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.

Scream All Day

This will totally shock all of you: The still-untitled FreeDarko Book 2 will at one point address some "could've been" players. I had called them "what if's," but not only does that encompass much more, it also overlaps with the Simmons tome—one of my great anxieties about the project. The last thing I want to do is look like I'm ripping off another colorful NBA history book that came out one year before ours.

Last night, as I inexplicably watched the World Series over Lakers/Hawks, I struggled to come up with the perfect characterization of that kind of player. Then it turned into a model, so I decided to scrap it and make it a blog post, not in the least because it could use some copious reader input. I think they call it open source, or cheating. First, though, some glimmers from the NBA I caught last night: I fear the Lakers will win it all with Bynum as rampaging dinosaur and Artest and Odom used as unimaginatively as possible. The Blazers really bum me out, especially Aldridge. Blatche is the original Anthony Randolph. Stop comparing Oscar Robertson to LeBron, Robertson was a better mid-period Kidd with scoring genes (that was all Ziller). Ozzie Guillen's pre-game commentary shows you why Kevin Garnett will never be part of a studio crew.

But back to the problem that really bugged me. We all know that there exist players we say "if only" about. For one, there's two kind: Those that drive us insane when they're around, and assume the glow of exceptionalism once they've retired. That's due in large part to the fact that 99.99999% of these players have problems with injuries, which we've learned to hate the victim for, or fuck up personally, which just gets really old really fast (at least if you're trying to argue for their hypothetical place among the game's elite). Beyond that, there's the more complicated matter of what kind of legacy we're going off of. What I haven't figure out yet is whether, in the end, we view all these types the same way—many paths to the same honorary status—or the kind of career a player manages to have in fact decides how real, extravagant, or wishful our projections for them end up being. I also really want someone to tell me if certain of these scenarios are more common to one sport, or position, than others.

After much handwringing and chatting, I arrived at the following four categories, which for now lack snappy names:

1. Guys who, when all is said and done, somehow convince us they'd had an actual career. This one is startlingly subjective: Sandy Koufax, Gale Sayers, and Bill Walton all belong here even though each had a very different arc as a player. Maybe "non-player" is more appropriate. This is kind who make the Hall of Fame without anyone making a fuss.

2. One step below that, we have players who strung together several seasons of stardom, but either not to a degree, or without enough distinction, to elevate them to the top category. Sometimes, it's just a matter of us being unable to get over how incomplete their place in history seems; they're a strange mix of conjecture and actuality that's its own kind of purgatory. I put Pete Reiser and Maurice Stokes here; Stokes is HOF but it's largely sentimental.

3. Total flashes-in-the-pan, one-year wonders who sustain nothing but suggest multitudes. Herb Score goes here, as does Mark Prior. These are the real darlings of the "could've been" fetishists, at least those with the most preposterously Romantic streaks; that because Category #2 is generally classified as "tragic."

4. Pure potential. Never really got a chance for those initial assessments to be proven wrong. Len Bias is the obvious, and most extreme, example here. Ernie Davis. Shaun Livingston probably fits, as well.

With that, I open up the floor for discussion. Add names, critique the framework, give a sport-specific analysis. It's like a Wiki with the head cut off. Or the tail, maybe.

Concept Car : Porsche Carma

Here's a nice concept car done by some design students called Porsche Carma. Although it looks a bit too much like a Dodge Viper to us, it definitely has some potential. Keep on working on it!