The LeBron's

Until tonight, I never believed in the Cavaliers. I thought that they were just the LeBron's and that their playoff performance against the Magic last year justified that belief. I watched in disgust as a team that has (in my humble opinion) the greatest player in the league fell from grace. They tripped, they fell, they tumbled, and nothing LeBron could do would stop the inevitable crash as a team that would have easily lost to a Garnett-lead Celtics team slowly crushed the playoff life out of them.

What bothered me most was the way in which Cleveland lost. The game plan seemed to be give James the ball, and pray for true greatness to occur for 48 minutes on 7 separate occasions. This worked as much as it could, but even LeBron transcendent him was not enough to outlast a clever and effectively coached Stan Van Gundy team as they ground the LeBron's to a stop. And when things got rough, the "coach of the year" disappeared. He would arbitrarily place James on a random Magic player and blow a 7 point half-time lead within 3 minutes of the start of the third quarter. He would deliberately run plays that had LeBron shooting fade-away jump shots. It was madness.

Tonight, I eagerly watched the Hawks and the Cavaliers play in Atlanta. If I were to have told you that LeBron was going to play very poorly offensively, against a hostile crowd and a fired-up Hawks team, you would have told me (erroneously) that the Cavs would certainly add another loss to their record. My statement to you would have been wrong, though, so do not judge yourself too harshly. LeBron did play incredibly poorly offensively. He almost had as many turnovers as he did made shots. He missed time after time when he had a chance to blow the game open. What fascinated me was the lack of the other two premises upon which my statement stood. The crowd was not hostile. The Hawks were not fired-up.

This is partially their fault, but I would like to give credit to the Cavaliers more than take it away from Atlanta. Mike Brown's preparation for this game, right after an emotional victory over the Lakers, was impeccable. It astonished me. He prepared a defensive scheme that made Joe Johnson look much worse than LeBron did in this game. It involved James shutting him down and throwing different double-teams at him every time he touched the ball. His execution silenced an emotional team and emptied a stadium full of fans thirsty for vengeance after an embarrassing sweep from last year. It reminded us what a championship caliber team looks like, and what a team that is not nearly there, regardless of what PER might lead us to believe, truly is. For now, my hat is off to Mr. Brown. He shocked me. The Cavs won with teamwork, and gutsy play from both Mo Williams and Delonte West. They won with fierce defense, certainly worthy of any team in the NBA. Most importantly, they won with LeBron shooting six for twenty (yes that is 30%), missing all five shots from beyond the arc, turning the ball over 4 times, and mere mortal play. Goodbye LeBron's, hello Cleveland.

True Garbage

What has happened? I remember recently sending a slightly over-enthusiastic text message to my brother which stated that the Utah Jazz were fifth in team PER as rated by Hollinger. This was big news. For once I believed in this ridiculous statistic (the individual one is better, but I still have my doubts about it as well) partly because of my obvious biases toward my hometown team, but also because it described what I was seeing myself with the few bits of box scores, two-minute highlights, the win-loss spread over the last ten games, and other scraps that I can accrue in Seattle.

Then Minnesota struck. For the fourth time of the season and the second time against Utah. Of their twenty losses, Deron Williams owns none. Of their four wins, Carlos Boozer owns half. This is pathetic. And after beating such teams as the Lakers, the Magic, and the Spurs, no less. This was then followed up by a 2-3 road trip, in which I was able to watch one of the most sloppy games I have ever seen against the Heat. Dwayne Wade usually owns the Jazz, but on this day, he didn't even have to (he did score 29 points). Carlos Boozer scored 12 points in the first couple minutes and then 2 points (free throws!) for the rest of the game. Okur looked like a joke. A big ugly, joke. I hate to pick on the guy. Lord knows every team needs an unathletic white center who can't play defense, can't create his own shots, rarely rebounds, and can shoot threes all day, while making a slightly less than great percentage of them. In defense of the big man, he did do something that very few (if any) have done before and very few (if any) will do again: he made Boozer look like a first-team defensive player.

What makes me more furious about this team is the trade of Eric Maynor. Unless this is the precursor to a blockbuster trade of Boozer for a good big man, this trade is unacceptable. If the Jazz didn't want to pay over the salary cap, they shouldn't have re-signed both Boozer and Milsap. Don't ruin the future to make up for your poor off-season management. At this point, I am at a loss: I don't know which league the GM is watching. We are slow, we can't play defense, and we are wasting the talent of a truly brilliant player in Williams. Now, we have ruined the great picks of two rookies (one undrafted) to clear up some money (apparently). Utah is too good for this. We have too much tradition for it. We were infamous as a dirty, defensive team that was *nasty*. Now, it seems that management of the team is content to sit back and sneak into the playoffs in a very talented conference, unwilling and unable to make bold moves and surround our only hope for salvation with some real talent, instead of ugly big men (Lamar Odom still looks and balls like Ms. America compared to Okur). This is all I want for belated Christmas: a dedication to trying to win a championship, risking losing more games while attempting to win more. In the words of another ugly white guy, "Merry Fucking Christmas." (Larry Bird)

Why It's Hard to Follow Basketball from Afar

This video conveys my general feeling of trying to glean NBA coverage without actually attending games or watching them on TV. True, this video is for LA fans, by what a slight bit of research would probably reveal is the local Lakers TV channel. But it speaks to a larger point. This game was largely covered in the national media as a case of Kobe having a broken finger. Which isn't to say that Kobe's finger, his sickness, or playing two games in a row didn't have anything to do with the loss. But it seems to me that the sports media's obsession with stories they already know leaves them unable to cover stories they don't know. What we end up seeing, presuming we don't have the local Utah Jazz station, is very much like the video that opened this post. It's a reel of Lakers highlights, and yet, if we ever glance at the score, we'd notice that the Lakers are behind and staying there.

This isn't to single out the Lakers, who are generally singled out as the NBA team (but that misses the point). I think the larger problem is staying on top of stories as they develop. It's waiting for things to be solidified in stone so you don't end up making the wrong calls. Predicting a team is going to the moon, when its only going to Minnesota. It seems to me (though, granted, my view is askance and taken from afar; meaning I don't follow the NBA nearly as much as I should to be pontificating on its followers' weaknesses, but that's my life) that coverage of the league always lags about a year behind where it should. Therefore, the Orlando Magic are one of this year's big stories. Not to say that that's wrong, but I suspect that other teams are creeping up, ready to strike when everyone in the media least expects it. Pretty soon it'll be mid spring and journalists will start making a retroactive case that 09/10 was their year, ensuring that we'll be inundated with mass amounts of coverage of them as next year's team to watch, while yet another team (one hopes the Jazz) prepares for its moment.

Then again, its very hard to predict these things. Is Atlanta the future of the league, or was November just a hot month? I don't know. (And its hard to know when I only hear about the Hawks in relation to the Celtics, which is partly the fault of coverage and partly the fault of my own biases: my strong emotional connection to Garnet over, say, Josh Smith. But that emotional bias, which limits my ability to take in Hawks or Smith stories as important to me, is itself due to a lack of past coverage, a lack of any narrative to connect new data to.) What I do know, however, is the way coverage is means that really awesome stuff often doesn't make it onto the public consciousness to every one's detriment. And although that video might not capture the whole truth of the league either, it does show that our current vision may be heavily distorted. Plus, it provides solid evidence for my beliefs about Farmer.