Sweet Stench of Success

To answer your question, Alistair, what happened was the real King showed up.

Lebron James, global icon, was never designed to win gritty, team-driven, playoff basketball games. He was designed to sell shoes and make witty commercials where five versions of the King argue about who gets the last piece of honey-glazed ham at a family dinner. Lebron James made his Decision on national television because that's where Lebron James lives - on national television. In some ways, the grand project of James' life is just as well-served being the loser of the NBA finals as it would have been had he emerged victorious.

This series aside, James will always be compared unfavorably to Michael Jordan. When Jordan was growing up, playing college ball, even his first few years in the Association, basketball was very different than it is today. Jordan changed that with his shoe line, his Jumpman logo, and his ridiculous level of play that made being clutch in the Finals the final benchmark of all success. Until the Jordan era, a little kid in Akron (or Santa Claus, IN, or the Bronx) didn't practice layups on a rim with no net dreaming of becoming a "global icon". Maybe a comfortable life for them and their families. Maybe some small measure of local fame. But never an icon.

Lebron James has made every move from a young age - switching from football to basketball, a more star driven sport, playing out of his mind in the Olympics, televising the crucifixion of Cleveland - to extend the limits of his own hype. Dirk Nowitzki just became a first-ballot hall of famer, something we'll likely appreciate more in 20 years than we will for the next four, or as long as the volatile experiment in South Beach is hanging on the tips of everyone's tongues. Whether by his own doing or the media's creation, Lebron James is the center of the basketball universe, even in defeat. The fact is, Lebron James wasn't just afraid of the moment - he was terrified. Karl Malone did not play his best basketball in the 98 finals, and lost to one of the all-time great teams. Charles Barkely did play at his best in 1993, but was never going to beat MJ. Lebron James played like garbage against Dirk and a group of aging mid-level stars - he was outplayed by Jason Terry. The previous post discussed James' athleticism, his passing, his inhuman abilities to score the basketball - but he doesn't have the fierce will to win, the heart of a champion. And maybe he never wanted it.

In the 2007 NFL draft, the Oakland Raiders made one of the worst decisions in their franchise's checkered history by selecting Jamarcus Russell, the LSU quarterback, with the first overall selection. Russell had almost unmatched size and arm-strength. QB guru Tom Martinez, who has mentored everyone from Tom Brady to Dan Marino, called Russell the purest physical specimen he had ever coached. Sound familiar? After 3 years, and 40 million dollars, the Raiders cut loose Russell, who didn't have a competitive football bone in his body. No team has come calling at his door since. All Russell seemed to want was a fistful of dollars. All James wanted, and got, was his face on a thousand front pages. The expression on it, one of confusion and disgrace, was irrelevant.

Can Anyone Explain This To Me?

I'm at a total loss in explaining the LeBron James phenomenon. Look, let's be real, the guy is talented, seriously talented beyond belief. If we watch sports in general, and basketball in particular, to see athletes perform physically arduous tasks that challenge the limits of what the human frame can accomplish (and this is a large part of why we do watch sports), then LeBron James is the NBA's best player, possibly basketball's best player ever. As we have said over and over again on this blog: he is a point guard in Karl Malone's body. He has amazing dexterity and some of the most impressive and emphatic power of anyone who has ever left the ground. He dunks with impunity, getting to the basket as quickly and ferociously as a lion riding a freight train. It is impossible to write about him without resorting to these hoary cliches, because the words "amazing," "lion," "unbelievable," and "power" really describe him. And yet, impressive as his raw athleticism is, he is more than a jumping, running, dunking machine. He is a seriously good passer, finding his teammates in the right spots and at the right times with precision. He plays some of the best defense in the world (he completely shut down the league's MVP Derrick Rose in the last few minutes of game 5 against the Bulls). He has a high basketball IQ, is capable of getting himself different looks, running the pick and roll on both ends, and navigating everything, be it a fast break or a solid, Boston Celtics defense. He can also hit impossible big shots and put his team on his back (as he did in 2009 to pull one away from the Magic and in 2007 to heroically spark a comeback and take his ragtag group to the finals, respectively). He is capable of all this and more, and it is, in sum total, the most complete set of basketball skills anyone has ever possessed. It is why hard nosed folk like Larry Bird say that when all is said and done there will just be LeBron.

But you already know all that. And here we are. Even with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, homecourt advantage, and the pressure considerably lifted off of his shoulders, LeBron James has given us another inexplicable performance. The Dallas Mavericks are the champions and LeBron had a +/- of negative 24 points. If only they had played James Jones, maybe they could have won this thing.

I joke because I do not understand. How could someone with these talents play like LeBron did in this series? Is there something about LeBron's talents that precludes him from using them all at once? Is the pressure to hard for him to bear? That certainly doesn't seem to be the case. He is able to laugh and joke with Dwyane Wade, and dig himself deeper into a hole. But when game time comes, Wade focuses. He may turn unpleasant, angry, rude. But he pushes himself as hard as he can, straining until his body gives out and frustration sets in. LeBron seems not to notice the lights and cameras. He seems to be thinking of his elementary school classmates, or counting in the fibonacci sequence, or giggling at Dirk's accent. The attention makes him more absent-minded, more unaware that he is onstage in front of the world, more dreamily caught in his own head and far away from reality. And in his stupor he performs at a sub-All Star level.

This drives me crazy. It perplexes me and gives me no satisfaction. I wanted the Heat to loose this series. But I wanted them to be beaten. It is thoroughly disheartening that LeBron seems not so much demolished but distracted. I would far rather see him win than what we got. I like LeBron personally, and don't hold it against him as a man. But as a basketball player, this is totally unacceptable.

Don't get me wrong, Dallas winning was a great event. The series was really enjoyable and we got some great basketball and a pretty good narrative out of it. Overall, I'm glad the Heat lost. They deserved to for missing 13 free throws. But I hope that LeBron James gets a Ridlin prescription, or at least the means to explain himself. Until that happens, it seems more and more that the man Bird declared king, is frustratingly blank. The person who best exemplifies the godlike zeniths the human body can reach, he who makes Wade, Bryant, Paul, Rose, and Anthony look like so many kindergartners playing against a 12 year-old, seems more and more utterly inhuman in all the other ways that matter to us. And the other ways we have of being human -- defeat, victory, pain, suffering, anger, weakness, humor, and beneficence (all the things Shakespeare wrote about) -- is what we really watch sports for. I know that this is a bit overblown and unfair to LeBron who has already been goaded, perhaps against his better judgment and full understanding, into moving to Miami and declaring himself "serious" at every opportunity. He keeps saying that each game is the most important of his career and so on and so forth. But until he plays like that -- until he approaches the game like Dwyane Wade does -- his words are noises devoid of meaning. So are his skills; they might as well be the gestures of a man alone in a blizzard, performed subconsciously. They exist more in theory than in tangible reality. If LeBron can understand that (I'm not so sure that he can), then there's one thing he can do about it: win. Until then, I don't think anyone can answer this post's question: Who was that?

Your God is Dead. Long Live Your God.

"There's a curse that comes with limitless potential: Everyone judges you against only that limitless potential." -Bill Simmons   


Basketball is the only sport where history is written not only as it unfolds, but in a great many cases, before it has begun to unfold at all. Only on a lacquered floor could a superstar like Dirk Nowitski go comparatively unnoticed for the past five years. The only explanation is that the Teutonic Furor had lost his only chance to grab the ring in 2006, and that whole Golden State unpleasantness the year after. Now that Dirk is back in the spotlight, he's Larry Freaking Bird. Whether that's true or not, I don't care to say - but we can all agree Dirk has not gotten significantly better in the course of this 2010-2011 campaign. He's simply closer to the microphone. 


Gregg Doyel controversially asked Lebron James if he was shrinking in the 4th quarter, the place where "superstars become superstars". This loaded question and its meaningless response aside, is Lebron James a superstar? He has won MVP, that's true, he has played in the finals (although, when the best player on his own team, he has never won a finals game) and he has guided teams to 60 win seasons. Lebron has taken a backseat in these past two games, compiling a meager 25 points with a respectable 18 assists, letting the alpha dog Wade try to beat the Mavericks for the second time in his career. All the games have been close, and Miami currently has two home games left in this best-of-three tilt. They're in a position to win, and every article you read is about how James is "shrinking."


What is he shrinking from? Michael Jordan, the greatest competitor of all time. Michael Jordan was not the greatest athlete of all time, though he may have had the most accomplished career and may have dominated his sport more than anyone besides perhaps Tiger Woods has ever dominated a sport. Michael Jordan was a competitor. Lebron James is an athlete. Michael Jordan could take the pressure and the team on his back and beat you, flat out, no matter what, any night of his professional life. Scouts and sportswriters saw a 15-year-old Lebron James, already heavier and taller than Jordan had ever been, and said "what if...". In doing this, they pretty much guaranteed that James would never live up to their ridiculous expectations.


No one said after Albert Pujols rookie year "this guy is not only the greatest right-handed hitter of all time, he'll probably end up having a better career than Babe Ruth." If people thought Peyton Manning was the best quarterback they'd seen coming out of college since Elway, no one dared say aloud, on national television, they thought Manning would surpass #7's records. Sure, it was important that those two guys, tops in their sport, win titles, which they did (although Peyton's took a while), but no one was saying "just wait 'til he's won 6, then we can really start this debate!"


When James was draft in 2003, basketball was in something of a lull. Jordan was long gone, Shaq and Kobe were beginning to tussle, and the only real one-man show was Allen Iverson. The writers needed a savior, someone we could watch in our time and claim as the greatest and, not surprisingly, they chose the 6'8 kid out of Akron with wide receiver speed. And it wasn't just enough that he win all those titles, he had to do it with a smile on his face and a cloud of chalk above his head. There's a lot more of that mean, Hall-of-Fame-induction-speech side of Jordan in Kobe Bryant than there ever was or will be in Lebron James.  


They ground him down so much, made him crave a championship so much, that he ultimately realized his own limitations, and was forced to partner with Wade, rather than staying in Cleveland and living the unexamined life. No matter how this series ends up, we've all learned one thing: Lebron was never the man we thought he was. Or wanted him to be.

We're back!

Here at True Greatness, we were so downtrodden and defeated after Deron Williams and Kendrick Perkins were traded away that writing about basketball became an aversive and distasteful undertaking. We are officially back. Two very brief thoughts about NBA basketball as it stands today:

1. KOC- My biggest issue with him is not that he is a bad general manager overall. In fact, a lot of short term fixes that he has done are quite good (e.g. trading for Kyle Korver, stealing Boozer away from the Cavs, seeing talent in Wesley Matthews, snagging big Al out of thin air, etc.) My main complaint is that he appears to have no long-term vision. Are the Jazz rebuilding, or are the competing to be the 8th seed to lose to the Thunder in 5? Is Devin Harris a Jazz man for life, or a place holder until someone better shows up? My personal plan would be to trade up in the draft and get either Williams or Irving. Get rid of veterans who cannot turn us into contenders (sorry, CJ). Rebuild and give the new guys some playing time. And do it all with purpose and vision. You aren't the worst, KOC. You are far from it. But you need to learn to look to the future, not just react to the present.

2. I would also like to officially endorse the True Greatness pick for the finals: Go Mavs!

That's it for now. Hopefully we will be back with more soon.

Michael Jordan: Great Man

Michael Jordan is universally revered as a great basketball player (even by Jazz fans), but he has, as of late, come under scrutiny for his non-basketball personality. He's said to be a nearly intolerably competitive guy (rumor has it after a teammate blew a game, Jordan snatched the man's plate away during a team dinner and said something to the effect of "Only good players get to eat"). This competitive behavior that drove Jordan to a place of Mellevillean obsession and psychosis was on full display during his hall of fame inductee speech. He jokingly, in jokes that weren't funny because they were barely veiled aggressive challenges, thanked those who had cut him from teams, underestimated him, or made the mistake of thinking they could guard him. After this speech everyone turned on their inner psychoanalyst abilities and declared that they had discovered the secret to Jordan's success. The cause of his obviously great talent was declared to be his competitiveness. It drove him to be great, but it also obviously made him an egotistical mess. A man who would never be happy. This was a great story because it had the full heft of a Shakespearean tragedy. It also had the unstated assumption that greatness might not be worth it. The rest of us didn't have to feel as bad that we weren't Jordan because, when you really saw what it was like to be the man, would you really want to?


This is all a pretty good analysis, as far as it goes, but it doesn't really capture the truth. Simply put, a lot of guys are really competitive pricks. And a lot of them have insane basketball talent. The best example of one of these is Kobe Bryant, who yesterday, called a ref a gay slur that refers to the pile of sticks used to burn gay people in the past. Kobe was visibly upset after getting a technical foul called on him. He stormed to the bench, nearly punched his teammate, threw a towel, and then yelled out to the ref. Basically he threw a nationally televised fit. Here's some video. Today he gave a milquetoast apology saying what he said wasn't meant to be taken literally (the guy isn't literally a pile of sticks, I guess) and that he didn't mean to offend anyone. Some (my good friend representing them) think this is just the kind of thing that Michael Jordan would do if he were around today. They argue that basketball players, or at least the hyper competitive kind, are small minded, quick to fly off the handle, and can get pretty offensive and pretty scary quite rapidly. If we have no examples from Jordan's actual career of incidents like this one it is because the media have advanced to such a point that everything is now covered. There is some truth in the idea that today's players face increased media scrutiny. Still, we have a love of heroes. LeBron was one up until the decision, where most of the criticism coming at him was pretty lame and was squashed by people in the media themselves. LeBron, up until the decision, had something else in common with Jordan too. Something that Kobe lacks: he was a deft handler of his image.

I think the forgotten piece in the Jordan puzzle (or a forgotten piece, as we'll never fully recreate the man) was his ability to handle his image; to make his own story into something that we would root for above and beyond the game. He has oft been mocked for saying that he wouldn't endorse a Democratic candidate because "Republicans buy shoes too," but this mockery totally misses the point of the man and his comment. All great men and women, from Catherine the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte to Teddy Roosevelt to Mahatma Gandhi knew how to spin their own legacy. They were, each one of them, shameless self promoters. They also knew, almost instinctively how to blend their stories into larger themes and how to rewrite their pasts so that they fit the day's narrative and appealed to a broad spectrum of people. A huge part of Napoleon's legacy comes from his memoirs, written when he was imprisoned, which reinterpret his rule through the prism of pro-republicanism and freedom loving grandness. I believe that all the great persons of history have either done this, or had it done for them by those who followed (which may be the case with Leonardo Da Vinci and William Shakespeare). How else could their trials and tribulations remain timeless, if they didn't change to speak to each time that considered them?

Michael Jordan did the same, albeit on a much smaller scale. In his youth he was the hotshot scorer. The dunker and leaper with unparalleled athletic ability.



Then he was the hero valiantly fighting a losing battle against superior teams from Detroit and Boston (it was a sole man vs. the hordes, the same concept as 300).



Then his story changed again, he became on top of the world, the best ever. He dunked less, but he was just as murderous for his passing and shooting abilities.



Then he was too good for basketball even. Then he returned, world weary, like the man going in for just one last heist. He was still on top of the world, but he dominated through sheer will power instead of talent. He relied more on teammates and played defense to win.



Of course each of these transitions was punctuated with the appropriate spin and commercials. Jordan launched Space Jam at the height of his (nearly) final career stage (then he came back for the Wizards, spinning himself both as the returned hero and now wise master).

The thing is, none of these stages of Jordan are really discrete. He could dunk against the Jazz and he could shoot, pass, and play D back in his North Carolina days. He chose to emphasize different aspects of his game and hinted to the media what needed emphasis so as to fit his personal narrative into what was big at the time. The media shaped a lot of this on its own, but Jordan was smart enough to take their cues and play along. His ability to appeal to so many different people in so many different ways made him a wonderful basketball player, but also a great man. I'm still in awe that I lived during his time and got to witness his legend unfold first hand.

Every great person has the talent and skills that inflame our imaginations, that lead us to speculate about them and even worship them. What separates the great from the merely talented is the ability to shift their personal stories into the realm of the mythic. Michael Jordan would have never thrown a fit like Kobe, not because he wasn't as big of an asshole, but because that would have marred the Michael Jordan legend. He craved not only Ws but a legacy as well; his ambition was big enough that it contained his name in the history books, not merely a list of the number of rings he won. He is still working on it, still trying to prove himself great, this time as the builder and runner of a basketball team. The kind of largeness that Jordan sought is so big that Kobe has no clue it exists. He stands next to it in all his petty smallness, not knowing the chill he feels is from a colossus' shadow blocking out the sun. As he enters into the playoffs, obsessed with tying Jordan's ring record and putting his name in the conversation for best basketball player ever to live, he is completely unaware that he has already lost.

Good-Bye To All That: So Long Free Darko

I have been pretty far away from basketball for a while -- there have been other things going on in my life, and it always becomes hard to watch when your team sucks and it is obviously not going to get any better for a while. So it came as a bit of a shock to me when I found out just now that freedarko is no more. I have a somewhat fraught relationship with the blog. I deeply admire its beautiful artwork, the creativity of its post subjects, and some of the many brilliant things it has done for basketball (popularizing and epitomizing the basketball blogging culture is just the most obvious). I also hated the blog at times. Mostly this was out of jealousy and a certain iconoclastic position I've always taken -- I always do the Nietzchean inversion of morals thing and determine that any given popular thing is bad precisely for the reasons its proponents think its good (mostly, this is probably just jealousy). But in addition to reasons of envy, the freedarko site has frequently offended me in aesthetic ways. The writing is mannered in a particular style that I find pretty obnoxious, lazy, and much less smart than it takes itself to be. Very frequently sentences are packed with too many ideas and, instead of appearing deep or something, they seem like the results of muddled thinking that didn't reveal anything at all. Reading this stuff was pretty frustrating. It seemed more an excuse to name drop and show of the eclecticism of its creator's interests than to inform or engage with the reader. If only they had an editor, I often opined. This sort of writing -- similar to that which can be found at pitchfork, which was brilliantly lampooned by David Cross -- seemed to represent the worst of do it yourself internet journalism: it was out of touch, masturbatory, and off putting. It exemplified, at least to me, HL Mencken's dictum that people were bad writers because they were bad thinkers (I'm not above name dropping and self congratulatory masturbation). Then there were the images: that crazy lolzcats internet aesthetic where everything is as grainy and unrelated to the article as possible, while appearing designed to leave the viewer with a feeling of queasiness and/or general disgust (we too, have not always been above this).

That stuff has annoyed me at times, but it has also made freedarko a unique website. One that really felt better suited to its medium than almost any other. The writers, particularly Shoals, in addition to annoying me with their individual sentences and ideas, were also courageous. I mean that in the highest sense it can be applied to an activity done from the safety of your own bed (note: not that courageous). They were unafraid of tackling any issue no matter how controversial or inane. And a lot of the ill-formed writing I mentioned above (articles comparing Jordan opponents to forgotten genesis games; ranking stadiums by horror film appeal; what have you) were often the result of creativity pushed as far as it would go. Writers on freedarko took on issues of real substance. I am incredibly grateful for their attempts to deal with race in the NBA, and for their insistence on challenging the received wisdom, often showing the arrogant and reactionary assumptions it was based on. These are issues that are incredibly important for anyone seriously interested in sports. And they are anathema to many major sports outlets where, much like in the NBA itself, what matters is keeping everyone happy and not upsetting the boat. Freedarko offered a break from that kind of thinking. It also offered a break from the strict confines of sports journalism, providing essays that were surprising, funny, thought provoking, and delightfully weird. It was often a romp to check out their site. I'll miss that irreverent fun.

The good news is that what freedarko started lives on in sites too numerous to count. They got in when the getting was good. They popularized blogging about basketball and forever defined what its aesthetic would look like. If I may steal a line from another faceless basketball blog, they really were the Velvet Underground of this enterprise. As long as semi-articulate, over educated people are spending too much of their time writing about basketball and giving their content away free, freedarko will live on. The joke that informs the blog's title has already come to pass: Darko is a semi-important part on an NBA team; he is freed (unless the blog was asking for Milicic to be freed from his physical imprisonment on Earth through assasination, which is pretty uncool, I think) from his former unhappiness. It's time Shoals and his coterie of writers are freed along with him; no longer fettered to the format they developed, which must have become, at least a little bit, restricting after six years, they can begin to exert their influence elsewhere. They'll go on to do bigger and better things, having left their mark on all of us who read them (I read Shoals in the Atlantic a few weeks ago, which blew my mind). This blog and many others wouldn't exist without their pioneering work, for which I want to say thanks. So... be free Darkos, go forth and prosper. I wish you the best. Thanks for the memories.

Defensive Ability

I was recently sent a really nice article on statistics in basketball. It captures the history of the movement, but also some current fundamental issues. What it fails to do, however, is address what I will call the "Second Generation" of such analysis in the N.B.A. I fundamentally believe the problem in analysis lies in the type of data we are currently collecting. When one thinks about the box score, one realizes that it is really a type of behavioral coding system. A certain behavior occurs (e.g., player A passes the ball to player B, who quickly makes a shot without dribbling or moving too much) and a tick mark occurs on the box sheet (e.g., player A receives one assist). The problem with the box score as it is currently constituted is that it relies too heavily on discrete, positive outcomes (e.g.., player A receives no credit if player B misses his shot, regardless of the beauty of the pass) and it is relatively unsophisticated. The author in the aforementioned article ends by saying that quantitative analysis will never replace a human watching basketball footage, which is certainly true, because the data analyzed in quantitative analysis are almost entirely based on a human watching basketball footage. What the author fails to see is that this footage can be analyzed (and quantified) in more sophisticated ways, which will (likely) lead to better and more sophisticated models. It will be harder to make such a system than the extant box score (a made shot is a discrete event, but who is to say whether a post-move is "good" or not?) but if made, I believe it will launch us into the Second Generation of basketball analysis. With that in mind, I would like to develop a relatively basic coding system for defensive ability. Something simple, but better than the number of blocks, number of steals, or adjusted +/-. I would like to use this coding system for the rest of the season, see if it correlates with established metrics of good defense (e.g., opponents' shooting percentage, opponents' points/possession, etc.), and to let you, dear readers, to join me for the ride. Any takers?