players in the league. Barring catastrophe, Lonzo is going to be a Laker (although I have a sneaking fear that the Celtics are going to take him first, or trade the #1 pick to someone else who wants him, and I'll have to watch my favorite draft prospect ever--I started watching sports sometime after the LeBron draft--play for some team that's not the Lakers). I'm going to use this article to make a couple bold predictions about the future of Ball and of the Lakers, and to bring up some strengths and weaknesses of Ball as a prospect.
Prediction 1: Lonzo Ball is going to be a Hall of Famer.
I don't want you to think I'm getting overhyped here. (I am, but I don't want you to think that.) I have never made this prediction about a draft pick. In ANY sport. They tell me Lonzo Ball has flaws. They tell me his shot is broken. Actually, wait, let's do a new thing for this:
Weakness 1: His shot is broken.
Okay, A, no it's not. Lonzo Ball shot 55% from the field, 41% from three, and 73% from two (because he doesn't take shots from the midrange, but that's basically a fetish for the modern NBA. He's still ridiculously good at them), the latter of which was 3rd in the country among everyone, big men included. His shot chart is absolutely ridiculous. Ben Simmons he is not. He shot 67% from the line, which has some people scared, but I'm pretty sure FT% is 99% psychological and 1% having hands too big to handle the ball, if you're Shaq, but that doesn't apply to Lonzo either.
There have also been claims that Lonzo has elite-tier speed on his release, which might help him get shots off in the NBA, but I'm not concerned one way or the other. Here's the thing: I don't need or want Lonzo to take all that many contested shots. If he can make them, that's fine, but if not, he can at least hit wide-open threes from Steph Curry land. That's enough to force teams to defend him, which creates space and lets him do that Lonzo magic (pun extremely intended). He's never gonna be Rondo or Rubio, where teams can play way off him because he can't punish them for it.
So really, Lonzo's shot is a strength. It's one of the best shots in college basketball statistically speaking, and it has the potential to be one of the best shots in the NBA.
Strength 1: He might be one of the best passers ever.
At the most basic level if you want to evaluate a passer you look at his assists. Lonzo looks good here: he averaged 7.6 assists per game, leading the nation by a good margin. (Markelle Fultz, all else aside, finished 17th with 5.9 APG).
At a slightly more sophisticated level, you might want to look at assist-to-turnover ratio, and Lonzo looks good here, too: He had 3.08 assists for every turnover, which is not actually first in the nation (it's 13th), but which is pretty unprecedented for point guards at his level (see this article, which is old but still accurate for everyone but Lonzo). In other words, Ball led the nation in assists (by, again, a comfortable margin) while turning the ball over less, proportionally speaking, than just about anyone in the nation (not to mention virtually all future elite NBA point guards).
On a qualitative level, it's easy to see by watching UCLA games just how much of an impact Ball's passing has. That whole offense, that #1-ranked juggernaut offense, that's all Ball. He's not just running the thing, he's practically inventing it as he goes along. He's the pilot of a top-flight fighter jet, Top Gun style, and he's flying it better than anyone else can fly their Cessna. He's the Peyton Manning of college basketball.
If that seems like not enough evidence to call Lonzo maybe one of the best passers ever, just read the rest of the article (and the last one) and keep in mind that while he's a great shooter, the vast majority of Ball's impact comes through his passing.
Weakness 2: The Lakers might not draft him.
So this isn't really a weakness of Ball himself, but moreso a weakness of this whole situation. What's weak is that the Lakers haven't explicitly said they're taking Ball. I'm hoping this is to avoid the instinctual sibling reaction of Boston to take him first, although part of me wants to believe that NBA front offices make decisions at a more mature level than that. (The other part of me remembers that John Hollinger, creator of the worst advanced stat ever made, is currently the VP of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, which is all the proof I need that NBA front offices have no goddamn clue what they're doing.)
My fear is that the Lakers get too clever and either trade this pick or take a player who's not Ball. The latter would be a huge mistake because Ball is by far the best prospect in this draft (although his floor is lower than Fultz's and some other players'). The former would be a mistake because, unless we draft Ball (more on this later), the Lakers aren't going to contend for another 3-4 years at minimum. But the Lakers front office, like all front offices, makes decisions either at random or based on the impulses of a child (cough Hollinger), and so I'm nervous.
(If you think I'm being too hard on the Lakers front office, recall that we're currently paying a combined $34 million to Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov, who aren't even starting anymore. Admittedly those contracts come from a previous iteration of the Lakers FO, but that iteration was also considered one of the best front offices in the league.)
Strength 2: Lonzo Ball is able to impact the game with ridiculously low usage.
Here's the deal with usage rate. It's basically a measurement of how involved a player is in his team's offense. The ideal player is able to contribute a lot with relatively low usage, but in practice this is extremely rare. Most players either contribute a lot with a lot of usage, like Kobe Bryant (31.8% career usage) or Russell Westbrook (an all-time-record 41.7% usage this past, likely MVP, year), or they contribute a little with low usage (e.g. virtually every bit player in NBA history). It's very rare to find someone who contributes a lot with little usage, like Dennis Rodman (career usage of 11.4% and massively valuable to his team, partially because of said contribution-to-usage ratio).
A point guard's whole role is to control the offense, distribute the ball, and, secondarily, to score sometimes. A point guard who dominates the ball, like Westbrook or James Harden (34.2% usage last year), can still be a valuable asset to his team, because you want the ball in his hands a lot regardless. But a point guard who can contribute hugely to his offense while not taking up a third of his team's possessions is the absolute dream. Magic Johnson is such a player: he's considered the greatest point guard ever and his career usage is only 22.3%. Ditto John Stockton, whose career usage rate is a stunningly low 18.9%. Chris Paul has a career 24.0% usage, and Isaiah Thomas hit a career-high 34.0% this last year. Markell Fultz's usage rate is 31.4%.
All this is to give you context to what a normal usage rate is expected to be for an elite point guard. So you'll understand what it means when I tell you that Ball's usage rate is 18.1%. That's lower than EVERYONE I just listed, and well below everyone not named Stockton. But as my last article about Ball showed, Ball nevertheless has an incalculable impact on his team's offensive performance. To have that big an impact while commanding less than a 20% share of your team's possessions is absolutely staggering.
In other words, Ball is not the kind of player who demands that you build an offense around him. He's the kind of player who not only lets his teammates shine, but lets them outshine him. This is why, for all of the individual abilities that other players bring to the table, I don't think a single one of them will help their team nearly as much as Ball will.
Weakness 1: His shot is broken.
Okay, A, no it's not. Lonzo Ball shot 55% from the field, 41% from three, and 73% from two (because he doesn't take shots from the midrange, but that's basically a fetish for the modern NBA. He's still ridiculously good at them), the latter of which was 3rd in the country among everyone, big men included. His shot chart is absolutely ridiculous. Ben Simmons he is not. He shot 67% from the line, which has some people scared, but I'm pretty sure FT% is 99% psychological and 1% having hands too big to handle the ball, if you're Shaq, but that doesn't apply to Lonzo either.
There have also been claims that Lonzo has elite-tier speed on his release, which might help him get shots off in the NBA, but I'm not concerned one way or the other. Here's the thing: I don't need or want Lonzo to take all that many contested shots. If he can make them, that's fine, but if not, he can at least hit wide-open threes from Steph Curry land. That's enough to force teams to defend him, which creates space and lets him do that Lonzo magic (pun extremely intended). He's never gonna be Rondo or Rubio, where teams can play way off him because he can't punish them for it.
So really, Lonzo's shot is a strength. It's one of the best shots in college basketball statistically speaking, and it has the potential to be one of the best shots in the NBA.
Strength 1: He might be one of the best passers ever.
At the most basic level if you want to evaluate a passer you look at his assists. Lonzo looks good here: he averaged 7.6 assists per game, leading the nation by a good margin. (Markelle Fultz, all else aside, finished 17th with 5.9 APG).
At a slightly more sophisticated level, you might want to look at assist-to-turnover ratio, and Lonzo looks good here, too: He had 3.08 assists for every turnover, which is not actually first in the nation (it's 13th), but which is pretty unprecedented for point guards at his level (see this article, which is old but still accurate for everyone but Lonzo). In other words, Ball led the nation in assists (by, again, a comfortable margin) while turning the ball over less, proportionally speaking, than just about anyone in the nation (not to mention virtually all future elite NBA point guards).
On a qualitative level, it's easy to see by watching UCLA games just how much of an impact Ball's passing has. That whole offense, that #1-ranked juggernaut offense, that's all Ball. He's not just running the thing, he's practically inventing it as he goes along. He's the pilot of a top-flight fighter jet, Top Gun style, and he's flying it better than anyone else can fly their Cessna. He's the Peyton Manning of college basketball.
If that seems like not enough evidence to call Lonzo maybe one of the best passers ever, just read the rest of the article (and the last one) and keep in mind that while he's a great shooter, the vast majority of Ball's impact comes through his passing.
Weakness 2: The Lakers might not draft him.
So this isn't really a weakness of Ball himself, but moreso a weakness of this whole situation. What's weak is that the Lakers haven't explicitly said they're taking Ball. I'm hoping this is to avoid the instinctual sibling reaction of Boston to take him first, although part of me wants to believe that NBA front offices make decisions at a more mature level than that. (The other part of me remembers that John Hollinger, creator of the worst advanced stat ever made, is currently the VP of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, which is all the proof I need that NBA front offices have no goddamn clue what they're doing.)
My fear is that the Lakers get too clever and either trade this pick or take a player who's not Ball. The latter would be a huge mistake because Ball is by far the best prospect in this draft (although his floor is lower than Fultz's and some other players'). The former would be a mistake because, unless we draft Ball (more on this later), the Lakers aren't going to contend for another 3-4 years at minimum. But the Lakers front office, like all front offices, makes decisions either at random or based on the impulses of a child (cough Hollinger), and so I'm nervous.
(If you think I'm being too hard on the Lakers front office, recall that we're currently paying a combined $34 million to Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov, who aren't even starting anymore. Admittedly those contracts come from a previous iteration of the Lakers FO, but that iteration was also considered one of the best front offices in the league.)
Strength 2: Lonzo Ball is able to impact the game with ridiculously low usage.
Here's the deal with usage rate. It's basically a measurement of how involved a player is in his team's offense. The ideal player is able to contribute a lot with relatively low usage, but in practice this is extremely rare. Most players either contribute a lot with a lot of usage, like Kobe Bryant (31.8% career usage) or Russell Westbrook (an all-time-record 41.7% usage this past, likely MVP, year), or they contribute a little with low usage (e.g. virtually every bit player in NBA history). It's very rare to find someone who contributes a lot with little usage, like Dennis Rodman (career usage of 11.4% and massively valuable to his team, partially because of said contribution-to-usage ratio).
A point guard's whole role is to control the offense, distribute the ball, and, secondarily, to score sometimes. A point guard who dominates the ball, like Westbrook or James Harden (34.2% usage last year), can still be a valuable asset to his team, because you want the ball in his hands a lot regardless. But a point guard who can contribute hugely to his offense while not taking up a third of his team's possessions is the absolute dream. Magic Johnson is such a player: he's considered the greatest point guard ever and his career usage is only 22.3%. Ditto John Stockton, whose career usage rate is a stunningly low 18.9%. Chris Paul has a career 24.0% usage, and Isaiah Thomas hit a career-high 34.0% this last year. Markell Fultz's usage rate is 31.4%.
All this is to give you context to what a normal usage rate is expected to be for an elite point guard. So you'll understand what it means when I tell you that Ball's usage rate is 18.1%. That's lower than EVERYONE I just listed, and well below everyone not named Stockton. But as my last article about Ball showed, Ball nevertheless has an incalculable impact on his team's offensive performance. To have that big an impact while commanding less than a 20% share of your team's possessions is absolutely staggering.
In other words, Ball is not the kind of player who demands that you build an offense around him. He's the kind of player who not only lets his teammates shine, but lets them outshine him. This is why, for all of the individual abilities that other players bring to the table, I don't think a single one of them will help their team nearly as much as Ball will.
Prediction 2: Lonzo Ball, if drafted by the Lakers, will take them to the playoffs in his first two seasons.
This one is bold. Really, really bold. The Lakers finished with the third-worst record in the league last season, and they play in the very strong Western conference. They aren't poised to make any major free-agent signings (in fact, despite popular misconception, they almost never do). The west is an extremely strong conference and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Within the next two years, the Lakers will be facing the following teams: A Warriors team starring Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Kevin Durant; a Spurs team with Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green, LaMarcus Aldridge, and the walking corpses of Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Pau Gasol; a Rockets team with James Harden and pals; a Clippers team that, while currently starring Chris Paul et al., will quite possibly implode this offseason (wait and see); a Jazz team on the upswing (+10 wins this year), led by (I'm hoping) this year's DPOY in Rudy Gobert, plus something called a Gordon Hayward; the Russell Westbrooks; the Memphis Grizzlies; a potentially good Blazers team with Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum; the Nuggets (I don't think they will be a threat though); a Pelicans team with the disastrous duo of DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis; the Miserable Mavericks; and if you think the Timberwolves' core is actually good (Karl-Anthony Towns, Ender Wiggin--once he gets good enough to deserve that nickname, Ricky Rubio, and Zach LaVine) then the Timberwolves. That's a lot of teams, several of whom are good.
I'm not going to try to predict the future, because things like Derrick Rose and Isaiah Thomas happen all the time. No one knows what franchises are going to take off with no warning or collapse into dust. But Lonzo Ball is a phenomenally gifted basketball player whose greatest attribute is that he improves his teammates' performance more than just about any point guard since Magic Johnson.
The Lakers have a young, raw core: D'Angelo Russell, who, despite the popular misconception that he is a "point guard," has actually been playing out of position for his entire pro career (he is a shooting guard); Brandon Ingram, who is very long and extremely talented (moreso physically than Lonzo, but less so BBIQ-wise) but hasn't quite figured out how to play yet, like a German Shepherd puppy trying to walk on its oversized paws; Julius Randle, who has teeny little T-Rex arms but who is inexplicably a pretty good basketball player; Larry Nance, Jr., who is athletic and actually good at defense; Ivica Zubac, whose name is pronounced "Ivitsa Zubats" and who is a surprisingly precocious center; Jordan Clarkson, who is a guy; and some other players. This motley crew is not very good right now; they finished, as I mentioned, third-to-last in the league, and although they probably underperformed a little because of the whole tanking thing, they didn't underperform by all that much. And while they showed a few flashes of brilliance (remember this game?), overall they did not impress.
But Lonzo Ball changes things. He is a magic player with a genius-level basketball IQ. He has the potential to turn all those guys from the preceding paragraph into All-Stars and strong role players. The Lakers were 17th in offense last year (slightly worse by ORTG). That's roughly as bad as the Bruins were (116th out of 351 by ORTG) before Ball showed up and turned them into the best offense in the country (2nd in PPG, 1st in ORTG). And before you jump on the defense train (which is reasonable; the Lakers are currently terrible at defense), you should know that Ball took the Bruins from 249th to 157th in DRTG. Some of that might be due to an easier schedule, or all of it might be. But I'm selectively choosing to credit Ball in order to support my own preconceived notions about his value to his team. The offense, though, is indisputable.
Weakness 3: LaVar Ball.
Unlike seemingly everyone else in the country, I don't have a problem with LaVar Ball. He's passionate and greedy and trying very hard to profit off of his son's success, but that's not any worse than anyone else involved with the NBA at any level. The reason I have LaVar as a weakness is because, as far as I can tell, the Lakers front office might actually have some concerns about him; they're reportedly talking with the coaching staff at UCLA to make sure he wasn't too disruptive to the team.
I don't think he will be. I think this whole thing is a concerted effort to A) get Lonzo to the Lakers, B) get his name (LaVar's) into the public eye, and C) polarize the world with respect to Lonzo. Polarization is absolutely key to getting the kind of success and fan loyalty that can make Lonzo an endorsement superstar. Nobody wants to sign Gordon Hayward to a billion-dollar deal (sorry for picking on him but he's just the most unremarkable top-tier player I can think of). I don't think LaVar actually gives a damn about what the Lakers do, and I definitely think he's smart enough to realize that if he doesn't shut up and leave the Lakers alone, his son will end up somewhere that's not LA.
There are only three ways I can think of that Lonzo won't be a Laker next year. First, if the Celtics take him. Second, if the Lakers fuck up horribly and decide that some other player is a better prospect or (shudder) a better fit. Or third, if they think LaVar will be a sufficiently large distraction to counteract the relative benefits of drafting Lonzo. This makes LaVar Lonzo's biggest weakness.
Strength 3: Fit.
When you're drafting a top-two draft pick (as the Lakers have in each of the past three drafts, including this one), you don't draft based on fit. You just don't. You would rather pull a Sixers and draft twelve elite big men and no guards than to draft based on fit and miss out on a superstar for your well-fitting role player. So when I say that Lonzo fits beautifully with the Lakers, I want to make it clear that this isn't a reason to take him. The reason to take him is all the stuff above: he's a basketball genius, he tremendously improves his team without dominating the ball, and he might be one of the best passers ever. Fit is just gravy.
That being said: Lonzo fits beautifully with the Lakers. As I mentioned, D'Angelo Russell is not really a point guard, he's a shooting guard playing out of position who happens to be a pretty good passer (his 4.8 assists per game last year, as a point guard, barely exceeds Kobe Bryant's career 4.7 APG, and Kobe played SG more or less full-time*). So with Ball sliding into a full-time point guard role, which he's better at than virtually anyone in the NBA, including Russell, D'Angelo gets to move back to his natural position of SG while still retaining his solid passing skills.
(* I feel the need to note that Kobe's assist numbers are artificially low due to A) playing most of his prime in the notoriously assist-denying triangle and B) playing almost all of his career as a shooting guard and very little as a point guard. But remember back in January of '13 where he played point guard for three games and averaged 16.3 points, 8.7 rebounds, and 13.0 assists? And explained that if he so chose he'd be the best point guard in the game? And then that March, he put up 42/7/12 and 41/6/12 in consecutive games? Who DOES that? The point being, playing PG and playing SG are very different things, assists-wise.)
Playing Ball and Russell at the two starting guard spots (which the Lakers will absolutely do; Ball is a day-one contributor) pushes Jordan Clarkson to a backup role, which is a good thing; Clarkson is a solid bench player but shouldn't be starting for an NBA team that hopes to contend. And while there's always the chance that he pulls an Isaiah and breaks out three or four years down the line, at this point chances are better that he never improves past bench player. Which is fine.
At the 3, the Lakers' future is Brandon Ingram. It is not Paul George. I referenced earlier in the article how the Lakers very rarely build around free agents, and I linked there to an old post of mine showing this to be the case. Of course that's not actually an argument against getting George, which I'll get to in a moment. First, the argument for sticking with Ingram: He's one of the most gifted young players in the league, with a huge wingspan, a great basketball IQ (albeit not Ball-level), enormous potential on both offense and defense, and the gift of youth--he's still only 19, about two months older than Ball. People who expect players to have a huge impact their first year in the league are usually forgetting that most of the guys who did that generally played three or four, and at least two, years of college before the draft. Those are important developmental years that are now happening after players are drafted. I expect Ingram to dominate within a couple years.
Now the case against George. I don't think he's a bad player, or even a mediocre player. My philosophy is to never pay mediocre players big contracts (cough Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov), but this certainly doesn't apply to George. And if and when he comes to the Lakers as a free agent, he'll probably be a young 29. There are still prime years after that. But there aren't very many, and there's no guarantee the Lakers are going to contend before this core is in their mid-to-late 20s themselves. At that point George will be in his mid-30s and not contributing much for the money he'd be getting.
But more importantly, I think George might stunt our core's growth. He's made it clear that he would want to play SF for us, to the extent that positions are a thing. But how are we supposed to play Ball, Russell, and Ingram around him? Does Ingram play the four (being skinnier than Kevin Durant)? Does he come off the bench (the future of our franchise)? Do we push George to the four, against his wishes, and probably end up blowing the whole thing up Dwight-style? This isn't a great argument against getting George, but it's at least worth considering.
The bigger philosophical problem is that basing your future plans around getting a free agent who has, at best, expressed interest (he's not exactly Carmelo Anthony forcing a trade to the Knicks) is a terrible idea, especially for the Lakers, who really don't sign very many big free agents. (I think people remember those '04 signings of Karl Malone and Gary Payton as being a lot better than they actually were. Them plus Shaq leads to everyone forgetting that, hey, the only other big free agent the Lakers have ever signed was Jamaal Wilkes.) What if George, like virtually every other free agent who's expressed interest in the past decade and a half, decides not to come? If we've been planning on George coming, we're left in the lurch. If we haven't, we can go ahead and win a championship with our young core regardless.
You don't base your future prospects on free agents. You accumulate player capital, you draft or trade for talent, you build your team, you retain your stars, you avoid bad deals, and maybe you get lucky and land a nice free agent. That's how you win in this league. Signing Paul George is a loser bet, and not just because there's a decent chance it doesn't pay off. It's a violation of the foundational philosophy of winning in the NBA.
Moving on. The other relevant Lakers to consider are Randle, Nance, and Zubac, but I don't have as much to say about them. Randle has improved pretty impressively over his time in the league, and I think having an elite passer like Ball distributing will help him get much better looks on offense. Nance I see as primarily a defensive contributor, and I'm not sure where Zubac is going to end up, as a player. I could see him becoming a real contributor in the mold of Marc Gasol -- they are virtually identical physically: both are 7'1, both 265 pounds, both with a 7'0 wingspan -- or I could see him never becoming more than a role player. But either way, having a guy like Ball running the offense can only improve their performance, much like it improved the play of all of Ball's teammates at UCLA (and Chino Hills).
Wrap-up:
I should address the possibility that Ball is going to bust. I see how it could happen: His shot is a little unconventional (although it goes in), he doesn't have much experience creating shots or scoring from the midrange, his defensive potential is solid but not elite, and his father might be a significant distraction at the pro level. I freely acknowledge that Lonzo has a better chance of ending up an Anthony Bennett than, say, Markelle Fultz. But I don't think it's going to happen, and I think by now I've thoroughly explained why.
But more importantly, I believe that if you're picking top-two in a draft as stacked with talent as this one, you don't settle for the safe choice. Maybe it makes sense for Boston, who are currently down 2-1 in the Eastern Conference Finals against a great Cavs team, but it doesn't make sense for the Lakers, who earned their top-three pick with light tanking and good old-fashioned bad play. We need a superstar. We need a transcendent player. And I suspect that Fultz won't be that kind of player. I think Ball will.
This one is bold. Really, really bold. The Lakers finished with the third-worst record in the league last season, and they play in the very strong Western conference. They aren't poised to make any major free-agent signings (in fact, despite popular misconception, they almost never do). The west is an extremely strong conference and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Within the next two years, the Lakers will be facing the following teams: A Warriors team starring Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Kevin Durant; a Spurs team with Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green, LaMarcus Aldridge, and the walking corpses of Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Pau Gasol; a Rockets team with James Harden and pals; a Clippers team that, while currently starring Chris Paul et al., will quite possibly implode this offseason (wait and see); a Jazz team on the upswing (+10 wins this year), led by (I'm hoping) this year's DPOY in Rudy Gobert, plus something called a Gordon Hayward; the Russell Westbrooks; the Memphis Grizzlies; a potentially good Blazers team with Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum; the Nuggets (I don't think they will be a threat though); a Pelicans team with the disastrous duo of DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis; the Miserable Mavericks; and if you think the Timberwolves' core is actually good (Karl-Anthony Towns, Ender Wiggin--once he gets good enough to deserve that nickname, Ricky Rubio, and Zach LaVine) then the Timberwolves. That's a lot of teams, several of whom are good.
I'm not going to try to predict the future, because things like Derrick Rose and Isaiah Thomas happen all the time. No one knows what franchises are going to take off with no warning or collapse into dust. But Lonzo Ball is a phenomenally gifted basketball player whose greatest attribute is that he improves his teammates' performance more than just about any point guard since Magic Johnson.
The Lakers have a young, raw core: D'Angelo Russell, who, despite the popular misconception that he is a "point guard," has actually been playing out of position for his entire pro career (he is a shooting guard); Brandon Ingram, who is very long and extremely talented (moreso physically than Lonzo, but less so BBIQ-wise) but hasn't quite figured out how to play yet, like a German Shepherd puppy trying to walk on its oversized paws; Julius Randle, who has teeny little T-Rex arms but who is inexplicably a pretty good basketball player; Larry Nance, Jr., who is athletic and actually good at defense; Ivica Zubac, whose name is pronounced "Ivitsa Zubats" and who is a surprisingly precocious center; Jordan Clarkson, who is a guy; and some other players. This motley crew is not very good right now; they finished, as I mentioned, third-to-last in the league, and although they probably underperformed a little because of the whole tanking thing, they didn't underperform by all that much. And while they showed a few flashes of brilliance (remember this game?), overall they did not impress.
But Lonzo Ball changes things. He is a magic player with a genius-level basketball IQ. He has the potential to turn all those guys from the preceding paragraph into All-Stars and strong role players. The Lakers were 17th in offense last year (slightly worse by ORTG). That's roughly as bad as the Bruins were (116th out of 351 by ORTG) before Ball showed up and turned them into the best offense in the country (2nd in PPG, 1st in ORTG). And before you jump on the defense train (which is reasonable; the Lakers are currently terrible at defense), you should know that Ball took the Bruins from 249th to 157th in DRTG. Some of that might be due to an easier schedule, or all of it might be. But I'm selectively choosing to credit Ball in order to support my own preconceived notions about his value to his team. The offense, though, is indisputable.
Weakness 3: LaVar Ball.
Unlike seemingly everyone else in the country, I don't have a problem with LaVar Ball. He's passionate and greedy and trying very hard to profit off of his son's success, but that's not any worse than anyone else involved with the NBA at any level. The reason I have LaVar as a weakness is because, as far as I can tell, the Lakers front office might actually have some concerns about him; they're reportedly talking with the coaching staff at UCLA to make sure he wasn't too disruptive to the team.
I don't think he will be. I think this whole thing is a concerted effort to A) get Lonzo to the Lakers, B) get his name (LaVar's) into the public eye, and C) polarize the world with respect to Lonzo. Polarization is absolutely key to getting the kind of success and fan loyalty that can make Lonzo an endorsement superstar. Nobody wants to sign Gordon Hayward to a billion-dollar deal (sorry for picking on him but he's just the most unremarkable top-tier player I can think of). I don't think LaVar actually gives a damn about what the Lakers do, and I definitely think he's smart enough to realize that if he doesn't shut up and leave the Lakers alone, his son will end up somewhere that's not LA.
There are only three ways I can think of that Lonzo won't be a Laker next year. First, if the Celtics take him. Second, if the Lakers fuck up horribly and decide that some other player is a better prospect or (shudder) a better fit. Or third, if they think LaVar will be a sufficiently large distraction to counteract the relative benefits of drafting Lonzo. This makes LaVar Lonzo's biggest weakness.
Strength 3: Fit.
When you're drafting a top-two draft pick (as the Lakers have in each of the past three drafts, including this one), you don't draft based on fit. You just don't. You would rather pull a Sixers and draft twelve elite big men and no guards than to draft based on fit and miss out on a superstar for your well-fitting role player. So when I say that Lonzo fits beautifully with the Lakers, I want to make it clear that this isn't a reason to take him. The reason to take him is all the stuff above: he's a basketball genius, he tremendously improves his team without dominating the ball, and he might be one of the best passers ever. Fit is just gravy.
That being said: Lonzo fits beautifully with the Lakers. As I mentioned, D'Angelo Russell is not really a point guard, he's a shooting guard playing out of position who happens to be a pretty good passer (his 4.8 assists per game last year, as a point guard, barely exceeds Kobe Bryant's career 4.7 APG, and Kobe played SG more or less full-time*). So with Ball sliding into a full-time point guard role, which he's better at than virtually anyone in the NBA, including Russell, D'Angelo gets to move back to his natural position of SG while still retaining his solid passing skills.
(* I feel the need to note that Kobe's assist numbers are artificially low due to A) playing most of his prime in the notoriously assist-denying triangle and B) playing almost all of his career as a shooting guard and very little as a point guard. But remember back in January of '13 where he played point guard for three games and averaged 16.3 points, 8.7 rebounds, and 13.0 assists? And explained that if he so chose he'd be the best point guard in the game? And then that March, he put up 42/7/12 and 41/6/12 in consecutive games? Who DOES that? The point being, playing PG and playing SG are very different things, assists-wise.)
Playing Ball and Russell at the two starting guard spots (which the Lakers will absolutely do; Ball is a day-one contributor) pushes Jordan Clarkson to a backup role, which is a good thing; Clarkson is a solid bench player but shouldn't be starting for an NBA team that hopes to contend. And while there's always the chance that he pulls an Isaiah and breaks out three or four years down the line, at this point chances are better that he never improves past bench player. Which is fine.
At the 3, the Lakers' future is Brandon Ingram. It is not Paul George. I referenced earlier in the article how the Lakers very rarely build around free agents, and I linked there to an old post of mine showing this to be the case. Of course that's not actually an argument against getting George, which I'll get to in a moment. First, the argument for sticking with Ingram: He's one of the most gifted young players in the league, with a huge wingspan, a great basketball IQ (albeit not Ball-level), enormous potential on both offense and defense, and the gift of youth--he's still only 19, about two months older than Ball. People who expect players to have a huge impact their first year in the league are usually forgetting that most of the guys who did that generally played three or four, and at least two, years of college before the draft. Those are important developmental years that are now happening after players are drafted. I expect Ingram to dominate within a couple years.
Now the case against George. I don't think he's a bad player, or even a mediocre player. My philosophy is to never pay mediocre players big contracts (cough Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov), but this certainly doesn't apply to George. And if and when he comes to the Lakers as a free agent, he'll probably be a young 29. There are still prime years after that. But there aren't very many, and there's no guarantee the Lakers are going to contend before this core is in their mid-to-late 20s themselves. At that point George will be in his mid-30s and not contributing much for the money he'd be getting.
But more importantly, I think George might stunt our core's growth. He's made it clear that he would want to play SF for us, to the extent that positions are a thing. But how are we supposed to play Ball, Russell, and Ingram around him? Does Ingram play the four (being skinnier than Kevin Durant)? Does he come off the bench (the future of our franchise)? Do we push George to the four, against his wishes, and probably end up blowing the whole thing up Dwight-style? This isn't a great argument against getting George, but it's at least worth considering.
The bigger philosophical problem is that basing your future plans around getting a free agent who has, at best, expressed interest (he's not exactly Carmelo Anthony forcing a trade to the Knicks) is a terrible idea, especially for the Lakers, who really don't sign very many big free agents. (I think people remember those '04 signings of Karl Malone and Gary Payton as being a lot better than they actually were. Them plus Shaq leads to everyone forgetting that, hey, the only other big free agent the Lakers have ever signed was Jamaal Wilkes.) What if George, like virtually every other free agent who's expressed interest in the past decade and a half, decides not to come? If we've been planning on George coming, we're left in the lurch. If we haven't, we can go ahead and win a championship with our young core regardless.
You don't base your future prospects on free agents. You accumulate player capital, you draft or trade for talent, you build your team, you retain your stars, you avoid bad deals, and maybe you get lucky and land a nice free agent. That's how you win in this league. Signing Paul George is a loser bet, and not just because there's a decent chance it doesn't pay off. It's a violation of the foundational philosophy of winning in the NBA.
Moving on. The other relevant Lakers to consider are Randle, Nance, and Zubac, but I don't have as much to say about them. Randle has improved pretty impressively over his time in the league, and I think having an elite passer like Ball distributing will help him get much better looks on offense. Nance I see as primarily a defensive contributor, and I'm not sure where Zubac is going to end up, as a player. I could see him becoming a real contributor in the mold of Marc Gasol -- they are virtually identical physically: both are 7'1, both 265 pounds, both with a 7'0 wingspan -- or I could see him never becoming more than a role player. But either way, having a guy like Ball running the offense can only improve their performance, much like it improved the play of all of Ball's teammates at UCLA (and Chino Hills).
Wrap-up:
I should address the possibility that Ball is going to bust. I see how it could happen: His shot is a little unconventional (although it goes in), he doesn't have much experience creating shots or scoring from the midrange, his defensive potential is solid but not elite, and his father might be a significant distraction at the pro level. I freely acknowledge that Lonzo has a better chance of ending up an Anthony Bennett than, say, Markelle Fultz. But I don't think it's going to happen, and I think by now I've thoroughly explained why.
But more importantly, I believe that if you're picking top-two in a draft as stacked with talent as this one, you don't settle for the safe choice. Maybe it makes sense for Boston, who are currently down 2-1 in the Eastern Conference Finals against a great Cavs team, but it doesn't make sense for the Lakers, who earned their top-three pick with light tanking and good old-fashioned bad play. We need a superstar. We need a transcendent player. And I suspect that Fultz won't be that kind of player. I think Ball will.
Friday, April 21, 2017
The Ball Effect
As you (hopefully) know, I'm a Lakers fan. Therefore instead of writing about the actually interesting things that are happening in the NBA at large (Russell Westbrook put up a 50-point triple double in the playoffs and lost, for one), I'm going to talk about pointless hypotheticals concerning the Lakers' draft pick.
This is a hypothetical because if the Lakers don't land a top-three pick in the draft lottery, they lose their pick. It's furthermore a hypothetical because the only player I'm actually interested in in this draft, Lonzo Ball, has maybe a 40% chance of landing on the Lakers even if they do keep the pick (which has roughly a 47% chance of happening).
I think Lonzo Ball is a special player. I think he's the best player in this year's draft, and that he has the potential to be the best offensive player in the league. But before I talk about him, I want to talk about the presumed #1 pick in this year's draft, Markelle Fultz.
I think Lonzo Ball is a special player. I think he's the best player in this year's draft, and that he has the potential to be the best offensive player in the league. But before I talk about him, I want to talk about the presumed #1 pick in this year's draft, Markelle Fultz.
Markelle Fultz
I should be interested in Markelle Fultz. It's weird that I'm not. I'm nominally a UW fan (although I emphatically couldn't care less about college basketball) and my loyalty is at least strong enough to manifest as a passing affection for Isaiah Thomas despite his being on the Celtics (although not strong enough that I don't find the Celtics being down 2-0, as a one seed, against the 8th seed Chicago Bulls, hilarious. Hey look, another interesting NBA event that I'm not going to talk about). But I just can't get into Fultz as a player.
This is partially because I haven't seen anything from him that makes me think he's going to be a superstar, and partially because frankly playing for an awful team makes me think he's less than transcendental. Let me unpack both parts of this real quick. In order to win at the NBA level, you need one of two things: Either you can be one of the greatest defensive teams ever, with amazing team chemistry and an absurd degree of defensive depth, which has been done exactly once, by the 2004 Pistons; or you have to have superstars. With a top-three draft pick, if you're not drafting a superstar, you're wasting your pick. I think it is a dramatically better decision to swing at and miss on a superstar prospect with the first overall than it is to take a sure-thing low-All-Star-level player who can contribute to a winning team but can't necessarily take the reins. Nobody will ever win a championship with a guy like Joe Johnson or Kevin Love as their best player. And to be perfectly honest I haven't seen anything from Fultz to make me think he's capable of being the best player on a championship team.
The second reason I'm not high on Fultz, as I mentioned, is because the Huskies are bad. They finished 9-22, winning only two conference games and finishing 11th in the Pac-12. Now, Fultz is comfortably the best player on that team, and there's an argument to be made that it's much harder to win without having other elite-level talent. I just don't agree with it. Basketball is a team game, but ultimately there are only five guys on the floor at a time for any given team, and having one of the five be a supposedly-transcendental player should be enough to make a major impact on your team's performance. Fultz just didn't do that.
Lonzo Ball
Ball did. In 2016, the year before Ball showed up, the Bruins went 15-17, finishing 6-12 in conference play. In 2017, this year, the Bruins went 31-5 overall and 15-3 in conference play. But that's not all! They improved dramatically in virtually every offensive stat for which we have a metric (overall NCAA rankings, out of 351, in parentheses):
| Year: | FG%: | 2P%: | 3P%: | AST: | Pts: | Pts/G: |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 45.4% (101st) | 48.8% (185th) | 36.3% (102nd) | 502 (71st) | 2480 (129th) | 77.5 (67th) |
| 2017 | 52.2% (1st) | 59.1% (3rd) | 40.6% (4th) | 771 (1st) | 3233 (2nd) | 89.8 (2nd) |
Wow. Under Lonzo Ball, the Bruins went from being a dead-average D1 team offensively, and one of the worst Pac-12 teams, to being one of the best offensive teams in the nation overall. They improved dramatically across the board. Ball's offense was a bona fide juggernaut.
The natural next question is: What? How can one player have such a massive impact on his team's performance? There must have been something else going on, right?
Well, not really. The Bruins kept the same coach. Four of their five major contributors from 2016 returned -- Bryce Alford, Isaac Hamilton, Aaron Holiday, and Thomas Welsh -- and all four of them remained major contributors on the '17 team. The only other significant addition was TJ Leaf, a power forward (who replaced the departed Tony Parker (not that Tony Parker), the fifth major contributor from 2016). And while Leaf is definitely an upgrade and he certainly contributed to the team's shooting and scoring improvements, the difference between him and Parker was not nearly enough to account for such a massive change in offensive performance. (Some of the difference between Parker and Leaf is also attributable to Ball; virtually every Bruin from the '16 roster played better in '17.)
The X-factor is Ball. He led the team in minutes, at 35.1 per game. He shot extremely well: 55.1% from the field, 41.2% from three, and an unthinkably good 73.2% from inside the arc (!!!). He put up 14.6 points, 6.0 rebounds, and 7.6 assists per game, as well as contributing on defense (which I haven't even mentioned so far in my assessment, since his offensive contributions are so much more profound). But that statline, while impressive, doesn't reflect on paper what you've already seen: Ball's offensive abilities almost singlehandedly transformed the Bruins from an average offensive team to an unstoppable freight train.
THAT is what I want to see from a future superstar. That's what I expect to see when we talk about transcendental players.
Of course, Lonzo Ball carries some caveats, which is why Fultz is generally projected to go ahead of him. His shooting motion is awkward and unconventional, although it clearly works; those shooting splits aren't decorative. And Ball's floor is probably lower than Fultz's, although I sincerely doubt he'll be a worse player. But as I said before, I would much rather pick someone like Ball, who, if he pans out, will -- in my opinion -- become the best player on a championship-caliber team, than take a guy like Fultz, who I don't think can take a team to the promised land.
Again, this is all doubly hypothetical: the Lakers might not keep their pick, and even if they do, the only spot where they're more-or-less guaranteed to take Ball is 2nd overall; if they draft first, they might very well take Fultz, and if they draft third, Ball might be gone. But I want Ball. I really, really want him. Gamechangers like this don't come along very often, and when they do, they often confuse analysts. They get written up as accidents, asterisks, weird outliers way beyond the realm of reason. (For instance, check out the section in this article titled "The Asterisk.")
But sometimes those accidents aren't so accidental. Sometimes one player really can have that big an effect. I think Ball is that player.
How do you spell MVP? B-A-L-L.
The natural next question is: What? How can one player have such a massive impact on his team's performance? There must have been something else going on, right?
Well, not really. The Bruins kept the same coach. Four of their five major contributors from 2016 returned -- Bryce Alford, Isaac Hamilton, Aaron Holiday, and Thomas Welsh -- and all four of them remained major contributors on the '17 team. The only other significant addition was TJ Leaf, a power forward (who replaced the departed Tony Parker (not that Tony Parker), the fifth major contributor from 2016). And while Leaf is definitely an upgrade and he certainly contributed to the team's shooting and scoring improvements, the difference between him and Parker was not nearly enough to account for such a massive change in offensive performance. (Some of the difference between Parker and Leaf is also attributable to Ball; virtually every Bruin from the '16 roster played better in '17.)
The X-factor is Ball. He led the team in minutes, at 35.1 per game. He shot extremely well: 55.1% from the field, 41.2% from three, and an unthinkably good 73.2% from inside the arc (!!!). He put up 14.6 points, 6.0 rebounds, and 7.6 assists per game, as well as contributing on defense (which I haven't even mentioned so far in my assessment, since his offensive contributions are so much more profound). But that statline, while impressive, doesn't reflect on paper what you've already seen: Ball's offensive abilities almost singlehandedly transformed the Bruins from an average offensive team to an unstoppable freight train.
THAT is what I want to see from a future superstar. That's what I expect to see when we talk about transcendental players.
Of course, Lonzo Ball carries some caveats, which is why Fultz is generally projected to go ahead of him. His shooting motion is awkward and unconventional, although it clearly works; those shooting splits aren't decorative. And Ball's floor is probably lower than Fultz's, although I sincerely doubt he'll be a worse player. But as I said before, I would much rather pick someone like Ball, who, if he pans out, will -- in my opinion -- become the best player on a championship-caliber team, than take a guy like Fultz, who I don't think can take a team to the promised land.
Again, this is all doubly hypothetical: the Lakers might not keep their pick, and even if they do, the only spot where they're more-or-less guaranteed to take Ball is 2nd overall; if they draft first, they might very well take Fultz, and if they draft third, Ball might be gone. But I want Ball. I really, really want him. Gamechangers like this don't come along very often, and when they do, they often confuse analysts. They get written up as accidents, asterisks, weird outliers way beyond the realm of reason. (For instance, check out the section in this article titled "The Asterisk.")
But sometimes those accidents aren't so accidental. Sometimes one player really can have that big an effect. I think Ball is that player.
How do you spell MVP? B-A-L-L.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Bill Simmons and the Wine Cellar Team
In his magnum opus (from the Latin, meaning "big work") The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons says a lot of things. Many of them are wrong (to name a few: Bill Russell was not better than Wilt Chamberlain, and Moses Malone was not the greatest rebounder of all time), many more are right, and quite a few are surprisingly insightful. If you haven't read the book already, I suggest you pick it up.
Simmons's whole book is basically building up to the reveal of what he calls The Secret. Spoiler alert: The Secret is not actually a secret, nor is it surprising to anyone who has played or watched team sports at any level at any point in their life. At the risk of ruining your incentive to buy the book, The Secret is this: Being really successful in basketball is less about talent than it is about having the right people on your team. They need to like each other, to work together, to have compatible personalities. In short, team chemistry is an underrated factor in determining which teams are successful and which flop.
I know, shocker, right? Who could have deduced that from watching the '04 Lakers shit the bed, or watching the '04 Pistons band together and win it all? Seriously, this big Secret became blindingly obvious to everyone in those NBA Finals, if it somehow wasn't already.
Later in the book, Simmons describes his Wine Cellar Team. The premise is this: Aliens are coming to challenge Earth in basketball for dominion of the planet. We need to produce a team that can beat them. But we get an advantage: We can choose any player from any year of their career and put them on our team. For instance, not only can we pick Magic Johnson, we can specifically pick 1985 Magic Johnson.
And the key? He wants players who understand and embody The Secret. Guys who are unselfish and dedicated to to team. Good teammates who understand when to step into the spotlight and when to defer to their better teammates. Not just a big jumble of superstars, but guys who understood their role and could fill it to perfection.
So it's maybe a little bit fucking shocking that his team is basically a giant mess of superstars and personalities plus half the starting lineup of the 1986 Boston Celtics.
I'm not joking. Here's his roster:
- '86 Larry Bird
- '03 Tim Duncan
- '85 Magic Johnson
- '92 Michael Jordan
- '77 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- '86 Kevin McHale (seriously???)
- '92 Scottie Pippen
- '77 Bill Walton
- '09 Dwyane Wade
- '09 Chris Paul
- '09 LeBron James
- '01 Ray Allen
Couple notes.
First, the obvious Celtics bias. Mathematically, it's not that bad: Bird, McHale, Walton, and Allen make four, which is 33% of the roster, for the second-most-talented franchise ever. The big problem here is basically that McHale and Walton (and Allen) are not close to good enough to be on this roster. They're not even in the conversation. How does one make a case for McHale over, say, Kevin Garnett, who would be a vast improvement at defense, an excellent team player, and just overall better? How do you argue for Walton over, I don't know, Hakeem Shaq Ewing Robinson even Dwight Howard, ANYONE else other than Walton? The presumption here is that the '86 Celtics were the peak of teammate-ship, and that anyone Simmons can pull from that roster is gonna be a crucial piece on this roster. This is just straight homer nonsense.
Second, all the other biases. Dropping Kobe for Dwyane Wade is outrageous, and all but the most egregious haters should be able to understand why. It's not a coincidence that Simmons's least favorite player ever got dropped from this list. It's also not a coincidence that there are three--count them, three--seasons on this list from 2009, and it's not because 2009 happened to be the greatest individual year in basketball history. No, this is why: Guess what year the Book of Basketball was released. That's right--2009! So Simmons is throwing in three seasons from the year he just witnessed, because apparently his memory doesn't go far enough back to think of anyone who might be a better fit. Imagine if I made a team and included 2017 Westbrook, 2017 Harden, AND 2017 Kawhi. That's basically what we're talking about here. And by the way, those are all stronger choices than the ones Simmons made.
Third, and most ridiculous. Simmons, as I mentioned, spends the whole book basically building up to the reveal of the obvious Secret. Then he completely fucking disregards it and throws a bunch of superstars on his team at random. Here's Simmons's criteria for what he wants on his team:
"Don’t forget that a formula of 'unselfishness + character + defense + rebounding + MJ' will run the Martians out of the gym unless they have an eight-foot-three center we didn’t know about."
And here are some of the ways he completely ignored that formula in forming his team:
- Michael Jordan is and was an asshole. This isn't even controversial; it's basically universally acknowledged. He punched Steve Kerr, ruined Kwame Brown, and alienated anyone who wouldn't bend to his unassailable will. I think the justification for Jordan being here is basically that he coexisted with the '92 Dream Team and with Scottie Pippen, but that misses the point badly: the Dream Team let him take the lead because the Olympics were a gimme and Jordan was the only superstar still in his prime (seriously, revisit that roster), and Scottie Pippen only coexisted with Jordan because he was happy to take second fiddle on the offense and first responsibilities on the defense. Can you imagine Jordan trying to get along with Shaq, or even Bynum? Or Dwight? I'll check the microfiche, but I'm pretty sure Kobe never punched a teammate in practice. Yet Jordan is somehow a lock for this team? The team that's built with the specific requirement that it be full of good teammates?
- In general, I don't know why Jordan is considered to be a necessary piece to win a championship. He won six, yes, but it was with a team that was specifically built both to suit his talents and to disguise his weaknesses, with players who were committed to taking inferior roles so that Jordan could shine as the superstar, and with a coach who intimately understood Jordan's psychology and knew exactly how to manipulate him to greater heights.
- Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Dywane Wade, and Ray Allen are all pretty mediocre at defense. The Bird excuse is "he jumped passing lanes," and people just kinda pretend that Wade and Allen were better than they really were.
- It's probably more notable that Simmons doesn't have ANYONE on his roster who particularly excels at defense far more than offense. He falls into the classic trap: thinking that players who score a lot of points are necessarily better than players who don't. But points are highly duplicable; with teammates like this, if you don't score that basket, your teammate probably will. Defense, though--you can never have too many good defenders. Or rebounders, or passers, or great teammates. The kind that doesn't punch the other players on the team.
- He says "rebounding" but doesn't take the greatest rebounder of all time, Dennis Rodman. He considers taking Rodman but decides against it, presumably because he doesn't think Rodman can coexist on this roster. Never mind that Rodman already coexisted with the worst personality on this roster for three years and won three championships with him.
- The other big thing that Simmons misses entirely is the rise of three-point shooting as an absolute offensive necessity in the past few years. This one he isn't entirely to blame for--who could have seen Steph Curry coming?--but he bears responsibility nonetheless.
Anyway. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of problems with Simmons's implementation of the Wine Cellar premise. I can do it better, and have, and will, but the focus of this article is explicitly on Simmons and his terrible choices. Next I'm going to cover a couple prerequisites for my big Wine Cellar article: I'll talk about Jordan, and why he's a bad choice; I'll talk about Kobe, and why he's a better choice; I may even mention Rodman, and why he's an indispensable choice. But I'll tell you one thing: My team will have players on it who didn't score a lot, who focused more on other aspects of offense, or even on defense (!). My team will be full of great teammates, elite defenders, selfless players, and dominant rebounders. My team will be so good that it will kick Simmons's team's asses up and down the court. Just you wait.
Simmons's whole book is basically building up to the reveal of what he calls The Secret. Spoiler alert: The Secret is not actually a secret, nor is it surprising to anyone who has played or watched team sports at any level at any point in their life. At the risk of ruining your incentive to buy the book, The Secret is this: Being really successful in basketball is less about talent than it is about having the right people on your team. They need to like each other, to work together, to have compatible personalities. In short, team chemistry is an underrated factor in determining which teams are successful and which flop.
I know, shocker, right? Who could have deduced that from watching the '04 Lakers shit the bed, or watching the '04 Pistons band together and win it all? Seriously, this big Secret became blindingly obvious to everyone in those NBA Finals, if it somehow wasn't already.
Later in the book, Simmons describes his Wine Cellar Team. The premise is this: Aliens are coming to challenge Earth in basketball for dominion of the planet. We need to produce a team that can beat them. But we get an advantage: We can choose any player from any year of their career and put them on our team. For instance, not only can we pick Magic Johnson, we can specifically pick 1985 Magic Johnson.
And the key? He wants players who understand and embody The Secret. Guys who are unselfish and dedicated to to team. Good teammates who understand when to step into the spotlight and when to defer to their better teammates. Not just a big jumble of superstars, but guys who understood their role and could fill it to perfection.
So it's maybe a little bit fucking shocking that his team is basically a giant mess of superstars and personalities plus half the starting lineup of the 1986 Boston Celtics.
I'm not joking. Here's his roster:
- '86 Larry Bird
- '03 Tim Duncan
- '85 Magic Johnson
- '92 Michael Jordan
- '77 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- '86 Kevin McHale (seriously???)
- '92 Scottie Pippen
- '77 Bill Walton
- '09 Dwyane Wade
- '09 Chris Paul
- '09 LeBron James
- '01 Ray Allen
Couple notes.
First, the obvious Celtics bias. Mathematically, it's not that bad: Bird, McHale, Walton, and Allen make four, which is 33% of the roster, for the second-most-talented franchise ever. The big problem here is basically that McHale and Walton (and Allen) are not close to good enough to be on this roster. They're not even in the conversation. How does one make a case for McHale over, say, Kevin Garnett, who would be a vast improvement at defense, an excellent team player, and just overall better? How do you argue for Walton over, I don't know, Hakeem Shaq Ewing Robinson even Dwight Howard, ANYONE else other than Walton? The presumption here is that the '86 Celtics were the peak of teammate-ship, and that anyone Simmons can pull from that roster is gonna be a crucial piece on this roster. This is just straight homer nonsense.
Second, all the other biases. Dropping Kobe for Dwyane Wade is outrageous, and all but the most egregious haters should be able to understand why. It's not a coincidence that Simmons's least favorite player ever got dropped from this list. It's also not a coincidence that there are three--count them, three--seasons on this list from 2009, and it's not because 2009 happened to be the greatest individual year in basketball history. No, this is why: Guess what year the Book of Basketball was released. That's right--2009! So Simmons is throwing in three seasons from the year he just witnessed, because apparently his memory doesn't go far enough back to think of anyone who might be a better fit. Imagine if I made a team and included 2017 Westbrook, 2017 Harden, AND 2017 Kawhi. That's basically what we're talking about here. And by the way, those are all stronger choices than the ones Simmons made.
Third, and most ridiculous. Simmons, as I mentioned, spends the whole book basically building up to the reveal of the obvious Secret. Then he completely fucking disregards it and throws a bunch of superstars on his team at random. Here's Simmons's criteria for what he wants on his team:
"Don’t forget that a formula of 'unselfishness + character + defense + rebounding + MJ' will run the Martians out of the gym unless they have an eight-foot-three center we didn’t know about."
And here are some of the ways he completely ignored that formula in forming his team:
- Michael Jordan is and was an asshole. This isn't even controversial; it's basically universally acknowledged. He punched Steve Kerr, ruined Kwame Brown, and alienated anyone who wouldn't bend to his unassailable will. I think the justification for Jordan being here is basically that he coexisted with the '92 Dream Team and with Scottie Pippen, but that misses the point badly: the Dream Team let him take the lead because the Olympics were a gimme and Jordan was the only superstar still in his prime (seriously, revisit that roster), and Scottie Pippen only coexisted with Jordan because he was happy to take second fiddle on the offense and first responsibilities on the defense. Can you imagine Jordan trying to get along with Shaq, or even Bynum? Or Dwight? I'll check the microfiche, but I'm pretty sure Kobe never punched a teammate in practice. Yet Jordan is somehow a lock for this team? The team that's built with the specific requirement that it be full of good teammates?
- In general, I don't know why Jordan is considered to be a necessary piece to win a championship. He won six, yes, but it was with a team that was specifically built both to suit his talents and to disguise his weaknesses, with players who were committed to taking inferior roles so that Jordan could shine as the superstar, and with a coach who intimately understood Jordan's psychology and knew exactly how to manipulate him to greater heights.
- Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Dywane Wade, and Ray Allen are all pretty mediocre at defense. The Bird excuse is "he jumped passing lanes," and people just kinda pretend that Wade and Allen were better than they really were.
- It's probably more notable that Simmons doesn't have ANYONE on his roster who particularly excels at defense far more than offense. He falls into the classic trap: thinking that players who score a lot of points are necessarily better than players who don't. But points are highly duplicable; with teammates like this, if you don't score that basket, your teammate probably will. Defense, though--you can never have too many good defenders. Or rebounders, or passers, or great teammates. The kind that doesn't punch the other players on the team.
- He says "rebounding" but doesn't take the greatest rebounder of all time, Dennis Rodman. He considers taking Rodman but decides against it, presumably because he doesn't think Rodman can coexist on this roster. Never mind that Rodman already coexisted with the worst personality on this roster for three years and won three championships with him.
- The other big thing that Simmons misses entirely is the rise of three-point shooting as an absolute offensive necessity in the past few years. This one he isn't entirely to blame for--who could have seen Steph Curry coming?--but he bears responsibility nonetheless.
Anyway. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of problems with Simmons's implementation of the Wine Cellar premise. I can do it better, and have, and will, but the focus of this article is explicitly on Simmons and his terrible choices. Next I'm going to cover a couple prerequisites for my big Wine Cellar article: I'll talk about Jordan, and why he's a bad choice; I'll talk about Kobe, and why he's a better choice; I may even mention Rodman, and why he's an indispensable choice. But I'll tell you one thing: My team will have players on it who didn't score a lot, who focused more on other aspects of offense, or even on defense (!). My team will be full of great teammates, elite defenders, selfless players, and dominant rebounders. My team will be so good that it will kick Simmons's team's asses up and down the court. Just you wait.
Friday, March 31, 2017
The NBA MVP is a bad, bad award
The MVP is a terrible award. This is true in basically every league, but it's especially true in the NBA. In the NFL, at least there's a decent chance that the winning player was the best quarterback in the league that year, although this is certainly not always the case. In the NBA, there is no implication whatsoever that the MVP was the best player in the league. They don't even pretend that it's about that; everyone who's lining up to name James Harden MVP is quick to acknowledge that if the award were going to the best player in the league, it would be LeBron's. (They're wrong--LeBron doesn't try during the regular season, and I guess just no one's watching him enough to realize that? Which is understandable, given what Westbrook and Harden are doing this year. Whereas Westbrook is currently trying harder--and playing better--than anyone since Kobe Bryant in 2006.)
The MVP. That acronym is for Most Valuable Player, which most people know but which no one really stops to talk about. I've said in the past that MVP, interpreted literally, can be hard to measure, and this is true. But it's not hard to define. A player's value can be expressed straightforwardly in the following way:
- Take each player in the league off their team and compare their team's performance with and without them. The player whose team falls off the most without him is the most valuable.
Of course this is really hard to measure (except in a few cases), which is what should make MVP an interesting award. But the people who vote on this award are sportswriters and broadcasters who completely ignore the concept of value in favor of their horrifyingly bad definition: The best player on the best team, or more generally the best player on one of the two or three best teams.
Which raises a problem: Generally the best teams have more than one great player, meaning that if you removed the "MVP" from their team, the team would still perform fairly well. Case in point: when Michael Jordan retired the first time, the Bulls' wins went from 57 (in '93, with Jordan) to 55 (in '94, without Jordan). That's a win differential of two. In what world can that be called "valuable"?? (N.B. Jordan didn't win MVP in '93, but he won it in '92 and '91.) In fact, given the suddenness of Jordan's retirement and the stability of the team in between those two seasons, this may be the best example in NBA history of why players considered among the league's "Most Valuable" sometimes bring very little literal value to the table. (Note that this is not an indictment of Jordan's abilities, merely an illustration of why the voters' definition of value is explicitly terrible.)
So what kind of players can be said to be genuinely valuable? They're still probably going to be among the league's superstars; while I'm sure the Suns would miss him, and his 70-point game was very impressive, there's almost definitely no chance that Devin Booker is one of the league's most valuable players. Moreover, these players will probably tend to appear on at least good teams, albeit probably not great ones; if their team is garbage, that's probably an indicator that the player isn't actually bringing all that much value to the table.
The Most Valuable Player ever--for a single season, that is--is probably Kobe Bryant in 2006. (The Most Valuable Player of all time, for his career, is almost certainly Dennis Rodman.) Bryant played on a team that, if it hadn't had him, would have been the worst in the league--by far--and quite possibly one of the worst in history. That team, aside from Kobe, starred Lamar Odom (well before he got good in 2011 and won SMOTY), Smush Parker, Kwame Brown, Chris Mihm, Devean George, Luke Walton, and Brian Cook. There wasn't even another league average player there; every one of Kobe's teammates would have struggled to start, or even get minutes, on any other team.
So here's what Kobe did. In January, he dropped 81 points, the second-most ever scored in a game, and dragged his team to a win over Toronto. In December, he dropped 62 points in three quarters, outscoring the entire Dallas Mavericks team combined--a team that would go on to win 60 games. In January, he averaged 43.4 points per game, for the entire month. In April (not counting postseason), he averaged 41.6. That's TWO forty-point months in the same season! (For reference, Jordan NEVER had a 40-point month. Not once. Kobe did it an additional two times: February of '03, and March of '07. March of '07, by the way, he also put up 50+ points in four straight games: 65, 50, 60, and 50. Don't ever tell me Jordan's a better scorer.)
Kobe dragged that sack of D-league burnouts to a seven seed, where they faced a Phoenix Suns team that was on fire, led by MVP (hahaha) Steve Nash, plus Shawn Marion, Raja Bell, Boris Diaw, Kurt Thomas, and a deep bench of players who all would have been the second best Laker on the opposite roster. The Lakers had absolutely no business being there. They were facing a team that was superior in virtually every respect. Most people expected a sweep. But Kobe dragged the Lakers to a seven-game series against the Suns before finally succumbing.
That's value.
So here's our approximate methodology for finding the players who ACTUALLY contribute serious value to their teams:
1. We limit our search to elite players, since they're the only ones who are good enough to add this kind of value;
2. We focus on teams that are not at the very top of the league, since they can likely afford to lose one superstar without falling off too far;
3. We find the players whose teammates are so bad that without their superstar, the team would be vastly worse than they are.
James Harden is generally considered the frontrunner for MVP this season. This is a mistake, but not as bad of one as it might appear. The Houston Rockets live to shoot threes and score in the paint; it's almost literally all they do, and they're exceptional at it. James Harden is the perfect fit for this team. His game has always been oriented around shooting either from three or from the basket. And while he's actually shooting shockingly badly from three this year--34.5%, a career low (!!)--his vision makes up for it, and he's leading the league with 11.2 assists per game. This is a plane built for James Harden to pilot, and while it's not exactly the SSOL Suns in terms of its complexity (again, literally all they do is shoot threes and layups), he is probably pretty valuable to the team. But he's also a distant second this year for MOST valuable.
And that's because Russell Westbrook is having, as I think I mentioned way back at the start of the article, one of the most valuable seasons of all time. Let me emphatically state that the Thunder minus Westbrook are nowhere near as bad as the '06 Lakers minus Kobe. They're a lottery team, no doubt, but Oladipo, Adams, Gibson, Kanter, and probably a few other guys all would have been the second-best player on that Lakers squad. But that doesn't detract from what Russell Westbrook is doing. You probably know already, but I'm gonna spell it out anyway, because it's that amazing a season.
Russell Westbrook is averaging a triple-double--31.8 PPG, 10.6 RPG, 10.4 APG--while leading the league in scoring. Not only has that never happened, it's never even come CLOSE to happening (primarily because Oscar Robertson was playing at the same time as Wilt Chamberlain). A lot of guys have come close to averaging a triple-double: Oscar a bunch of times (including actually doing it once, in 1962), Magic Johnson in '82 (when he put up 18.6/9.6/9.5, led the league in steals, and somehow finished 8th in MVP voting), et al... but nobody's done it while also being the top scorer in the league.
Let me put this in perspective. Let's focus just on the points and the rebounds. The last time someone averaged 30+ PPG and 10+ RPG was Karl Malone in 1990. Robinson, Shaq, Hakeem, Ewing, Duncan, Garnett, Bynum--none of those guys ever achieved what Westbrook is almost certainly going to do this year. And he's a POINT GUARD.
Now let's look at just the points and assists. The last time someone averaged 30+ PPG and 10+ APG was Tiny Archibald in 1973. This one might be more understandable, since generally great passers tend to focus on passing rather than scoring--Magic, Nash, Jason Kidd--but it's still pretty incredible.
And finally, looking at just rebounds and assists: the last person to average 10 of each was, of course, Oscar Robertson in 1962.
Now realize that Westbrook is about to do all three of those things, simultaneously. And that he's doing it while also playing unbelievably well in the clutch, carrying his team Kobe-style to wins, dropping contested midrange jumpers in the fourth quarter and overtime--NOBODY does that anymore--and just generally annihilating the rest of the league. This isn't Kobe '06, value-wise, but it's the closest thing I've seen. It may be the closest thing in NBA history.
Russell Westbrook is the MVP. And while he may not win the NBA MVP, I feel like winning my blog's MVP is far more meaningful, if perhaps less prestigious.
The MVP. That acronym is for Most Valuable Player, which most people know but which no one really stops to talk about. I've said in the past that MVP, interpreted literally, can be hard to measure, and this is true. But it's not hard to define. A player's value can be expressed straightforwardly in the following way:
- Take each player in the league off their team and compare their team's performance with and without them. The player whose team falls off the most without him is the most valuable.
Of course this is really hard to measure (except in a few cases), which is what should make MVP an interesting award. But the people who vote on this award are sportswriters and broadcasters who completely ignore the concept of value in favor of their horrifyingly bad definition: The best player on the best team, or more generally the best player on one of the two or three best teams.
Which raises a problem: Generally the best teams have more than one great player, meaning that if you removed the "MVP" from their team, the team would still perform fairly well. Case in point: when Michael Jordan retired the first time, the Bulls' wins went from 57 (in '93, with Jordan) to 55 (in '94, without Jordan). That's a win differential of two. In what world can that be called "valuable"?? (N.B. Jordan didn't win MVP in '93, but he won it in '92 and '91.) In fact, given the suddenness of Jordan's retirement and the stability of the team in between those two seasons, this may be the best example in NBA history of why players considered among the league's "Most Valuable" sometimes bring very little literal value to the table. (Note that this is not an indictment of Jordan's abilities, merely an illustration of why the voters' definition of value is explicitly terrible.)
So what kind of players can be said to be genuinely valuable? They're still probably going to be among the league's superstars; while I'm sure the Suns would miss him, and his 70-point game was very impressive, there's almost definitely no chance that Devin Booker is one of the league's most valuable players. Moreover, these players will probably tend to appear on at least good teams, albeit probably not great ones; if their team is garbage, that's probably an indicator that the player isn't actually bringing all that much value to the table.
The Most Valuable Player ever--for a single season, that is--is probably Kobe Bryant in 2006. (The Most Valuable Player of all time, for his career, is almost certainly Dennis Rodman.) Bryant played on a team that, if it hadn't had him, would have been the worst in the league--by far--and quite possibly one of the worst in history. That team, aside from Kobe, starred Lamar Odom (well before he got good in 2011 and won SMOTY), Smush Parker, Kwame Brown, Chris Mihm, Devean George, Luke Walton, and Brian Cook. There wasn't even another league average player there; every one of Kobe's teammates would have struggled to start, or even get minutes, on any other team.
So here's what Kobe did. In January, he dropped 81 points, the second-most ever scored in a game, and dragged his team to a win over Toronto. In December, he dropped 62 points in three quarters, outscoring the entire Dallas Mavericks team combined--a team that would go on to win 60 games. In January, he averaged 43.4 points per game, for the entire month. In April (not counting postseason), he averaged 41.6. That's TWO forty-point months in the same season! (For reference, Jordan NEVER had a 40-point month. Not once. Kobe did it an additional two times: February of '03, and March of '07. March of '07, by the way, he also put up 50+ points in four straight games: 65, 50, 60, and 50. Don't ever tell me Jordan's a better scorer.)
Kobe dragged that sack of D-league burnouts to a seven seed, where they faced a Phoenix Suns team that was on fire, led by MVP (hahaha) Steve Nash, plus Shawn Marion, Raja Bell, Boris Diaw, Kurt Thomas, and a deep bench of players who all would have been the second best Laker on the opposite roster. The Lakers had absolutely no business being there. They were facing a team that was superior in virtually every respect. Most people expected a sweep. But Kobe dragged the Lakers to a seven-game series against the Suns before finally succumbing.
That's value.
So here's our approximate methodology for finding the players who ACTUALLY contribute serious value to their teams:
1. We limit our search to elite players, since they're the only ones who are good enough to add this kind of value;
2. We focus on teams that are not at the very top of the league, since they can likely afford to lose one superstar without falling off too far;
3. We find the players whose teammates are so bad that without their superstar, the team would be vastly worse than they are.
James Harden is generally considered the frontrunner for MVP this season. This is a mistake, but not as bad of one as it might appear. The Houston Rockets live to shoot threes and score in the paint; it's almost literally all they do, and they're exceptional at it. James Harden is the perfect fit for this team. His game has always been oriented around shooting either from three or from the basket. And while he's actually shooting shockingly badly from three this year--34.5%, a career low (!!)--his vision makes up for it, and he's leading the league with 11.2 assists per game. This is a plane built for James Harden to pilot, and while it's not exactly the SSOL Suns in terms of its complexity (again, literally all they do is shoot threes and layups), he is probably pretty valuable to the team. But he's also a distant second this year for MOST valuable.
And that's because Russell Westbrook is having, as I think I mentioned way back at the start of the article, one of the most valuable seasons of all time. Let me emphatically state that the Thunder minus Westbrook are nowhere near as bad as the '06 Lakers minus Kobe. They're a lottery team, no doubt, but Oladipo, Adams, Gibson, Kanter, and probably a few other guys all would have been the second-best player on that Lakers squad. But that doesn't detract from what Russell Westbrook is doing. You probably know already, but I'm gonna spell it out anyway, because it's that amazing a season.
Russell Westbrook is averaging a triple-double--31.8 PPG, 10.6 RPG, 10.4 APG--while leading the league in scoring. Not only has that never happened, it's never even come CLOSE to happening (primarily because Oscar Robertson was playing at the same time as Wilt Chamberlain). A lot of guys have come close to averaging a triple-double: Oscar a bunch of times (including actually doing it once, in 1962), Magic Johnson in '82 (when he put up 18.6/9.6/9.5, led the league in steals, and somehow finished 8th in MVP voting), et al... but nobody's done it while also being the top scorer in the league.
Let me put this in perspective. Let's focus just on the points and the rebounds. The last time someone averaged 30+ PPG and 10+ RPG was Karl Malone in 1990. Robinson, Shaq, Hakeem, Ewing, Duncan, Garnett, Bynum--none of those guys ever achieved what Westbrook is almost certainly going to do this year. And he's a POINT GUARD.
Now let's look at just the points and assists. The last time someone averaged 30+ PPG and 10+ APG was Tiny Archibald in 1973. This one might be more understandable, since generally great passers tend to focus on passing rather than scoring--Magic, Nash, Jason Kidd--but it's still pretty incredible.
And finally, looking at just rebounds and assists: the last person to average 10 of each was, of course, Oscar Robertson in 1962.
Now realize that Westbrook is about to do all three of those things, simultaneously. And that he's doing it while also playing unbelievably well in the clutch, carrying his team Kobe-style to wins, dropping contested midrange jumpers in the fourth quarter and overtime--NOBODY does that anymore--and just generally annihilating the rest of the league. This isn't Kobe '06, value-wise, but it's the closest thing I've seen. It may be the closest thing in NBA history.
Russell Westbrook is the MVP. And while he may not win the NBA MVP, I feel like winning my blog's MVP is far more meaningful, if perhaps less prestigious.
Friday, March 24, 2017
The NFL Conference Championship Mailbag, Except With Me
So a couple years ago (921 days, or 2 years, 6 months, 9 days, or 1.4 times an elephant's gestation period) I wrote this article, where I responded to mail that Bill Simmons got because A) I don't get mail and B) I'm better at life than him and C) he deserves it. Now it's 2017 or something and I want to do it again, and since I don't actually read Bill Simmons anymore (there are only so many Friday Night Lights references I can bear before I go insane and start smashing things), I just googled "NFL mailbag" and got one from TheRinger, which is just a bummer. But anyway, here we go.
Q: Given the ‘Hail Mary’ the week before and ‘The Throw’ this week, you’ve probably got a stack of mailbag responses the size of puffy Brendan Fraser about Aaron Rodgers. But here is one more. Has he entered the ‘Curry Zone’? For example, you’re not near a TV and get a text from Sal that simply reads, “AARON FUCKING RODGERS!” Is there anything that doesn’t enter your mind? Did he throw another Hail Mary? Did he make a roll out throw, running full speed to avoid a defender and place it on a dime to his receiver 54-yards away? Did he trip over the guard at the snap and throw a touchdown while sitting on his ass? It’s all in play until Twitter can give you the answer to what just happened!
— Kelly, Louisville
You know what? I just remembered why I hate Simmons (and his pathetic, imitative, simpering readerbase). I no longer want to do this. But I'm gonna power through, out of hatred. Is it strange that when I read "the Curry Zone" in the context of the NFL my mind went to Aaron Curry, rather than the presumable intention of Seth? I guess that dates me.
Simmons, disgustingly, refers in his answer to "that one crazy Devin Hester year." Motherfucker, it was TWO YEARS, 2006 and 2007, and they were two of the greatest years of my life. Simmons also references John Elway in the context of his being a great QB, which is horrifyingly wrong for a whole different set of reasons... but I'm not even gonna get into that here. God, I swear the only good part about having a blog is having already written all these arguments about things and people I love and/or hate in sports.
I'm not responding to the actual question here because it's terrible, not to mention shockingly ignorant of history: In what world could Aaron Rodgers possibly be considered more electric a player than, say, Michael Vick or Steve Young?
Q: I just heard something that I can’t put my finger on……………Not quite sure……..Can’t put my finger on it………………………..OH YEAH, THAT MUST BE THE SOUND OF YOUR ASS PUCKERING UP AT THE THOUGHT OF SEEING AARON RODGERS IN THE SUPER BOWL! Everywhere you go for the next few weeks, every time you see replays of that throw to Cook on the sideline, every highlight clip, every American Family commercial, your bunghole is going to pucker up like a snare drum, Simmons!!!! Don’t get comfortable because it is going to be a long few weeks, OK?
— Ryan M, Darlington, Wisc.
Ha. I hope you enjoyed the NFC championship, Ryan. Hope you enjoyed the Big 10 Championship. And the 2014 NFC Championship, and the week three Seahawks-Packers game in 2012. You remember, the one where Golden Tate caught the game-winning touchdown and sent the entire state of Wisconsin into a half-decade-long-and-counting fit of apoplectic, impotent rage?
Oh, and in what sense is a snare drum puckered? Puckered means--we're going dictionary here--"tightly gathered or contracted into wrinkles or small folds." A snare drum consists of two tense plastic sheets and a rattle of metal wires, which look like this, and not like the "puckered" coils you might be imagining. There is nothing whatsoever puckered about a snare drum. It is in fact one of the most tensely stretched things you can imagine, which is the diametric opposite of "puckered." God, what do they teach you in Wisconsin? How to make cheese? Or just how to lose important and high-profile football games in embarrassing ways?
Q: When Dallas nailed the field goal to tie the game at 31, the first thought that popped into my head was, “Oh boy, they left Aaron Rodgers too much time.” Who are your top-five all-time “left too much time” QBs?
— Benjamin, Hong Kong
Well, the obvious first choice is Vince Young, the king of the comeback. Tim Tebow is a close second, but only for those of us fortunate enough to witness the glory and spiritual ecstasy of his 2011 season, in which he led six Game-Winning Drives in 14 games and came thiiis close to converting the whole of his audience into whatever religion he is--it's so hard to remember, Judaism maybe?--but then got crushed by Bill Belichick, who I guess symbolizes either the devil or atheism, depending on your perspective, twice in five games, which more or less ended his career. But not before he won a legendary Wild Card game in Pittsburgh by tossing a gorgeous touchdown strike on the first play of overtime. What was the question again?
Q: Isn’t it time we finally got a QB matchup for the ages with Brady vs. Rodgers in the Super Bowl? With apologies to Brees vs. Manning, this would be the best Super Bowl QB matchup since Elway vs. Favre in Super Bowl 32. Rodgers and Brady are all-timers. If the Packers pull off the upset, I’m going to be pissed if the Patriots don’t win. We’ve already beaten Big Ben and Pittsburgh. I want Brady.
— Charlie B, Green Bay, Wisc.
My god, you actually think Elway vs. Favre was a BETTER matchup than Brady vs. Rodgers would have been? I don't even have words. Just mentally apply all the Wisconsin jokes I made two answers ago, because I don't even have the patience for this shit.
Q: Please make the mailbags a weekly Friday thing again. For 21 months I missed you and talked about the good old days. You are the longest breakup I have ever had where I have accepted someone back with open arms. Please don’t break my heart twice.
— Derek, New York
It was 30 months, actually, Drew, but thanks, I guess (2 years, 6 months, and 9 days, remember?). Wait, did you say Derek? I'm gonna stick with Drew. Also, how fucking self-indulgent is it that Simmons included THIS letter in his mailbag? (Said the guy answering someone else's mail.)
Q: Let’s play a game called “CAN YOU IMAGINE?” Can you imagine the media, league and fan outrage if Bill Belichick had been PROVED (key word is PROVED) to have called the Steelers “assholes,” or attempted to trip a player running down the field, or accused a franchise of screwing with their headsets and NOT apologized after the league took responsibility, or hadn’t reported a player’s injury for an entire regular season, or circumvented the salary cap to sign players, or hid cases of domestic abuse by one of his players, or had a player who admitted that he liked his footballs overinflated past league specifications, or piped noise into a stadium, or tampered with another team’s player while under contract then signed said player as soon as he was available, or violated offseason practice rules, or signed a player with a history of domestic abuse against a pregnant woman? No wonder Pats fans think there’s a double-standard in the NFL. Your thoughts?
— B. Williams, Grand Rapids, Mich.
I'm actually with you as far as the double standard goes, and I frankly detest Mike Tomlin and not only because of the tripping incident. But it's going to take a lot more than this to make me feel sympathy for Pats fans. Poor babies are only the fans of the most successful sports franchise of the past sixteen years (and tied with the Lakers over the past 17). This is a team that has missed the playoffs three times this millennium. They have more Super Bowl wins since 2013 than the Boston Celtics have NBA Championships since 1986. Get back in your cave, Pats fans.
Q: Read this sentence out loud: Marvin Lewis has been an NFL head coach for the same franchise for 14 years and has ZERO playoff wins. You forgot to mention the Bengals on your top-five tortured fan base list, right?
— Steven M., Cincinnati
I read it out loud. That's a pretty bad sentence. If you're going to give me instructions like that, you could at least have the courtesy to put in some effort. Take as your example Neil Gaiman: "It was at the end of February, in lambing season, when the world was cold, and a bitter wind howled down the moors and through the leafless forest, when icy rains fell from the leaden skies in continual drizzling showers, at six in the evening, after the sun had set and the sky was dark, that a wicker basket was pushed through the space in the wall."
Or Cormac McCarthy, for those of you who really want an example with the word "phallus" in it: "They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them."
Actually, you know what, do not send me any sentences with the word "phallus" in them. Send them to Simmons.
Q: Do we need to assign a new nickname to the new LA football team, similar to the Zombie Sonics moniker of old? I refuse to call this team the Chargers purely out of respect for San Diego fans.
— Alex, Cleveland
It will never cease to amuse me that somehow people don't realize that the Chargers were founded in LA and played their first season in LA. Oh, and by the way, both the Raiders (1982-94) and the Rams (1946-94) also had long stints in Los Angeles way before all this talk of relocation came about. Speaking of relocation, remember that time...
I can't do this. I can't pick on the Cleveland freaking Browns, especially when all you're really doing is showing solidarity with San Diego fans. I had this whole thing planned out, complete with a brutal, heartbreaking statistic (the team that used to be the Browns and became the Ravens has more Super Bowl wins since moving than the new Browns have playoff appearances) but I just can't follow through with it. I have nothing but respect for fans of a franchise that hasn't won a playoff game since I was one. And amidst all my hatred for Dan Gilbert, I really do like to see the city of Cleveland winning at something, especially if it keeps coming at the expense of Golden State. Stay strong, my friend. And call the Chargers the Football Clippers. That's a curse they can't shrug off.
Q: People in San Diego HATE LA, and vice versa. There are ZERO Charger fans in LA, they are all either Rams or Raiders fans. San Diego fans hate their owner too, so why in the world would they continue to support a team where they hate the owner AND the relocation? It would be similar to the Patriots moving to New York. Would you honestly still be a fan?
— Sam Miller
This isn't even true. People in LA don't care at all about people in San Diego. The same kind of one-way hatred exists between SF->LA and Portland->Seattle. It's because we (people in Seattle and/or LA) know our city's better, so we don't have to stress about it. Now, I have no idea how the relative cultures of New York and Boston compare on this basis, but I have to assume that Boston is the angry younger sibling who's really obsessed with winning and New York is the chill older sibling who sort of doesn't care (with maybe the exception of Yankees/Sox, which is probably more even fan-wise, if a little one-sided championships-wise).
But to answer your question, no, I would not support any of my teams if they moved. Know how I know? Because I hate the Thunder and root for not only their failure, but the failure of basically everyone who has ever played there (notably Durant and Harden at the moment). The one exception, which surprised even me, is that I'm pretty solidly on Team Westbrook in the MVP conversation right now. I kind of think he's putting up one of the two most impressive individual seasons of all time (up there with Wilt's 50 PPG, 25 RPG season in 1962). He's averaging a triple double while leading the league in scoring. I think we've lost sight of just how unthinkable that is. There's just nothing like it. And frankly I will be disgusted, albeit a little amused, when inevitably Harden wins the MVP. How absurd is it that the two most dominant individual offensive seasons in NBA history are BOTH going to be MVP runners-up at best?
Q: Who is the Aaron Rodgers of the NBA?
— Bert, Manila, Philippines
Let's see. An overrated efficiency nut who inherited his role from a gunslingin' Hall of Famer, likes to complain a lot when he loses to a team from the Pacific Northwest, and pops up way too frequently in Bill Simmons's mailbag?
Just kidding, I got nothing.
The closest thing would honestly be James Harden, if only because everyone is about to use a relatively minor advantage in a few cherry-picked advanced stats to justify giving him MVP over a superior, but slightly less efficient, player, when the real rationale is because he's lucky enough to have good teammates and a stronger record. Which you would think would run against the "Most Valuable" thing, but hey, I'm not a voter.
I resent Simmons's choice of Durant, if only because, as much as I dislike him, Rodgers would never do something as cowardly as Durant did. The equivalent would be, like, walking to the Patriots to be Brady's backup-slash-garbage-time-fill-in. After losing the Super Bowl to the Patriots. Because you threw a pick six in overtime.
Q: Le’Veon Bell compared himself to Steph Curry, but isn’t James Harden the perfect basketball comp for him? Incredible shiftiness and masterful secondary skills (Harden’s passing and Bell’s receiving) that make them virtually unstoppable. Get Bell some facial hair and it’ll be complete. I feel like the only way the Steelers win is if Bell has like 200 total yards. Unlikely, but then again, Harden did have a 53–17–16 this year. FEAR THE BEARD, SIMMONS!
— Taylor, Patchogue, N.Y.
LeVeon has put up 200 combined yards five times in his career. You might just be overstating his importance. Don't forget that the Steelers also have both a competent quarterback in Roethlisberger and maybe the best receiver in the league in Antonio Brown. The real question is: Who in the NFL has facial hair unappealing enough to be compared to Harden? Is it Luck?
Q: We just had a playoff game take a dramatic turn on a holding call on a man born the year Annie Hall won Best Picture, who regularly physically dominates freaks of nature in their athletic prime. This same man “spends $350,000 per year maintaining his body” and one of the things he does is “strange acupuncture.”
— Jeffrey Abell
There just literally isn't even a question here. This made me use all three of my garbage words (just, literally, even).
Q: Up here in Canada the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes were struggling to survive until they got bumped to a small university stadium to make way for a U2 concert. (True story.) Turns out that watching football in a small but packed stadium is much more fun than watching it in a half-full mausoleum, and Percival-Molson Stadium became their new permanent regular-season home. Mark my words: After the Chargers become the hottest ticket in town, Jacksonville will start working on their 30,000-seat facility.
— Damian Penny
Ha, that's cute. You think the LA Chargers are going to become "the hottest ticket in town," when that town is A) LA, and B) still LA? Three things you might not know about that city. First, people in LA don't care about football. The furthest anyone cares is basically wearing Raiders gear because it was cool when NWA did it. Second, the Chargers are the third-most-popular of the three past-and/or-present LA teams, and frankly even the Rams are not exactly popular right now. Third, LA is just not a football town. It is a basketball town, and a little bit of a baseball town, but there's a reason all three football teams left: Despite being the second biggest market in the country, LA can't support two NFL teams. It probably can't even support one.
Q: You’re a Raiders fan and you stumble upon a hot tub time machine in Vegas that can be used only once. Do you go back in time and change the Immaculate Reception or the Tuck Rule? Do you possibly stop the Steelers dynasty of the ’70s before it starts, or do you potentially erase Tom F-ing Brady from the history books? (In my best Keanu voice) “What do you do, Bill, what do you do?!”
— Lucas, Evansville, Ind.
It's probably indicative of the Raiders' culture of losing that this question isn't "Which option gives you a better chance of winning the Super Bowl," but rather, "Which option is more spiteful." The thing is, you fucked up: beating the Steelers in 1972 does nothing. They didn't even make the Super Bowl that year; it was the 14-0 Dolphins. How do you not know this?
Here's the other thing you fucked up: If the Pats lose in the Tuck Rule game in '01, they're not gonna say, "Well, the Brady Experiment is over. Guess we'll start Bledsoe again." No way. Brady in 2001 started 14 games, winning 11; put up an 86.5 passer rating; and got invited to the Pro Bowl. Bledsoe in 2001 was 29, hadn't had a season that good since 1997, and was very clearly the second-best quarterback on the team. So while beating the Pats would have prevented them from winning their first Super Bowl, they would still presumably go on to win at least four more. The biggest thing that happens historically is the Greatest Show on Turf looks a lot more impressive.
So neither option is actually going to change history (not like, say, preventing Bledsoe's injury or beating the Steelers in one of the years that they actually won the Super Bowl). That being the case, which year gives the Raiders a better shot at the trophy? In 2001, they would have had to go through the 13-3 Steelers and the 14-2 Rams; in 1972, it would have been the 14-0 Dolphins and the 11-3 Redskins.
I'm actually going to go with the '72 Raiders on this one. The '01 Raiders had a BAD defense (19th in the league in points allowed per game), and it's fair to say that even if they'd made it through the Steelers they would have gotten eviscerated by the Rams in the Super Bowl. Kurt Warner might have dropped 500 yards on them. And while the '72 Dolphins are scary, record-wise, they're actually somewhat unconvincing as far as all-time-great teams go, and the Raiders did surprisingly well in common matchups. That being said it's a long road either way.
But honestly, the biggest factor involved here should be historicity. The point of this exercise is to give Raiders fans a chance to correct something that went wrong. The Immaculate Reception, for all the controversy surrounding it, was the right call. The ball clearly bounced off Tatum, making the reception legal. The Tuck Rule is more controversial, and I can see both sides of the argument. While I can understand why a ref might think Brady was still in the "throwing" motion, I think the play should have been ruled a fumble, and I absolutely do not think it should have been overturned. Besides, the Immaculate Reception is one of the greatest plays in NFL history. Don't ruin that. Fix the Tuck Rule.
Q: So me and my buddy Sam have had a seven-year wager on who would appear in the Simmons mailbag first. Last week I was ecstatic to see one of my Knicks points made the bag! But then he said, “Hey, this isn’t like the ESPN bag. For all we know, Simmons maybe got a total of like 100 emails for this one. This would be like you scoring with a once-hot actress who’s now in her late 60s.”
— Morris
There's a Q but not, like, a question mark, or a question. There's not even an indicative upward inflection, at least not that I can see. And where am I supposed to assume you're from, Morris? Unincorporated territories? Get out.
Q: So, a buddy of mine has a theory that deserves more airtime. 2016 by all accounts was a relentless disaster: Unless you were a diehard Republican, pretty much the only positive thing was the Cubbies finally winning the World Series. What if 108 years of collective angst, despair, and soul bartering finally … worked? For as long as I’ve known them, all my friends who are Cubs fans have prattled on about “Man, I would give ANYTHING to see the boys win one!” What if 2016 was the universe finally cashing that ticket?
— Joe, Boston
I like how you say "for as long as I've known them," as if maybe your friends are 109 years old and you just didn't know them in the days before the Cubs' dry streak.
Q: Since the Falcons had Future and Bow Wow (Ciara’s exes) as sideline guests when they played the Seahawks, what’s the worst possible guest that a remaining QB would not want to see on game day?
— Alex T.
I'm gonna go ahead and not answer this one.
Q: If the Patriots win this weekend, what are the chances that (a) Trump has the NSA/CIA/FBI dig up dirt to blackmail the Super Bowl officials or Falcons/Packers players/coaches and cause an “accident” or arrest of players/coaches (something to help the Pats win), and (b) that some combination of Brady/Belichick/Kraft put Trump up to it? I have a feeling Trump’s going to end up with a Super Bowl 51 ring and then give it to Putin. That’s the reason Russia interfered with the election: Putin wants another Pats SB ring.
— Abbet, San Bernardino, Calif.
I'm tempted to make a joke about liberals, but that risks my readers thinking I'm a conservative.
Q: Let’s say Larry Bird and Tom Brady show up at your front door at 4 a.m. and give you something like, “Bill, we got in big trouble in L.A. and need a place to crash.” Who gets the guest room and who gets the couch?
— Pedro, Brazil
Bird gets the bed, for his back. Duh. As for on an emotional level, I'm gonna need different people for this to work. Let's say Kobe Bryant and Russell Wilson? Russ can have the guest bed. Kobe can have my fuckin' bed. I'll take the couch. Don't ever say I'm disloyal. (Then again, neither Kobe nor Russell supposedly sleeps more than a handful of hours a night, so... problem solved?)
Q: The list of QBs that New England has faced this season: Palmer, Tannehill, Taylor, Whitehurst, Dalton, Jones, Wilson, Kaepernick, Fitzpatrick, Goff, Flacco, Siemian, Moore and Lossweiler. The Patriots played ONE top 15 QB all season, at home, and lost. Do we really even know how good this Pats team is? Does reading that list at least put doubts in your mind about the validity of the 14–2 regular-season record?
— John Iezzi
The Patriots also got shut out 16-0 by the Bills. I don't have a response to this question--I'm from the future and it wouldn't really be fair for me to comment--but I'm just really hoping we never forget that. 16-0.
Q: You wrote: “Last note: Celtics radio voice Sean Grande recently compared Thomas’s offensive leap to that of Roy Hobbs in The Natural. For me, it feels more like David Ortiz’s unexpected leap as a cleanup hitter, when Boston fans kept saying to each other, ‘I can’t tell if this is a fluke or something more legitimate … but it’s starting to feel legitimate … right???’” So … steroids?
— TJ Olszweski
Legitimately, maybe. I mean, "steroids" is a little naive; the world of performance-enhancing drugs is vast, beautiful, and terrifying. But when you see a guy make a leap like this--and at the ripe old age of 27, to boot--you have to wonder.
Just kidding. Isaiah was a stud at UW (legend), he was a borderline stud in Sacramento (20/3/6 with 1.3 steals a game isn't nothing), and he's been improving every year in Boston. I don't think this is a PED leap. I think it's just my little man growing up.
Q: Now that we’ve lost half of the Manning Face tag-team and Playoff Eli is dead, is the Andy Reid Face the best Face in the National Football League? The Manning Face always looks like they smelled a rank fart in an elevator. The Andy Reid Face looks like a guy waking up from a coma, having no idea where he’s at and REALLY wanting a Double-Double Animal Style. Or will this argument be made moot by Roger Goodell Face if/when the Pats beat the Pack in the highest-rated Super Bowl ever?
— Cameron K, Austin, Texas
Dude, who doesn't wake up wanting a Double-Double Animal Style? But he's in Kansas City. I would think barbeque would be a better option. Speaking of which, you're in fucking Austin. How did your mind NOT immediately go to barbeque? Get your shit together.
Q: Is there a better hypothetical argument starter than “The Raiders Should Have Always Been in Vegas?” Al Davis (R.I.P.) wore white jumpsuits, always told the league to go screw itself, and made draft decisions like he was hitting on 17 with a 2 showing. Now we have Mark Davis, a man who looks like he just came out of a casino after 14 straight hours of losing his shirt gambling, tipping waitresses with $1 chips, and offering I.O.U. payments to hookers. You thought there were some scary characters in the black hole for Oakland; what type of shenanigans will happen in Vegas? How many “muffed punts” and “missed field goals” will happen? I can’t wait to see what happens.
— Andrew G.
Yeah, these very legitimate concerns about the integrity of the league that you bring up are strong arguments AGAINST your point. Why exactly are you wanting this? Are you just unaffiliated, and so you're not gonna care when your team gets screwed by Vegas bookies paying off the punter to get himself blocked? The average punter in this league is paid like $2 million. Do you know how much money a dirty bookie stands to make by fudging the line of a big game? Do you know how significant a seven-point swing is? I'm probably overreacting here, but god damn.
Q: The story line of the NFL rescheduling the Steelers-Chiefs game for safety reasons was hilarious. The Sunday night playoff game had way bigger ratings than a 1 p.m. game. When has Goodell ever done the right thing based on safety???
— Ryan, Denver
Defenseless receivers? Crown of the helmet? Ringing any bells? Speaking of bells, has there ever been a reference more dated than Simmons's "Pull this leg and it plays jingle bells"?? It's not even from that long ago, it's just somehow intrinsically way older than it actually is.
Q: Roger Staubach should have made your “Greatest QB” list somewhere, right? Whether it’s in the “What if?” category since he served four years in the Navy (before his Cowboys career started), or on the actual list itself, I would put him ahead of Aikman and Bradshaw even though Staubach did have good weapons. Plus, he invented the Hail Mary even if it was a clear push-off by Drew Pearson. Glad to have you back writing again.
— Adam N., Orlando, Fla.
Yeah, like tenth. And yeah, above Aikman and Bradshaw, no question. Glad to be back, Adam.
Q: Does it strike you at all odd that we have an NFC championship favorite trotting out a likely MVP QB, guiding an offense that just tied the freaking Greatest Show on Turf for total points in a season, and is playing at home where they’re historically a much tougher team, and yet all the conversation has consisted of the entire media world collectively jerking off to the other team’s QB? (And rightfully so, Aaron Rodgers is an alien, I’m convinced.) NFL.com actually ran an article calling Aaron Rodgers the Michael Jordan of football for freak’s sake. Do you get the same feeling I do that there’s huge potential for a great Matty Ice/Falcons FU game here? I mean aren’t we really one non-superhuman Aaron Rodgers performance away from the Packers’ one-man band getting shit on in a 20-point laugher Sunday?
— Daniel G
Before we start with the Jordan comparisons, let's wait for Rodgers to drop out of the league to play mediocre baseball, then come back and punch Steve Kerr while getting carried to a championship by Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. That's what happened, right? Seriously, though, if we're calling Jordan GOAT, isn't it kind of insulting to compare him to Rodgers when Brady is in the other conference championship game?
Good call on the game, by the way. It turned out to be a 23-point laugher, so you are what we in the biz refer to as "wrong," but you were close. In much the same way that a missed free throw is close.
Q: Love your website and your articles. Just asking for a quick favor. In your Jan. 13 mailbag there is a question posted from someone by the name of Mike Piekarski, with no specification of where the reader is from. That just so happens to be my name as well. Is there any way you can either change the name, or put in some clarification of where the reader is writing from? It’s not a very common name, and I don’t want people thinking that I’m asking questions about actors ejaculating.
— Mike Piekarski
Why would you ever NOT want that?
Q: When I first heard you throw out the idea that every Leo movie would be better with Matt Damon as the lead, I thought it’s just Bill being Bill. There was just no possible way for me to wrap my head around the concept that there was anything Leo couldn’t do as an actor. And then one awful, sleepless Wednesday night at about 2 in the morning while watching one of the 30 HBO channels, a gift presented itself to me. The gift of clarity. [Scotty Doesn't Know] This brief cameo was proof to me and all others that there is nothing Matt Damon can’t do. For all the nonbelievers go ahead and try to picture Leo ever doing something like this … you couldn’t do it, could you? Game. Set. Match. DAMON.
— Matthew Rosati
Fair point, and I love this scene (and song and movie) so much that I won't even say anything cutting and bitter.
Q: Is there a better back-to-back-to-back stretch of performances/movies than Rob Lowe in ’85-’86 … St. Elmo’s Fire-Youngblood-About Last Night…? He’s the legitimate star in all three (even though Emilio Estevez was first billed in St. Elmo’s!) and all three were released between June 1985 and July 1986. So, let’s call this stretch Rob’s best “season.” Think Yaz in ’67, when the Triple Crown was legitimate (sorry Miggy in 2012). Is there another actor’s season that stacks up against Rob Lowe’s Triple Crown–winning performance of ’85-’86?
— Corey Leiseth
I'ma let you finish or whatever but Secretariat had the best Triple Crown of all time. Of all time! In all seriousness, Secretariat is probably one of the three most dominant athletes ever, along with Don Bradman and Wayne Gretzky. Okay, favorite stat from each of those three guys (or horses, as the case may be):
- In 1973, Secretariat won the Triple Crown, which consists of the Belmont Stakes (see above link), the Preakness Stakes, and the Kentucky Derby. He still, to this day, holds the all-time records in EACH of those three races, despite them being the three most competitive in horse-racing.
(Ben Morris raises the interesting argument that the only reason Secretariat stands as the best racehorse of all time* is because the advancement of the sport has plateaued for the past forty-four years, and that if horse athletes had kept advancing in the same way that human athletes have, Secretariat would have been left behind. I kind of hate this argument. There's quite a bit of evidence that humans aren't actually becoming better athletes as much as we're benefiting from better technology, better nutrition, and a much larger pool of talent. None of those things really apply to horses, and there's no reason to hold that against Secretariat. He's the GHOAT: the Greatest Horse of All Time. Deal with it.)
* I'm using "best" here in a surface-level sense: he beats all other horses in the three biggest horse-races in the world. If you want to do "greatest," it's a matter of taste between Secretariat and Man o' War, a champion racehorse from 1920. If you want "most dominant," Man o' War almost definitely takes it; he only lost one race, and it was basically a crazy fluke. He didn't win the Triple Crown because his owner didn't feel like racing him in the Derby; the first Triple Crown winner had been Sir Barton in 1919, but people didn't start caring about the Triple Crown as an entity until 1930, when Gallant Fox won it.
- In hockey, one can score points through either scoring goals or through assists. Wayne Gretzky was good at both: He is the career leader in goals, assists, and points. But that still sells him short. In fact, if Gretzky had never scored a goal in his entire career, he STILL would be the all-time leader in points, because his 1963 assists outpace Jaromir Jagr's 1909 points. (N.B. that Jagr is active and could theoretically close this gap, but he is also 45 and may very well not.)
- In cricket, a 40 batting average is considered very good. Most players are in the 20-40 range. Players north of 50 are very rare. Only six players, including Bradman, have career averages above 60; second place after Bradman is Adam Voges, at 61.87. Don Bradman's career batting average is 99.94. He is literally more than 60% more productive than the next best batters. That not only outstrips Gretzky (who's about 50% more productive than the next guy), but it's also a rate stat, not a volume stat. A better comparison might be points per game in hockey, a stat in which Gretzky is (of course) first all-time, but by a much narrower margin (1.921 to Mario Lemieux's 1.883. Note that there is then a much bigger gap to Mike Bossy, 1.497, in third place). A surprisingly good comparison might be an NBA player averaging 50 points per game for their CAREER.
I'd like to see Rob Lowe do that. Actually, who am I kidding, he's Rob Lowe. He probably could.
Q: I have a theory: for TV shows where nudity is in play, the nudity-independent quality of a particular season is directly proportional to the quality of nudity in that season. The two most obvious examples are Homeland and True Detective — both had amazing first seasons with A+ nudity, and both fell off a cliff in subsequent seasons (in both respects). Thrones, on the other hand, has maintained consistency in both areas over the years. I can’t think of any counter examples, can you?
— Mike G
No, because I get laid.
Q: It is like the girl you had one amazing sexually charged night with, who leaves in the morning and you don’t know her name or contact info. The mailbag returning is like that girl walking back into your life and saying ‘Want to date?’ Yes, yes, yes it is back. My question as a huge Patriots fan and knowing how crazy Bills Mafia is — if the Bills ever won the Super Bowl, wouldn’t that be the most insane SB parade in history? Think about it, they would slam themselves into tables, have dildos everywhere and the town would run out of alcohol and City Hall would be burned down. Glad to have the mailbag back.
— Fuck ESPN, Kendall
Q: Given the ‘Hail Mary’ the week before and ‘The Throw’ this week, you’ve probably got a stack of mailbag responses the size of puffy Brendan Fraser about Aaron Rodgers. But here is one more. Has he entered the ‘Curry Zone’? For example, you’re not near a TV and get a text from Sal that simply reads, “AARON FUCKING RODGERS!” Is there anything that doesn’t enter your mind? Did he throw another Hail Mary? Did he make a roll out throw, running full speed to avoid a defender and place it on a dime to his receiver 54-yards away? Did he trip over the guard at the snap and throw a touchdown while sitting on his ass? It’s all in play until Twitter can give you the answer to what just happened!
— Kelly, Louisville
You know what? I just remembered why I hate Simmons (and his pathetic, imitative, simpering readerbase). I no longer want to do this. But I'm gonna power through, out of hatred. Is it strange that when I read "the Curry Zone" in the context of the NFL my mind went to Aaron Curry, rather than the presumable intention of Seth? I guess that dates me.
Simmons, disgustingly, refers in his answer to "that one crazy Devin Hester year." Motherfucker, it was TWO YEARS, 2006 and 2007, and they were two of the greatest years of my life. Simmons also references John Elway in the context of his being a great QB, which is horrifyingly wrong for a whole different set of reasons... but I'm not even gonna get into that here. God, I swear the only good part about having a blog is having already written all these arguments about things and people I love and/or hate in sports.
I'm not responding to the actual question here because it's terrible, not to mention shockingly ignorant of history: In what world could Aaron Rodgers possibly be considered more electric a player than, say, Michael Vick or Steve Young?
Q: I just heard something that I can’t put my finger on……………Not quite sure……..Can’t put my finger on it………………………..OH YEAH, THAT MUST BE THE SOUND OF YOUR ASS PUCKERING UP AT THE THOUGHT OF SEEING AARON RODGERS IN THE SUPER BOWL! Everywhere you go for the next few weeks, every time you see replays of that throw to Cook on the sideline, every highlight clip, every American Family commercial, your bunghole is going to pucker up like a snare drum, Simmons!!!! Don’t get comfortable because it is going to be a long few weeks, OK?
— Ryan M, Darlington, Wisc.
Ha. I hope you enjoyed the NFC championship, Ryan. Hope you enjoyed the Big 10 Championship. And the 2014 NFC Championship, and the week three Seahawks-Packers game in 2012. You remember, the one where Golden Tate caught the game-winning touchdown and sent the entire state of Wisconsin into a half-decade-long-and-counting fit of apoplectic, impotent rage?
Oh, and in what sense is a snare drum puckered? Puckered means--we're going dictionary here--"tightly gathered or contracted into wrinkles or small folds." A snare drum consists of two tense plastic sheets and a rattle of metal wires, which look like this, and not like the "puckered" coils you might be imagining. There is nothing whatsoever puckered about a snare drum. It is in fact one of the most tensely stretched things you can imagine, which is the diametric opposite of "puckered." God, what do they teach you in Wisconsin? How to make cheese? Or just how to lose important and high-profile football games in embarrassing ways?
Q: When Dallas nailed the field goal to tie the game at 31, the first thought that popped into my head was, “Oh boy, they left Aaron Rodgers too much time.” Who are your top-five all-time “left too much time” QBs?
— Benjamin, Hong Kong
Well, the obvious first choice is Vince Young, the king of the comeback. Tim Tebow is a close second, but only for those of us fortunate enough to witness the glory and spiritual ecstasy of his 2011 season, in which he led six Game-Winning Drives in 14 games and came thiiis close to converting the whole of his audience into whatever religion he is--it's so hard to remember, Judaism maybe?--but then got crushed by Bill Belichick, who I guess symbolizes either the devil or atheism, depending on your perspective, twice in five games, which more or less ended his career. But not before he won a legendary Wild Card game in Pittsburgh by tossing a gorgeous touchdown strike on the first play of overtime. What was the question again?
Q: Isn’t it time we finally got a QB matchup for the ages with Brady vs. Rodgers in the Super Bowl? With apologies to Brees vs. Manning, this would be the best Super Bowl QB matchup since Elway vs. Favre in Super Bowl 32. Rodgers and Brady are all-timers. If the Packers pull off the upset, I’m going to be pissed if the Patriots don’t win. We’ve already beaten Big Ben and Pittsburgh. I want Brady.
— Charlie B, Green Bay, Wisc.
My god, you actually think Elway vs. Favre was a BETTER matchup than Brady vs. Rodgers would have been? I don't even have words. Just mentally apply all the Wisconsin jokes I made two answers ago, because I don't even have the patience for this shit.
Q: Please make the mailbags a weekly Friday thing again. For 21 months I missed you and talked about the good old days. You are the longest breakup I have ever had where I have accepted someone back with open arms. Please don’t break my heart twice.
— Derek, New York
It was 30 months, actually, Drew, but thanks, I guess (2 years, 6 months, and 9 days, remember?). Wait, did you say Derek? I'm gonna stick with Drew. Also, how fucking self-indulgent is it that Simmons included THIS letter in his mailbag? (Said the guy answering someone else's mail.)
Q: Let’s play a game called “CAN YOU IMAGINE?” Can you imagine the media, league and fan outrage if Bill Belichick had been PROVED (key word is PROVED) to have called the Steelers “assholes,” or attempted to trip a player running down the field, or accused a franchise of screwing with their headsets and NOT apologized after the league took responsibility, or hadn’t reported a player’s injury for an entire regular season, or circumvented the salary cap to sign players, or hid cases of domestic abuse by one of his players, or had a player who admitted that he liked his footballs overinflated past league specifications, or piped noise into a stadium, or tampered with another team’s player while under contract then signed said player as soon as he was available, or violated offseason practice rules, or signed a player with a history of domestic abuse against a pregnant woman? No wonder Pats fans think there’s a double-standard in the NFL. Your thoughts?
— B. Williams, Grand Rapids, Mich.
I'm actually with you as far as the double standard goes, and I frankly detest Mike Tomlin and not only because of the tripping incident. But it's going to take a lot more than this to make me feel sympathy for Pats fans. Poor babies are only the fans of the most successful sports franchise of the past sixteen years (and tied with the Lakers over the past 17). This is a team that has missed the playoffs three times this millennium. They have more Super Bowl wins since 2013 than the Boston Celtics have NBA Championships since 1986. Get back in your cave, Pats fans.
Q: Read this sentence out loud: Marvin Lewis has been an NFL head coach for the same franchise for 14 years and has ZERO playoff wins. You forgot to mention the Bengals on your top-five tortured fan base list, right?
— Steven M., Cincinnati
I read it out loud. That's a pretty bad sentence. If you're going to give me instructions like that, you could at least have the courtesy to put in some effort. Take as your example Neil Gaiman: "It was at the end of February, in lambing season, when the world was cold, and a bitter wind howled down the moors and through the leafless forest, when icy rains fell from the leaden skies in continual drizzling showers, at six in the evening, after the sun had set and the sky was dark, that a wicker basket was pushed through the space in the wall."
Or Cormac McCarthy, for those of you who really want an example with the word "phallus" in it: "They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them."
Actually, you know what, do not send me any sentences with the word "phallus" in them. Send them to Simmons.
Q: Do we need to assign a new nickname to the new LA football team, similar to the Zombie Sonics moniker of old? I refuse to call this team the Chargers purely out of respect for San Diego fans.
— Alex, Cleveland
It will never cease to amuse me that somehow people don't realize that the Chargers were founded in LA and played their first season in LA. Oh, and by the way, both the Raiders (1982-94) and the Rams (1946-94) also had long stints in Los Angeles way before all this talk of relocation came about. Speaking of relocation, remember that time...
I can't do this. I can't pick on the Cleveland freaking Browns, especially when all you're really doing is showing solidarity with San Diego fans. I had this whole thing planned out, complete with a brutal, heartbreaking statistic (the team that used to be the Browns and became the Ravens has more Super Bowl wins since moving than the new Browns have playoff appearances) but I just can't follow through with it. I have nothing but respect for fans of a franchise that hasn't won a playoff game since I was one. And amidst all my hatred for Dan Gilbert, I really do like to see the city of Cleveland winning at something, especially if it keeps coming at the expense of Golden State. Stay strong, my friend. And call the Chargers the Football Clippers. That's a curse they can't shrug off.
Q: People in San Diego HATE LA, and vice versa. There are ZERO Charger fans in LA, they are all either Rams or Raiders fans. San Diego fans hate their owner too, so why in the world would they continue to support a team where they hate the owner AND the relocation? It would be similar to the Patriots moving to New York. Would you honestly still be a fan?
— Sam Miller
This isn't even true. People in LA don't care at all about people in San Diego. The same kind of one-way hatred exists between SF->LA and Portland->Seattle. It's because we (people in Seattle and/or LA) know our city's better, so we don't have to stress about it. Now, I have no idea how the relative cultures of New York and Boston compare on this basis, but I have to assume that Boston is the angry younger sibling who's really obsessed with winning and New York is the chill older sibling who sort of doesn't care (with maybe the exception of Yankees/Sox, which is probably more even fan-wise, if a little one-sided championships-wise).
But to answer your question, no, I would not support any of my teams if they moved. Know how I know? Because I hate the Thunder and root for not only their failure, but the failure of basically everyone who has ever played there (notably Durant and Harden at the moment). The one exception, which surprised even me, is that I'm pretty solidly on Team Westbrook in the MVP conversation right now. I kind of think he's putting up one of the two most impressive individual seasons of all time (up there with Wilt's 50 PPG, 25 RPG season in 1962). He's averaging a triple double while leading the league in scoring. I think we've lost sight of just how unthinkable that is. There's just nothing like it. And frankly I will be disgusted, albeit a little amused, when inevitably Harden wins the MVP. How absurd is it that the two most dominant individual offensive seasons in NBA history are BOTH going to be MVP runners-up at best?
Q: Who is the Aaron Rodgers of the NBA?
— Bert, Manila, Philippines
Let's see. An overrated efficiency nut who inherited his role from a gunslingin' Hall of Famer, likes to complain a lot when he loses to a team from the Pacific Northwest, and pops up way too frequently in Bill Simmons's mailbag?
Just kidding, I got nothing.
The closest thing would honestly be James Harden, if only because everyone is about to use a relatively minor advantage in a few cherry-picked advanced stats to justify giving him MVP over a superior, but slightly less efficient, player, when the real rationale is because he's lucky enough to have good teammates and a stronger record. Which you would think would run against the "Most Valuable" thing, but hey, I'm not a voter.
I resent Simmons's choice of Durant, if only because, as much as I dislike him, Rodgers would never do something as cowardly as Durant did. The equivalent would be, like, walking to the Patriots to be Brady's backup-slash-garbage-time-fill-in. After losing the Super Bowl to the Patriots. Because you threw a pick six in overtime.
Q: Le’Veon Bell compared himself to Steph Curry, but isn’t James Harden the perfect basketball comp for him? Incredible shiftiness and masterful secondary skills (Harden’s passing and Bell’s receiving) that make them virtually unstoppable. Get Bell some facial hair and it’ll be complete. I feel like the only way the Steelers win is if Bell has like 200 total yards. Unlikely, but then again, Harden did have a 53–17–16 this year. FEAR THE BEARD, SIMMONS!
— Taylor, Patchogue, N.Y.
LeVeon has put up 200 combined yards five times in his career. You might just be overstating his importance. Don't forget that the Steelers also have both a competent quarterback in Roethlisberger and maybe the best receiver in the league in Antonio Brown. The real question is: Who in the NFL has facial hair unappealing enough to be compared to Harden? Is it Luck?
Q: We just had a playoff game take a dramatic turn on a holding call on a man born the year Annie Hall won Best Picture, who regularly physically dominates freaks of nature in their athletic prime. This same man “spends $350,000 per year maintaining his body” and one of the things he does is “strange acupuncture.”
— Jeffrey Abell
There just literally isn't even a question here. This made me use all three of my garbage words (just, literally, even).
Q: Up here in Canada the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes were struggling to survive until they got bumped to a small university stadium to make way for a U2 concert. (True story.) Turns out that watching football in a small but packed stadium is much more fun than watching it in a half-full mausoleum, and Percival-Molson Stadium became their new permanent regular-season home. Mark my words: After the Chargers become the hottest ticket in town, Jacksonville will start working on their 30,000-seat facility.
— Damian Penny
Ha, that's cute. You think the LA Chargers are going to become "the hottest ticket in town," when that town is A) LA, and B) still LA? Three things you might not know about that city. First, people in LA don't care about football. The furthest anyone cares is basically wearing Raiders gear because it was cool when NWA did it. Second, the Chargers are the third-most-popular of the three past-and/or-present LA teams, and frankly even the Rams are not exactly popular right now. Third, LA is just not a football town. It is a basketball town, and a little bit of a baseball town, but there's a reason all three football teams left: Despite being the second biggest market in the country, LA can't support two NFL teams. It probably can't even support one.
Q: You’re a Raiders fan and you stumble upon a hot tub time machine in Vegas that can be used only once. Do you go back in time and change the Immaculate Reception or the Tuck Rule? Do you possibly stop the Steelers dynasty of the ’70s before it starts, or do you potentially erase Tom F-ing Brady from the history books? (In my best Keanu voice) “What do you do, Bill, what do you do?!”
— Lucas, Evansville, Ind.
It's probably indicative of the Raiders' culture of losing that this question isn't "Which option gives you a better chance of winning the Super Bowl," but rather, "Which option is more spiteful." The thing is, you fucked up: beating the Steelers in 1972 does nothing. They didn't even make the Super Bowl that year; it was the 14-0 Dolphins. How do you not know this?
Here's the other thing you fucked up: If the Pats lose in the Tuck Rule game in '01, they're not gonna say, "Well, the Brady Experiment is over. Guess we'll start Bledsoe again." No way. Brady in 2001 started 14 games, winning 11; put up an 86.5 passer rating; and got invited to the Pro Bowl. Bledsoe in 2001 was 29, hadn't had a season that good since 1997, and was very clearly the second-best quarterback on the team. So while beating the Pats would have prevented them from winning their first Super Bowl, they would still presumably go on to win at least four more. The biggest thing that happens historically is the Greatest Show on Turf looks a lot more impressive.
So neither option is actually going to change history (not like, say, preventing Bledsoe's injury or beating the Steelers in one of the years that they actually won the Super Bowl). That being the case, which year gives the Raiders a better shot at the trophy? In 2001, they would have had to go through the 13-3 Steelers and the 14-2 Rams; in 1972, it would have been the 14-0 Dolphins and the 11-3 Redskins.
I'm actually going to go with the '72 Raiders on this one. The '01 Raiders had a BAD defense (19th in the league in points allowed per game), and it's fair to say that even if they'd made it through the Steelers they would have gotten eviscerated by the Rams in the Super Bowl. Kurt Warner might have dropped 500 yards on them. And while the '72 Dolphins are scary, record-wise, they're actually somewhat unconvincing as far as all-time-great teams go, and the Raiders did surprisingly well in common matchups. That being said it's a long road either way.
But honestly, the biggest factor involved here should be historicity. The point of this exercise is to give Raiders fans a chance to correct something that went wrong. The Immaculate Reception, for all the controversy surrounding it, was the right call. The ball clearly bounced off Tatum, making the reception legal. The Tuck Rule is more controversial, and I can see both sides of the argument. While I can understand why a ref might think Brady was still in the "throwing" motion, I think the play should have been ruled a fumble, and I absolutely do not think it should have been overturned. Besides, the Immaculate Reception is one of the greatest plays in NFL history. Don't ruin that. Fix the Tuck Rule.
Q: So me and my buddy Sam have had a seven-year wager on who would appear in the Simmons mailbag first. Last week I was ecstatic to see one of my Knicks points made the bag! But then he said, “Hey, this isn’t like the ESPN bag. For all we know, Simmons maybe got a total of like 100 emails for this one. This would be like you scoring with a once-hot actress who’s now in her late 60s.”
— Morris
There's a Q but not, like, a question mark, or a question. There's not even an indicative upward inflection, at least not that I can see. And where am I supposed to assume you're from, Morris? Unincorporated territories? Get out.
Q: So, a buddy of mine has a theory that deserves more airtime. 2016 by all accounts was a relentless disaster: Unless you were a diehard Republican, pretty much the only positive thing was the Cubbies finally winning the World Series. What if 108 years of collective angst, despair, and soul bartering finally … worked? For as long as I’ve known them, all my friends who are Cubs fans have prattled on about “Man, I would give ANYTHING to see the boys win one!” What if 2016 was the universe finally cashing that ticket?
— Joe, Boston
I like how you say "for as long as I've known them," as if maybe your friends are 109 years old and you just didn't know them in the days before the Cubs' dry streak.
Q: Since the Falcons had Future and Bow Wow (Ciara’s exes) as sideline guests when they played the Seahawks, what’s the worst possible guest that a remaining QB would not want to see on game day?
— Alex T.
I'm gonna go ahead and not answer this one.
Q: If the Patriots win this weekend, what are the chances that (a) Trump has the NSA/CIA/FBI dig up dirt to blackmail the Super Bowl officials or Falcons/Packers players/coaches and cause an “accident” or arrest of players/coaches (something to help the Pats win), and (b) that some combination of Brady/Belichick/Kraft put Trump up to it? I have a feeling Trump’s going to end up with a Super Bowl 51 ring and then give it to Putin. That’s the reason Russia interfered with the election: Putin wants another Pats SB ring.
— Abbet, San Bernardino, Calif.
I'm tempted to make a joke about liberals, but that risks my readers thinking I'm a conservative.
Q: Let’s say Larry Bird and Tom Brady show up at your front door at 4 a.m. and give you something like, “Bill, we got in big trouble in L.A. and need a place to crash.” Who gets the guest room and who gets the couch?
— Pedro, Brazil
Bird gets the bed, for his back. Duh. As for on an emotional level, I'm gonna need different people for this to work. Let's say Kobe Bryant and Russell Wilson? Russ can have the guest bed. Kobe can have my fuckin' bed. I'll take the couch. Don't ever say I'm disloyal. (Then again, neither Kobe nor Russell supposedly sleeps more than a handful of hours a night, so... problem solved?)
Q: The list of QBs that New England has faced this season: Palmer, Tannehill, Taylor, Whitehurst, Dalton, Jones, Wilson, Kaepernick, Fitzpatrick, Goff, Flacco, Siemian, Moore and Lossweiler. The Patriots played ONE top 15 QB all season, at home, and lost. Do we really even know how good this Pats team is? Does reading that list at least put doubts in your mind about the validity of the 14–2 regular-season record?
— John Iezzi
The Patriots also got shut out 16-0 by the Bills. I don't have a response to this question--I'm from the future and it wouldn't really be fair for me to comment--but I'm just really hoping we never forget that. 16-0.
Q: You wrote: “Last note: Celtics radio voice Sean Grande recently compared Thomas’s offensive leap to that of Roy Hobbs in The Natural. For me, it feels more like David Ortiz’s unexpected leap as a cleanup hitter, when Boston fans kept saying to each other, ‘I can’t tell if this is a fluke or something more legitimate … but it’s starting to feel legitimate … right???’” So … steroids?
— TJ Olszweski
Legitimately, maybe. I mean, "steroids" is a little naive; the world of performance-enhancing drugs is vast, beautiful, and terrifying. But when you see a guy make a leap like this--and at the ripe old age of 27, to boot--you have to wonder.
Just kidding. Isaiah was a stud at UW (legend), he was a borderline stud in Sacramento (20/3/6 with 1.3 steals a game isn't nothing), and he's been improving every year in Boston. I don't think this is a PED leap. I think it's just my little man growing up.
Q: Now that we’ve lost half of the Manning Face tag-team and Playoff Eli is dead, is the Andy Reid Face the best Face in the National Football League? The Manning Face always looks like they smelled a rank fart in an elevator. The Andy Reid Face looks like a guy waking up from a coma, having no idea where he’s at and REALLY wanting a Double-Double Animal Style. Or will this argument be made moot by Roger Goodell Face if/when the Pats beat the Pack in the highest-rated Super Bowl ever?
— Cameron K, Austin, Texas
Dude, who doesn't wake up wanting a Double-Double Animal Style? But he's in Kansas City. I would think barbeque would be a better option. Speaking of which, you're in fucking Austin. How did your mind NOT immediately go to barbeque? Get your shit together.
Q: Is there a better hypothetical argument starter than “The Raiders Should Have Always Been in Vegas?” Al Davis (R.I.P.) wore white jumpsuits, always told the league to go screw itself, and made draft decisions like he was hitting on 17 with a 2 showing. Now we have Mark Davis, a man who looks like he just came out of a casino after 14 straight hours of losing his shirt gambling, tipping waitresses with $1 chips, and offering I.O.U. payments to hookers. You thought there were some scary characters in the black hole for Oakland; what type of shenanigans will happen in Vegas? How many “muffed punts” and “missed field goals” will happen? I can’t wait to see what happens.
— Andrew G.
Yeah, these very legitimate concerns about the integrity of the league that you bring up are strong arguments AGAINST your point. Why exactly are you wanting this? Are you just unaffiliated, and so you're not gonna care when your team gets screwed by Vegas bookies paying off the punter to get himself blocked? The average punter in this league is paid like $2 million. Do you know how much money a dirty bookie stands to make by fudging the line of a big game? Do you know how significant a seven-point swing is? I'm probably overreacting here, but god damn.
Q: The story line of the NFL rescheduling the Steelers-Chiefs game for safety reasons was hilarious. The Sunday night playoff game had way bigger ratings than a 1 p.m. game. When has Goodell ever done the right thing based on safety???
— Ryan, Denver
Defenseless receivers? Crown of the helmet? Ringing any bells? Speaking of bells, has there ever been a reference more dated than Simmons's "Pull this leg and it plays jingle bells"?? It's not even from that long ago, it's just somehow intrinsically way older than it actually is.
Q: Roger Staubach should have made your “Greatest QB” list somewhere, right? Whether it’s in the “What if?” category since he served four years in the Navy (before his Cowboys career started), or on the actual list itself, I would put him ahead of Aikman and Bradshaw even though Staubach did have good weapons. Plus, he invented the Hail Mary even if it was a clear push-off by Drew Pearson. Glad to have you back writing again.
— Adam N., Orlando, Fla.
Yeah, like tenth. And yeah, above Aikman and Bradshaw, no question. Glad to be back, Adam.
Q: Does it strike you at all odd that we have an NFC championship favorite trotting out a likely MVP QB, guiding an offense that just tied the freaking Greatest Show on Turf for total points in a season, and is playing at home where they’re historically a much tougher team, and yet all the conversation has consisted of the entire media world collectively jerking off to the other team’s QB? (And rightfully so, Aaron Rodgers is an alien, I’m convinced.) NFL.com actually ran an article calling Aaron Rodgers the Michael Jordan of football for freak’s sake. Do you get the same feeling I do that there’s huge potential for a great Matty Ice/Falcons FU game here? I mean aren’t we really one non-superhuman Aaron Rodgers performance away from the Packers’ one-man band getting shit on in a 20-point laugher Sunday?
— Daniel G
Before we start with the Jordan comparisons, let's wait for Rodgers to drop out of the league to play mediocre baseball, then come back and punch Steve Kerr while getting carried to a championship by Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. That's what happened, right? Seriously, though, if we're calling Jordan GOAT, isn't it kind of insulting to compare him to Rodgers when Brady is in the other conference championship game?
Good call on the game, by the way. It turned out to be a 23-point laugher, so you are what we in the biz refer to as "wrong," but you were close. In much the same way that a missed free throw is close.
Q: Love your website and your articles. Just asking for a quick favor. In your Jan. 13 mailbag there is a question posted from someone by the name of Mike Piekarski, with no specification of where the reader is from. That just so happens to be my name as well. Is there any way you can either change the name, or put in some clarification of where the reader is writing from? It’s not a very common name, and I don’t want people thinking that I’m asking questions about actors ejaculating.
— Mike Piekarski
Why would you ever NOT want that?
Q: When I first heard you throw out the idea that every Leo movie would be better with Matt Damon as the lead, I thought it’s just Bill being Bill. There was just no possible way for me to wrap my head around the concept that there was anything Leo couldn’t do as an actor. And then one awful, sleepless Wednesday night at about 2 in the morning while watching one of the 30 HBO channels, a gift presented itself to me. The gift of clarity. [Scotty Doesn't Know] This brief cameo was proof to me and all others that there is nothing Matt Damon can’t do. For all the nonbelievers go ahead and try to picture Leo ever doing something like this … you couldn’t do it, could you? Game. Set. Match. DAMON.
— Matthew Rosati
Fair point, and I love this scene (and song and movie) so much that I won't even say anything cutting and bitter.
Q: Is there a better back-to-back-to-back stretch of performances/movies than Rob Lowe in ’85-’86 … St. Elmo’s Fire-Youngblood-About Last Night…? He’s the legitimate star in all three (even though Emilio Estevez was first billed in St. Elmo’s!) and all three were released between June 1985 and July 1986. So, let’s call this stretch Rob’s best “season.” Think Yaz in ’67, when the Triple Crown was legitimate (sorry Miggy in 2012). Is there another actor’s season that stacks up against Rob Lowe’s Triple Crown–winning performance of ’85-’86?
— Corey Leiseth
I'ma let you finish or whatever but Secretariat had the best Triple Crown of all time. Of all time! In all seriousness, Secretariat is probably one of the three most dominant athletes ever, along with Don Bradman and Wayne Gretzky. Okay, favorite stat from each of those three guys (or horses, as the case may be):
- In 1973, Secretariat won the Triple Crown, which consists of the Belmont Stakes (see above link), the Preakness Stakes, and the Kentucky Derby. He still, to this day, holds the all-time records in EACH of those three races, despite them being the three most competitive in horse-racing.
(Ben Morris raises the interesting argument that the only reason Secretariat stands as the best racehorse of all time* is because the advancement of the sport has plateaued for the past forty-four years, and that if horse athletes had kept advancing in the same way that human athletes have, Secretariat would have been left behind. I kind of hate this argument. There's quite a bit of evidence that humans aren't actually becoming better athletes as much as we're benefiting from better technology, better nutrition, and a much larger pool of talent. None of those things really apply to horses, and there's no reason to hold that against Secretariat. He's the GHOAT: the Greatest Horse of All Time. Deal with it.)
* I'm using "best" here in a surface-level sense: he beats all other horses in the three biggest horse-races in the world. If you want to do "greatest," it's a matter of taste between Secretariat and Man o' War, a champion racehorse from 1920. If you want "most dominant," Man o' War almost definitely takes it; he only lost one race, and it was basically a crazy fluke. He didn't win the Triple Crown because his owner didn't feel like racing him in the Derby; the first Triple Crown winner had been Sir Barton in 1919, but people didn't start caring about the Triple Crown as an entity until 1930, when Gallant Fox won it.
- In hockey, one can score points through either scoring goals or through assists. Wayne Gretzky was good at both: He is the career leader in goals, assists, and points. But that still sells him short. In fact, if Gretzky had never scored a goal in his entire career, he STILL would be the all-time leader in points, because his 1963 assists outpace Jaromir Jagr's 1909 points. (N.B. that Jagr is active and could theoretically close this gap, but he is also 45 and may very well not.)
- In cricket, a 40 batting average is considered very good. Most players are in the 20-40 range. Players north of 50 are very rare. Only six players, including Bradman, have career averages above 60; second place after Bradman is Adam Voges, at 61.87. Don Bradman's career batting average is 99.94. He is literally more than 60% more productive than the next best batters. That not only outstrips Gretzky (who's about 50% more productive than the next guy), but it's also a rate stat, not a volume stat. A better comparison might be points per game in hockey, a stat in which Gretzky is (of course) first all-time, but by a much narrower margin (1.921 to Mario Lemieux's 1.883. Note that there is then a much bigger gap to Mike Bossy, 1.497, in third place). A surprisingly good comparison might be an NBA player averaging 50 points per game for their CAREER.
I'd like to see Rob Lowe do that. Actually, who am I kidding, he's Rob Lowe. He probably could.
Q: I have a theory: for TV shows where nudity is in play, the nudity-independent quality of a particular season is directly proportional to the quality of nudity in that season. The two most obvious examples are Homeland and True Detective — both had amazing first seasons with A+ nudity, and both fell off a cliff in subsequent seasons (in both respects). Thrones, on the other hand, has maintained consistency in both areas over the years. I can’t think of any counter examples, can you?
— Mike G
No, because I get laid.
Q: It is like the girl you had one amazing sexually charged night with, who leaves in the morning and you don’t know her name or contact info. The mailbag returning is like that girl walking back into your life and saying ‘Want to date?’ Yes, yes, yes it is back. My question as a huge Patriots fan and knowing how crazy Bills Mafia is — if the Bills ever won the Super Bowl, wouldn’t that be the most insane SB parade in history? Think about it, they would slam themselves into tables, have dildos everywhere and the town would run out of alcohol and City Hall would be burned down. Glad to have the mailbag back.
— Fuck ESPN, Kendall
Nah, the Bills at least made four straight Super Bowls in the '90s; that right there is a pretty impressive streak. I'm going with the Browns or the Lions. If either of those teams win the Super Bowl, they will make the Bills look like the Patriots crossed with the Yankees and strained through the Celtics. Make it the Browns. The entire city of Cleveland would shut down. Not for a day. Forever. They'd wake up MONTHS from now in Canada or the ruins of Baltimore. Art Modell's decaying corpse impaled on a spike. On that note, I'm out.
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