Super-Overreactionizer: Welcome to the NBA Playoffs

Kevin Durant’s Personal Arms Race

by Steve McPherson

Sometimes, I’m not really sure what impresses actual basketball players about other basketball players. If you’ve spent any amount of time around an NBA locker room, you quickly learn that just about everything they say is couched in layers of language that deflect and distort both attention and intention. If they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed, they’ve nevertheless been schooled in how to at least not put their foot in their mouth. And if they’re got anything on the ball at all, they’re going to never allow a sliver of light to make its way out in the scrum. Never mind the fact that they can always fall back on generally being millionaires while you do this for free (if you’re most bloggers) or relative peanuts (if you’re a beat reporter).

But as someone who’s been a musician (a guitarist) and also listened to retired basketball players talk about other players, I have to feel like the really pyrotechnical stuff is maybe not as impressive to them as it can be to us. Coming at it from the musical perspective, ultrafast playing has never been something that’s blown me away. It feels more like the kind of thing you can master if you simply devote enough time to it. There’s something impressive about the devotion, but the actual execution of it — for someone who’s spent years and years mastering the technique — is basically like blowing your nose. Plus, as a practitioner, you learn tricks to make things look or seem more impressive than they truly are. Playing guitar behind your head? Not as hard as it looks, for example.

What impresses me in a guitarist are the things at the margins that go mostly unnoticed. Kicking in the overdrive early enough to coax a peal of feedback, letting just enough of the open strings rattle between chord changes, straight up not playing very much or going for something just beyond your reach and miraculously landing it. I like to think that’s the way other craftsmen and women appreciate things like Kevin Durant reaching out just far enough to corral Reggie Jackson’s wanton outlet pass late in the fourth quarter of the Thunder Game 1 defeat of the Memphis Grizzlies.

It looks, frankly, fake. And it doesn’t start looking any less fake the more you look at it. It looks like some video game glitch, like the ball being suctioned to a running player’s hand because doing otherwise would demand a whole lot of coding that no one wants to do. Sometimes it’s just easier to let things like that go.

But the real world doesn’t let them go. Physics is a cruel mistress, and the fact that Durant gets control of the ball is only superseded by his ability to control it well enough to gently kiss it off the glass. It’s not an emphatic dunk, it’s not a dagger three. But to me it just has to be the kind of thing that says to a team full of opponents, “Sit down. We’re done here.” How can anyone, as a professional basketball human, look at that and think, “We have a chance against that”? Somehow, these must be the kind of things that are more indelible than any prosaic jumper or dunk. We talk frequently about “daggers” in playoff games, but “dagger” implies premeditation, that you had a weapon with you.

This was more like Durant accidentally elbowing a guy’s nosebone into his brain. Do you think Durant even knew he could do that? He probably didn’t. He just tried it and it worked. At that edge, at that place just a hair beyond where your known capabilities lie, that’s where the coolest stuff happens. If that’s where Durant and the Thunder can live, the Grizzlies don’t have a chance.

#FreeJimmer

by Sean Highkin

For the third consecutive year, the Bulls are attempting a playoff run without Derrick Rose. His devastating ACL tear led to a first-round demise in 2012, and Nate Robinson led them past the Brooklyn Nets in 2013. Who’s going to be their offensive spark this year? Jimmy Butler showed promise on Sunday. That’s about it.

But the real answer is buried on the bench, on the outside looking in at Tom Thibodeau’s airtight rotation. The stat line that jumped out from the box score of their Game 1 loss to the Wizards was this one:

Jimmer Fredette – DNP COACH’S DECISION

Jimmer hasn’t played much since the Bulls signed him in March. He didn’t play much in Sacramento, either. As an NBA player, he’s pretty one-dimensional. But his one dimension is the one thing that nobody else on the team can do.

It’s hard for a terrible defensive player to crack Thibodeau’s rotation, unless he has the veteran experience and offensive skill set of Carlos Boozer. Jimmer doesn’t have that pedigree. He’s a wildly popular college player who hasn’t done much in the NBA but he can shoot.

The Bulls only scored 6 points in the final 6 minutes on Sunday. You’re telling me it would have hurt to try Jimmer out when literally nothing else was working?

If the Bulls didn’t sign Jimmer for this, then what is he doing here?

There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Kyle Korver

by Caleb Nordgren

We’ve always known Kyle Korver could shoot. If he were an Old West outlaw, he’d be known for his lightning-fast draw and the ability to nail a bottle on a fence post at 50 paces.

But, as Roy Hibbert knows, that’s not all Korver does. Korver imposed his will on Hibbert and the Indiana Pacers in game one, and it’s only going to get worse from here. When a slow white dude is blocking your behemoth of a center, it’s all over.

The Pacers are toast. They’ve been in a tailspin for months, and it just so happens that Korver and the Hawks are the perfect team to expose them for the clownfrauds they are. The Hawks would’ve been the undisputed third-best team in the East if Al Horford hadn’t gotten hurt, and that’s a fact. In fact, with the Pacers in free fall, they would’ve been in the conversation with Indiana and Miami for best team in the East.

Pero Antic isn’t going to back down from David West or Lance Stephenson or anyone else. Paul Millsap will drop a three in Roy Hibbert’s eye or take him off the dribble and finish at the rim, take your pick. Elton Brand is FAR too old for Indiana’s shit. And Jeff Teague, having already lit George Hill’s funeral pyre, will do the same to Paul George and anyone else who tries — emphasis on tries — to guard him.

And Korver? Korver will run around like a maniac on offense, stopping only long enough to bury a dagger in your heart, then come back down on defense and swat Roy Hibbert into oblivion. And then do it again, just in case it didn’t take the first time.

Indiana’s done. The only question now is how far the Hawks can go.

Better watch your ass, Miami.

You Gotta Have Faith

by Andrew Lynch

Faith, my friends, cannot be defined. Or, if it can, it’s a personal definition, unavailable to a public at large. Its only connection to others comes in small groups, in congregations of like-minded folk with a simple, humble goal they strive toward, together.

The Warriors are an analytics friendly team, and with good reason. Numbers are the future in basketball, and a more informed organization will make better decisions in the long run. Those metrics and mindsets, however, are subject to the failings of probability. As precise as they might become, there’s always something cosmic and quantum that puts variance into action.

Sometimes, atomic fluctuations lead to your Australian centerpiece breaking a rib. And that fracture ripples across space and time, and those already cynical of your approach and your credentials and your future give you even less of a chance than they did before. Slather this team in butter; they’re toast. Faith, were it measured, would be found in short supply among the wicked and the doubtful.

Maybe we will get to that day, the promised land of tomorrow where things so basic and universal as faith will be reduced to a number. Even then, though, the numbers would probably be against these Warriors. Everything else is. Everyone, too.

Except, of course, the rallied righteous who reside in the Golden State locker room. Mark Jackson, Steph Curry, Jermaine O’Neal — starter and coach and veteran of vintage — they all have walked through the hellfire of an uncertain regular season, and all have steeled their resolve in its flame. They believe that they belong exactly where they are, and in Game 1, they proved it. Whatever room for doubt remains does so in the margins and belongs wholly to those outside the halo of the Warriors’ inner circle. And that skepticism builds certainty for Golden State, lifting them to victory over a Goliath of the media’s making, the vaunted Los Angeles Clippers.

1-0. Those are the numbers that matter today, to the people who matter. Nothing else matters to the team in yellow and blue, if even that registers. Zen and its fetchings might belong to New York now, but the true peace that comes with a clear mind devoid lives in Oakland.

Will that matter? We don’t know. Neither do the Warriors. But if it will, have faith that Golden State will make the most of it. They certainly do.

Blazers Smoke Rox on April 20th Matchup; Deliver Death Knell to Upstart “Analytics Movement”

by Miles Wray

At the end of Sunday night’s game, the Portland Trail Blazers were in a jovial, celebratory mood as they walked back to their locker room.

Even though they were just witnesses to a murder.

Perhaps they should spend their off days in Houston composing a eulogy.

Or maybe they should run from the law.

Since they perpetrated the crime.

In front of 18,240 gobsmacked witnesses.

The deceased party goes by the name “analytics movement” — even though the only thing about it that moves is some nerd’s index finger tapping on a calculator’s keys. Am I right?

The poo-poohed General Manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, will be headlining the 2015 Groan Analytics Conference after his shot at being an NBA champion went up in smoke like so much primo Oregonian grass. I suspect that, even after seven years in the biz, Morey couldn’t identify the heart of a champion even if its ventricles were beating rich, crimson, champion’s blood all over the mechanical pencils in his breast pocket.

Let me identify one of these champions for you, Mr. Morey. Hint: His name rhymes with “Bold Freeland.”

Joel Freeland may as well have spent the first 52 minutes of this game back in the locker room, face-down in some delicious shepherd’s pie imported from his native England. By resting the third-string big man, Blazers head coach Terry Stotts had positioned the Rockets right where he wanted them. Houston was left flummoxed by a dominant, game-changing last minute of play by the love-handled Briton.

Freeland may have netted a -3 plus/minus in his single minute on the court. But Freeland was +1 where it counted, and where it counts is the area under your sternum that’s just to the left of center. (Hint: it rhymes with “champion’s fart.”) Using an innocuous rebound as his stage, Freeland lured Dwight Howard into committing his sixth foul as surely as the sight of an old-timey, twirling barber’s pole lures in a mustachioed, kazoo-tooting Portlander off from the street.

Houston’s numbers and formulas and statistical whatchamawoozits are as useless now as a high school freshman’s half-completed algebra assignment soaked in a torrent of steaming piss. This is what it looks like when Daryl Morey’s precious databases are covered in champion’s blood.

I find Portland guilty on all counts of squeezing the life out of the “analytics movement.” Their sentence will be served in the second round of the NBA Playoffs.

Case closed.

Class dismissed.

Hasta la vista.

Game, set, match.

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