As Weird as Finger Panes

It's not online, but you'll have to take our word for it. In today's New York Times, the following words exist:

If Milicic does decide to leave for Europe, his lasting impressions on the N.B.A. may be as a cautionary tale about raw talent from overseas and the fact that he helped to inspire a young group of bloggers who started the site Free Darko.

The site has gone on to be one of the better N.B.A.-related blogs and last year produced the book "Free Darko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Basketball Almanac."

I lead with this not only to crease my own mask (it likes it!), but also because it pertains directly to a post I'd planned to write anyway. Darko is inseparable from "raw talent", albeit in practice, less often the overseas variety. We fixate on players in part for their singularity, but also in many cases because of their ability to tickle the imagination. It's alternately laughable and pitiable to watch NBA teams wait on, and ultimately admit their folly with, the likes of Darko or Kwame Brown. It's like the change of seasons, but with less Wordsworth and more scrap heap.

How then, is that so different from what we've been through with (deep breath) Andray Blatche, Amir Johnson, Rashad McCants, Julian Wright, Donte Greene, Javaris Crittenton, Al Thornton, Alexis Ajinca, Anthony Randolph, and Bill Walker, to name a few. Asterisk as many of these as you want, especially since some are recent or facing coaching oppression, but there's a sinking feeling associated with all of them. I know GMs in businesses are supposed to eat crow, but you've got to think their investment is more personal, emotional—as ours is entirely.



We've also been right quite a few times, and in other cases been stuck waiting to see if, to name the ultra-dude, J.R. Smith will ever become whole. Or Thaddeus Young achieve stardom, Francisco Garcia get those minutes, and so on. Those may just be a question of admitting that not all ideas become flesh, or that a league full of superstars wouldn't make any sense (1965, I see you!). With someone like Amir Johnson—once posited as a stroke of luck who would make up for Darko—it's harder to know what to feel. Did we stake a franchises's future on him? No, but our enthusiasm for Amir was every bit as real and concrete as, well, ours for players real and concrete. And now, we are forced into an expressive bind: Either admit that we falsely expended energy, spewing it back forth into the cosmos, or find value in the act of love even if this love is in the end proven false.

And wait, isn't this textbook bad faith? GMs are just stupid. We are willing to let our love of the game, or at least some scrap of it, hinge on potential without a road ahead, sometimes well after potential has ceased to quiver and gone still, mocking, obdurate. We celebrate the uneasiness and blind faith, while GMs gamely wait on their investment to pan out. They made a choice, and are forced to live with the consequences. We believe more the less dreams come true. That's not to say we resent players who realize their potential, but that excitement is different than belief. Do GMs believe? Do enchiladas dream?

I would be happy to learn that the universe is one big circle made up of syllogism. So when I die, they would say "his blog ended up lending its name to the All-Star point-forward FreeDarko Greenton, as well as both encouraging and extinguishing a certain elitist strain of fandom." But I don't want to stop now. DON'T MAKE ME STOP NOW.

No Boulder Too Vague

Hey, it's me. I'm back again. The video above is how I feel when my sick comes back, like it just did after a morning of relative lucidity. I have seen every Jekyll & Hyde movie and this is my favorite. It also made it very hard for me to believe that Spencer Tracey was not in some way related to the Martin Sheen clan, at least when he turned into an id-fueled monster.

You probably wonder why I'm posting, given that I'm writing like a happy seminar on text messaging. It's because, as you probably all know, THE WARRIORS ARE FOR SALE. No, not the team, but for all intents and purposes, the team. If you want to trade for anyone on the Warriors, you can. It hurts to see Nellie go out like this, the limits of his imagination reinforced so gravely. He has no idea what to do with anyone tall, no matter how multi-faceted they are. We all have our limits, and I suppose blind spots are part of true vision, but his inability to make Randolph work is just dumb. At least D'Antoni can plead "system." However, it heartens me that Curry can be had, too. I was worried we'd have to wait till this summer, when they draft John Wall and have to bring him off the bench (thus precipitating a sit-in by every local broadcaster around the league).

It's strange and possibly emotional, but most of all—and speaking of D'Antoni—the stage is set for forever. Have you ever heard of the Braves/Celtics swap? Here's an ESPN article on it. Walter Brown bought the Braves after taking cash instead of that crazy St. Louis Spirit settlement, merger blah blah blah. He was governor of Kentucky at some point and had a friend who died when he parachuted out of an airplane with too much cocaine strapped around his waist. It was in front of the governor's mansion. The parachute malfunctioned. But enough about him. In 1978, Brown sold the Braves to the guy who owned the Celtics, and bought the Celtics from him. Also, they traded the core of each team across state lines.

The analogy doesn't work perfectly, but for the sake of the living, let this happen with Golden State and the Knicks. What I mean by this is, if the Warriors want to lose everyone and save money, and the Knicks (as we know) have no one good and aren't getting LeBron, why not send D'Antoni someone to love in the form of Ellis, Randolph, Curry, and Morrow? That's like the absolute primordial super factual D'Antoni team! Sure, there's no PG, but it can't be worse than what they've got now.

I am going to lie down again. Think it over and write some open letters!

Dream Angels: Z The Return

Structure (debuted Monday) now revised to be more precise. Here is the starting line-up for the 2010 Golden State Warriors. (UPDATE: Jax fixed.)

Left Turn at Midnight

Buy stuff in our name. Now, watch me wrestle with a topic beyond all human comprehension.

I tried writing about Nellie's new plan in a quasi-mystical, mytho-technical style, but then my brain collapsed, I fell into a wormhole, and at the bottom of time I was confronted by Anthony Randolph and Monta Ellis folding in and out of one another, only deepening my belief that these two not only share a special bond, but might be guided by the same hive-brain. Then I threw my laptop aside in disgust, and proceeded to absolutely flip out over Cavs/Heat. It seems like Moon is a budget Marion, and I wish I lived in a world where this was going to be our ECF.

Now, I find myself calmer, though maybe worse for wear, and ready to discuss what one can only properly dub Nelson's "negative rotation." What's most striking about this project is how heavy-handed it is. It reminds me of Stalin, or some other form of social engineering where the logic is prized above the actual human toll. Yes, Nelson has insisted that the vets will be fresher (TK suggests that he's realized he's incapable of managing their minutes in games, so this is the only option). But it's so ruthless, so decisive in its lunacy, that there's little room for empirically-induced change. What if the vets get creakier, lack rhythm, or one—say, Maggette—proves himself absolutely indispensable? The way Nelson's talking, you get the sense that this isn't about people, but about a structure, an idea.

It reminds me on some level of what D'Antoni promised us with the Knicks: Euro-like, a bunch of interchangable dudes getting 20-25 minutes a night each, depending on match-ups and that night's hot hand. The Warriors might be ideally suited for this philosophy, provided the youngsters came along some; it's not like Jackson, Maggette, Crawford, or Biedrins have insufferable egos. But this would be the ultimate coach's team. What makes Nellie so enigmatic is that he wants to organize in such a way that players will be free to undermine any notion of sound coaching. The 2006-07 Warriors, demented as they were, were the most reactionary kind of revolution. Nellie was the ringmaster, but on some level was able to trust his team, let them travel down paths he'd get started in his imagination. You couldn't find a more unlikely combination of a coach's team and one so much in the players' hands that at times, you'd swear you were witness to a mutiny.



Instead, Nelson replaced the screechy line-up tinkering of the first half of 2008-09, a kind of micro-managing that sought to compensate for the loss of spontaneous detail that occurs when a PG like Baron, Nash, or Hardaway guides a fluid assemblage. Now, he's going all Rauschenberg on the game, leaving the most gaping holes he can and watching the rest of the team scramble to adjust. It's a dramatic form of meddling that leads to hands-off ingenuity, forcing a group to gnash their teeth and survive by depriving them of what little comfort they have. This team may depend on its vets, but none of them are the focal point of it; it remains stranded between D'Antoni's vision and the traditional model, and simply lacks both the control and the chaos to recreate 2006-07's Baron/Jackson axis. In fact, you might say that it's replaced controlled chaos with chaotic control, all centered, ironically in the person of Mr. Jackson.

But, to return to my terrifying vision, I have to think that this is ultimately all about Ellis, Randolph, or the indistinguishable future that is the two of them. Monta's an undisputable star in the making, but no one knows exactly how he will flourish. Randolph has so much it people get queasy, and since the break has showed an almost untoward level of commitment, intensity, creativity, emotion, and willingness to be everywhere at once. It's almost as if Nelson wants to see how many gaps these two omni-positional talents can fill. As everyone else on the team foams at the mouth and is forced to surprise themselves, working every day toward realizing one of Nellie's core values (Control or Chaos), Ellis and Randolph are a secret experiment unto themselves.

There's a team to develop here, but it's entirely likely that by season's end, all notion of well-distributed depth, and a roster full of possibilities, will give way to the belief that what's needed is lesser beings to hang in the background as Ellis and Randolph are given free rein going forward. If it works perfectly, you'd get a foundation that's achieved some measure of order and logic, like a point guard unto itself. And then on top of that, those two. And behind it all, Don Nelson, about to unleash his most diabolical team yet.

We'll probably never know, though, if he's doing this to prove something to the world, to himself, or simply because he sees no other way forward.

Paints for Mirrors

Quote of the holiday day: "You bring me the yeti and I'll release your parents." Meatloaf said it, no less.

I knew there was a reason I was so thoroughly invested in Anthony Randolph. Besides being my last best hope for feeling like I'm touching the league's pulse, Randolph's also bringing it back to 2001 for the MSM. Check out these quotes from Bucher (bold all mine):

Sources also say rookie phenom Anthony Randolph, who some believe has the talent to one day be among the league's top 10 players, has been told he's not fitting in and could be dealt.

I guess FD is still more influential than I ever imagined. Are people really saying this? And if indeed it is front office folks, isn't the planet spinning backward if they're on my wavelength? Not that potential will ever completely disappear as a factor in assessing talent, but aren't things supposed to be getting more rational, economical, and here-and-now when it comes to team-building?

If you think I'm overreacting, how about this:

Yes, Randolph is 19 and plays with crazy rambunctiousness that results in silly fouls and ugly turnovers. But he also routinely makes plays -- blocked shots, crushing putback dunks and acrobatic drives -- that are beyond any other Warrior's capability. People within the organization talk about him the way they did Webber, as a singular talent capable of someday making the team a title contender. According to a half-dozen scouts and GMs, he has the potential to nudge out Derrick Rose as the best player in his draft class.



This is one of those "how serious is FD" moments. I would never say any of this with a straight face, because for now, Randolph's mystique is light years away from anything this concrete. I might be treading on the old "potentially potential" territory, but at this point, I think the real drama is seeing what kind of prospect Randolph develops into, not projecting what he might do as a refined NBA player. I'm especially attached to the kind of athlete who forces this kind of thinking. The charm, and the irony, of it is that you've got the fantastic doubling as the height of scouting acumen, the whimsical and the shrewd forced to pull in the same direction. But there's a big difference between venturing there selectively (less so if you're a half-serious blog) and applying it as a matter of course, as front offices once did; it's also bizarre to see it show up at all now, seeing how the climate has changed, the age limit has sobered everyone up, and there are so many embarrassing quotes on the record about past duds. I guess Anthony Randolph really is that fucking powerful.

Also, I was looking at my fantasy team and happened to click here. I have to say, if there's any single reason for me to be alienated from the NFL, it's the way running backs—my favorite position—currently rise and fall, or are platooned. Maybe my "I miss 2003" is nostalgia for the height of my interest in the NFL, but it also marks the exact point at which platoons and "RB's are finished at 30" started their ascent. It keeps real star power from gaining traction—T-Mac, injury-ravaged as he is, is still a viable star at 30 due to his playmaking ability; Kobe at near 31 is 1A or 1B in the league—but it cheapens the position itself, and what the individual's contribution to it means. Feel free to insert your favorite FD buzzword (style, personality, etc.) anywhere in the preceding graph.

Merry Christmas, and may you live like a slipping pitch.

Impressionable Youths

Earlier today, Shoals told a group of Brooklyn middle-schoolers that they should be into Anthony Randolph.

With any luck, this moment will redefine the book report and lead to the greatest 7th-grade science fair in the history of the world.

(H/T Trey)

People Get Ready

Exhibit A: What the fuck is going on in that picture? I'll tell you what's going on—the only possible thing that explains this, Exhibit B:




(Both of these images were originally 666px long!!!!!)

The per-48s for that, if you're wondering, would be 39 points, 7 for 35 from the floor, 21 for 35 from the line, 25 boards, and 3.5 blocks. But he'd probably foul out first. I also didn't think you could be labeled a "point forward" if you had the spirit of an evil point guard.

This makes me feel vaguely bad about watching no ball all weekend, as does that Warriors/Grizz game that turned into a game between ten shooting guards. Though I like to think I was there in spirit, and maybe even contributed to it a little.