SERIES ABOUT WHICH PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARE

• Los Angeles Clippers versus Memphis Grizzlies: The only series in which I genuinely feel silly picking either team and acting as if I can support such a claim with certainty, this one might collapse into itself as the nexis of all NBA diehard viewership in the first round. Blake Griffin has recently shown himself to not only be the Boy Prince of Dunkitude, posting a couple of high-efficiency scoring outbursts in a pair of losses to the Hawks and Clippers; while a 36 or a 29-point-night might not seem like much, the variety of ways (face-up jumpers, step-throughs in the post) in which he scored the points finally made him appear to be a worthy second option to the wizardry Chris Paul’s largely left in his pocket until fourth quarters this year. But I’m pretty sure the rest of the world will quickly forget about the Clippers’ highly efficient, if sometimes unwatchable, offense (ranked fourth leaguewide) once it’s vaulted into the rusted, gaping maw of the Grizzlies’ D, one that seems almost naturally made for the rigors (read: laxer rule enforcement by officials) of the postseason. Just a year ago, this same Grizzlies team sans its best perimeter threat in Rudy Gay took it to another high-powered offense without a lot of muscle in the middle, but that Spurs squad didn’t have one of the league’s best players or a couple of benchwarmers in Kenyon Martin and Reggie Evans who would love to get equally as violent as the Grizzlies’ boys. I like both of these two teams too much to want to see this one in the first round, but someone must win, and despite home court advantage, I’m inclined to give this one to the Clippers in six games.

• Boston Celtics versus Atlanta Hawks: Another playoff season, another terrible series made hard to watch by a Hawks team around which a layer of visual muck seems to orbit. No matter who is in a series with them, be it Derrick Rose or Dwyane Wade or LeBron James, the Hawks make things visually unappealing. But this could legitimately be classified as these Celtics’ last stand, their defense of the castle, and defining legacies can generally be something to behold, even when playing the Hawks. Josh Smith and the Hawks’ topsy turvy offense (where their oversized 2, Joe Johnson, operates from the post and Smith, the 4, works as an almost Princeton-offense-like high-post distributor) can be ruthless in its working toward open threes and free throws, but an inspired Celtics defense can rip apart any machine, no matter how intricately crafted. In another series in which I am almost certainly being dumb about ignoring the home court, I see the Celtics winning in six games.

• Dallas Mavericks versus Oklahoma City Thunder: Winning an NBA championship is like having easily visible Russian prison tattoos; no matter how harmless one is toiling away as an insurance adjustor, one must always be respected, no matter how ridiculous, because of the legendary past. Yeah, the Dallas Mavericks team showing up to these playoffs looks very little like the one that did so a year ago, this time finding confusion in its depth rather than solutions, finding atrophy where veteran experience was once the term used. This isn’t a team on its last hurrah, trying to prove something; whether they’re trying isn’t even clear. And what they’re running into, this offensive wrecking ball of a team, one that sports a couple of this league’s highest volume scorers and one of its most efficient, all of whom inhabit wholly separate parts of the offense? Pundits will give respect where respect is due because, “Hey, they’re the champs.” Well, the champs lost every matchup with this Thunder team during the year, a couple convincingly so, making last year’s penultimate round  feel further and further away; while I don’t see the season series repeating itself with a sweep, I do still see the Thunder taking this in five games.

SERIES THAT MIGHT BE FUN… BUT WE KNOW WHO’S GOT THIS

• Denver Nuggets versus Los Angeles Lakers: Kenneth Faried will make all of us bow at the majesty of both his hair and dunks, and for that, we should all be eternally grateful; in fact, this entire Nuggets squad will do what it did last year all over again: blitzkrieg the unsuspecting viewers with a lot of insanely fast play punctuated by a flurry of threes and dunks, all before bowing out to a team that simply poses unfriendly matchups with them. Last year, that was OKC in an epic battle of THUNDERNUGGETS!!@@@#!!, but this time around, it’ll just be the bigs in LA taking this one in a very competitive six games.

• New York Knicks versus Miami Heat: Wow. This series has everything: the names, the cities, the epic venue, the narrative, the come back story. Too bad these guys have to actually play basketball because that will likely go a lot worse for the Knickerbockers, for which everything has been sort of falling into place over the last month. And then A’mare came back. And we start all over. Again. Whichever iteration of the Knicks shows up in Miami Saturday afternoon likely doesn’t have the chemistry or fortitude that another Tyson-Chandler-led team did last summer, and if NY’s offense operates anything like it has at all other points at which Melo and Stoudemire have shared the floor, this will be a short one, with the Heat taking this series in five games.

• Utah Jazz versus San Antonio Spurs: You remember this time last year, this situation. The Spurs had the top seed and a pass-heavy offense that took the pressure off of its older main cogs, and San Antonio ran into an imposing road block in a surging eight seed that found most of its strength inside and stole another postseason from the former dynastic crew. But this Jazz team doesn’t play defense like that Grizzlies team; in fact, it doesn’t play D like anyone in the playoffs, posting the lowest defensive efficiency of any of the 16 qualifying teams. And this Spurs team? They’re ready. Ready for a Finals run, ready to pull off a shocker, and damn sure ready to win this series in five games.

SERIES THAT WILL MOSTLY BE PLAYED ON NBA TV

• Philadelphia 76ers versus Chicago Bulls: This Bulls team, even without its dynamic scoring creator in Derrick Rose, can stop essentially any offense that can’t overpower it with raw offensive talent. The 76ers’ leading scorer comes off of the bench, and he posts less than 15 points per game. I know we’re in an age of advanced statistics, but those numbers don’t look promising.  Bulls in four games, getting those broken wing players some needed rest.

• Orlando Magic versus Indiana Pacers: The Pacers  really, really got shivved by a Heat team that didn’t care as much about a top seed as it did rest for its Big Three, as even after these four walkthroughs, Indiana’s still walking into a second-round bloodbath at the hands of a Heat team that toyed with them all season. A Bulls/Pacers second-round matchup would have provided some much-needed sparks for semis that can sometimes feel like prolonged coronation processes, but now we can only wait for the Heat to take off some heads in the next round. Ughh. Oh yeah, Pacers in four games.

Make your bets accordingly, and by that, I mean in no way take any of my advice (especially on the Code Red. That stuff is disgusting). You can read this column every Friday, and I can be followed on the regular on Twitter here. Thanks for the read.

Photo courtesy of ben mathews via Flickr.

Quick programming notice for those who’ve seen the “Notes on a String”: I’m going to be shifting this column’s nature over to that of an all-purpose notebook column, more like the “Rockets Daily” column of olden times. Now that you’ve been reprogrammed, read up.

• In a sweet bit of formality amidst a year full of informal sabotage, Dwight Howard finally decided to be a sweetheart and kill this season after slowly torturing it like a Takashi Miike villain in every face-palmingly obtuse way possible by shutting dow n his season thanks to back surgery. Firstly, the Indiana Pacers may thank their lucky stars that, though they may have only had to face a Magic team that was such (a team) in name only, they avoided even a diluted, half-hearted version of this league’s second-best player, given the matchup problems Howard has created for Indiana’s Ent-like Roy Hibbert thanks to his speed and agility in comparison to Hibbert’s… not those things. Secondly, at least Van Gundy will get to go out with his head held high, unworried about stepping on the notoriously fragile toes of this organization’s “franchise player” (who has shown no interest in this franchise beyond this obligatory upcoming year) and free to rant, fulminate and generally stew on the Orlando sideline to his heart’s content while wondering which new team he’ll have overachieving come next winter. Most importantly, though, is the actual reasoning behind all of this; the difference between a self firebombing and an actual back injury, the kind that lingers for years and hinders mobility to no end (which fans of both Houston and this Orlando team probably know), is vast and could change the future of not just this team, but this league. Either the league’s best big man has been injured in a way that might permanently affect his game and impact, or the league’s biggest primadonna just pulled one of the most brazen power moves in recent sports history; either way, this announcement mattered more than an impact on the outcome a series between a three and six seed.

• The Houston freefall has been less than fun, but hey, at least this feels familiar, right? That entire month of Dragic looking so calm and collected in the waning minutes of a barnburner felt so… foreign, a far cry from the generally frantic scurrying involved in Rockets clutch-time possessions. Tripping over itself against a team almost certainly hurting its own interests by beating Houston seems entirely more apropos.

• Andre Drummond is a very large, very talented young man; Harrison Barnes and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist look like very different kinds of the future at the wing position, one at which the Rockets have been desperately since the departure of Tracy McGrady’s athleticism, which preceded the departure of Mac himself by a few years. This year might be stacked enough that when a franchise picking in the top 10 inevitably finds itself looking at picking someone too early to avoid roster redundancy, shipping a couple of picks in the middle of this same talent-stuffed draft along with a contributor on a cheap or expiring contract could be good enough to bring back someone with serious star potential. For those Rockets fans still dressing their wounds from the numerous bruises accumulated along the bumpy, sudden fall out of the playoff picture, all of this draft talk may be coming too soon, but this particular draft may provide Houston with the organic chance at a star that this team’s avidly chased for about three years.

• Though Jeremy Lin’s emergence this year frustrated some in Houston who were under the misguided notion he’d have gotten anything close to the chance or specific opportunity that he got in New York thanks to a complete vacuum at the point guard position, nothing about it appeared particularly germane to life as a follower of the Rockets, at least no more than it should have to any fan of an NBA team; however, the rise of Steve Novak is a different matter altogether. He’s second in the league in true shooting percentage, which is less than surprising given his 47% from distance (GAH… 47 fricking percent! Actually a real number), but he can now play more than three or four minutes at a time without his team literally imploding from the lack of defense, something that forced Jeff Van Gundy, who’s gone on record as saying that Novak has the best jumpshot JVG’s ever seen, to never play the 6’10″ “power forward”. Apparently, Novocaine’s even becoming respectable on that end of the court. Plus, he’s submarining the Rockets’ chance at even better picks with each made three-pointer that helps the Knicks tally another W. So…much…ambivalence…

• Picking the Western Conference feels like the damn NCAA Tournament at this point. Grizz, Clippers, Lake Show… they all seem like contenders at this point. Hmmm… this would probably be a good year to get a cushy low-playoff seed and see what happens. Maybe the Rockets could… oh yeah.

That’s all for now, kinfolk. You can read this column every Friday, and I can be followed on the regular on Twitter here. Thanks for the read.

Those of us who spend our times pretty closely attached to the pro game of basketball have heard from our counterparts in the scouting scene that this year’s upcoming NBA Draft would be the kind that could yield a buffet of possible stars and permanent rotation players, the kind of haul not seen since LeBron and Co. gave about six teams franchise players on one day. The possibility of a pair of picks in the middle of the draft this year appears to be a much more exciting possibility than it may have been a year ago, but only the Knicks’ now-sure-to-be 15th pick can be certainly handed to Houston; a playoff spot, as most readers now know, will confer Houston’s first-rounder to the Nets, thanks to some shoddy Terrence Williams-related decision making (to be fair, most thinking associated with Williams isn’t the best). Adding in the possible Dallas pick (unlikely as it’s top-20-protected, meaning its falling to the Rockets probably won’t happen and, een if it did, would almost certainly necessitate a victory over Houston tonight), that’s three possible first-round picks for one of the league’s premier talent evaluators in one of the best drafts in ages. And why might we pass this up?

Most of us are calling it veteran experience, but what it comes down to is a little bit of hope. This fanbase has seen this story two years in a row, and three might be pushing the resiliency of an already flimsy group of followers (Not you guys. Reading this pretty much negates you from that group). All any of these fans want are a few games in which Houston looks capable against a title contender, a home win or two, a little bit of payoff for all of those stay-at-home Thursday nights that could have been spent relating better to significant others, going out with friends or generally bettering ourselves. Not that this game doesn’t always provide us with something great, but the playoffs… they’re different, and this fanbase knows it.

Just remember, there are options here, and if in late June you find yourself wondering what could have been as Arnett Moultrie or Austin Rivers or Perry Jones slip down the draft board, remember how much fun that one night in May was. As fans, the memories have to be worth as much to us, or what is any of it for?

Just a simple block, in a way I hadn’t ever seen one, in a game I hadn’t expected one, by a player that I didn’t know could do such a thing. Tim Duncan, the game’s best player, a man who made sure that his domination was so mundane as to be irreversible, had another of his imminent game-enders, a flush from just a few feet away, sent back by this impetuous kid with nonsensical tattoos. Ginobili comes off of the handoff brilliantly, going right as he’s not supposed to be able to, making the excitable Amar’e Stoudemire follow the Argentian and lose sight of a man he never should have; Manu makes the perfect shovel pass and as Duncan prepares to snuff out this Suns team’s season, Stoudemire does what he should be able to and makes the play. The ball, flying downward; the Suns lead, this close to evaporated; the hand of Amar’e, bounding upward to get under the dunk attempt in a way I had never seen before, the closest I have ever seen to a human erasing another man’s actions like some poorly thought out scrawling on a notepad. Like that, Amar’e Stoudemire reminded me what this game could do, what he could do, what it all meant. And like that, it looks like he’s done.

2012 has been less than kind to Amar’e, once such an undiluted beacon of pure light in this sport that seems endlessly stocked with flash, a flaming blue star hanging in the middle of the Vegas strip. Reminding everyone exactly how human every one of these “freaks”, these “beasts” are, Stoudemire lost his brother in a car accident earlier this year. Nothing can compare to tragedy of this sort, of course; still, the rest of the year has treated the former Suns stalwart less than genially. When Jeremy Lin began his brilliant stretch of play, Stoudemire was away from the team, grieving his loss; when he returned, he found himself an uncomfortable, if accepting, secondary option to a guy working on a 10-day-contract what seems like moments ago. Prior to and after Lin’s going supernova on the world at large, STAT had looked sluggish and frustrated playing in an offense in which he was not a primary option, while continuing his general ineptitude on the defensive end; many theorized that he had to be injured, and why wouldn’t they, if they had seen what we all had in Phoenix?

As many great writers of this sport have discussed, the beauty of basketball can be seen in the narrative of the possession, of which hundreds make up a game which make up a season, a 24-second period that can at once be a microcosm of a greater storyline and its own fantastic, miserable, tragic, captivating, heroic moment; in most half-court possessions, some version of the pick-and-roll is employed, furthering this idea that every basketball possession is like the last and also completely different. the middle pick-and-roll that Stoudemire ran, most often in his career with Steve Nash but also for a while with Raymond Felton, represented all that seemed possible within such simplicity. After setting the screen and turning the corner, all hell had been unleashed on defenders of the play; Stoudemire’s stunning blend of controlled grace and awesome power mostly left those attempting to keep him from the rim with the unfortunate choice of trying to cheat off of the ball-handler to deny him the ball, leaving one of the greatest shooters ever in Nash with space in the paint, having a help defender from the perimeter double in the paint, opening an array of looks for the Suns’ shooters, or, gulp, try to stop Stoudemire one-on-one slashing toward the basket with zeal. I say that he mostly gave this choice because many times, there was no choice, simply an end point.

His career a sped-up flipbook with frustratingly constant plot twists, Stoudemire has went through so many different eras to his short career that one forgets exactly who he was coming into this league, a preps-to-pro project pick that looked like Shawn Kemp without any of the polish; of course, he similarly ate through the league in his initial campaign, looking none of his 19 or 20 years, or maybe looking all of them as he bounded around joyfully and waited for the next opportunity at which he could swallow the ball, hoop and league whole. When Nash came to replace the malcontented basketball prodigy Stephon Marbury, Stoudemire quickly transitioned from a dizzying frenzy of energy galloping around into Nash’s Mjolnir, the hammer of God that he could throw down whenever necessary to remind opponents exactly what they had to fear. And then the knee-surgery. And the failed comeback, the deep playoff run with Diaw, the reemergence as no longer a weapon of Nash’s but a separate and equally horrifying controller of space, a man who had found the exact limits of his seemingly limitless potential and the sheer genius involved in maximizing it. Phoenix became basketball paradise, where writers of all stripes— uselessly nostalgic, wide-eyed and effusive, seemingly racist— could create their own versions of what this offensive oasis truly meant on its own and to the greater NBA universe.

In the end, I hope that this endures at the image of Amar’e, a wunderkind that honestly developed himself into a mastermind, even if he and his best chance at what we retroactively deem greatness never quite attained what we thought that they could, whether it was due to a detached retina, a violent hip-check that made two men very reasonably get up off of a bench to protect their teammate, the subsequent suspension that seemed to gift-wrap a title for the already formidable 2007 Spurs, or a decimated line-up that just couldn’t outplay the Lakers with its feeble options outside of STAT and Nash. At his best, he could make such nonsense seem so possible without even touching the ball, his presence that imposing and awing. That is what I hope, but I know better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orVJc-iPVI

I know that it’s New York and that that half-season of pure, giddy fun will be roundly dismissed when people stare at that millstone of a contract, given in that offseason when everyone wanted their very own LeBron consolation prize and $100 million maybe didn’t seem like the absurdly large sum that it is. I know that that city’s media has little sympathy for bulging discs or dead brothers or poor team chemistry when thinking about why the Knicks can’t just sign Chris Paul or Dwight Howard and make all of this stuff, this salary cap numbers game, go away. I know that Robert Sarver probably thinks that he’s validated in his pennywise ways when he looks at STAT’s newest health concerns. I know that he will be lumped in with Carmelo Anthony if this stretch of Knicks basketball doesn’t go the way New Yorkers want, need, it to go: somewhere, anywhere, near a Larry O’Brien trophy. I know, I know: fair or not, Stoudemire’s legacy among those nameless dunderheads who seem to scribe this sport’s unwritten history will be that of another New York savior-turned-pariah, not the paragon of unforeseen possibility that breathless viewers knew such a short time ago.

This might not be the end for Stoudemire, as his career will almost certainly drag on for a big longer; hell, in this league, with the gifts he had, another ten years seems completely realistic, if not inevitable. He could bring that once-gorgeous jumper basically anywhere if he shores up his defensive liabilities to some (or any) extent and be a helpful member of an NBA team for a very long time. But that genius, that spark that lit up in him, his point guard and every watchful eye that knew when he got space, something beyond magic, something impossible, might happen— that’s almost certainly not going to return with him when Stoudemire himself comes back from this back injury because we haven’t seen it once this year.

Knowing what we know this year makes that moment last season when STAT acknowledged Blake Griffin, an unmistakable nod of approval and gesture of mutual understanding between superhumans, that much more painful, as if Amar’e knew his own moment going nova was coming to its end, soon to be dwarfed into a career of pick-and-pops and shaky takes toward the basket. I can’t imagine what it might be to lose that or any of what he’s lost this year, but I can remember what he had and what he could do: remind people exactly what it is that they love about this truly gratifying game.

• Thursday night’s TNT schedule boasted one of this year’s premier doubleheaders, with a Finals rematch that fell flat in Miami and a game that was routinely touted as a “Western Conference Finals” preview, Thunder vs. Lakers. In the interest of full (if unwanted) disclosure, these are the teams I would most likely envision pairing up in this year’s penultimate round, but both teams have gotten a free ride as far as the public discourse goes in one most important regard: their defenses. If a team has had offensive trouble throughout a year, such as Boston with its 25th league-ranked offense, that outfit will justifiably be written off as one without much chance of playoff longevity, as teams at or below the league average on either side of the ball simply do not get rings, empirically speaking. So how is it that two teams, OKC and LA, with defenses of relatively low calibers (12th and 9th leaguewide, respectively. Sounds decent, but the 4 points per 100 possessions more that the Thunder give up than the league’s best add up quickly) have come to be the de facto frontrunners out West? Unlike offense, fans and pundits seem to assume that teams can turn on defensive afterburners that had stayed latent throughout the regular season, an idea proven patently untrue by the Finals competitors in the past ten years. From that group, only four of the last twenty squads to enter the championship round were not in the top seven best defensive teams from their respective regular seasons, with only one of them (05-06′s aberration in Miami) going on to win it all. In a bit of good news for all Thunder faithful, the teams that did deviate from that trend, ’04 and ’08 Lakers, ’06 Mavs and Heat, did have obscenely talented offenses, and OKC’s stands pat as this league’s current gold standard on that end of the ball. Still, this somewhat blase reaction to defensive consistency should maybe allow the reigning champs in Dallas (6th in the league in defensive efficiency) and the emerging shipwreck in New York (5th currently) some more talk as possibilities to make this endlessly messy and interesting season a little more of both.

• Dwight Howard had a chance to make this all go away, to make this miserable sisyphean season become something weirder, better. Instead, he decided to drag us through this swamp again next year and commit a far graver sin: extending this damn Magic season as is. Not once this year has it seemed the Magic could play a watchable game, either exerting less effort than seems humanly (or magically) possible in losses or gluttonously hitting every three that comes its way in victories; never a happy midpoint, never anything that’s worth cranking up the ol’ League Pass. I seriously cannot remember a team with such a good record playing a season as unremarkable as this one; casual fans used to piss and moan about the Spurs and Pistons because… um, I’m not entirely sure why that happened. But I’d watch a thousand Ben Wallace free throws before having to watch another damn Magic blowout, no matter the victor. Great minds have mentioned that this Orlando team poses a significant matchup problem for the Miami Heat, and God, I hope so; this team owes us all at least six good games, even if they had to wait until late April to give them to us.

• Drunk with cap space, some Rockets fans have already spent Houston’s considerable chunk of offseason change (the team will be about $15 million under the cap if Samuel Dalembert’s non-guaranteed deal is hacked off and before extending any deals to Courtney Lee or Goran Dragic), preparing sign-and-trades for a veritable inventory of the league’s best, from Howard to Deron Williams to Eric Gordon; the likelihood remains, though, that Houston’s offseason will be spent in much less sexy negotiations: trying to retain the team’s backup point and shooting guards. Rahat and Michael have both recently taken the time to delve into exactly how great Dragic and Lee have been this season, specifically since taking on starters’ minutes, making it clear that these players have contributed to the Rockets’ overall depth that has kept them in games that their best players flailed through (or in which they didn’t play). Any followers still holding out for a tank job next year may be salivating at the idea of losing depth and cap holds at once, but Les Alexander reacting similarly seems less than likely. Still, despite their clear use to Houston, how much can the Rockets realistically offer next season to these two? If teams decide they want these men to be their starters, particularly Dragic, the contracts could reach the 4-year, $35 million range (similar players have generally gotten shorter contracts, but Lee and Dragic are both about to their enter their likely primes), one at which it seems highly unlikely for the Rockets to hold on to them. More than maybe ever, this offseason may reveal a lot about Alexander and Daryl Morey’s priorities.

• So I’ve held off on a mea culpa for this for some time (mostly because I’m sure I’m the only person waiting for it), but yikers, was I off about that Portland team. Some may remember my laughably premature prediction that the Blazers were Finals-bound, and I’d like to tear into myself for this one. Somehow, I’d forgotten that this team was without a general manager, a center under the age of 38 or a point guard not named Raymond Felton. Eventually, the team came back down to Earth and then went screaming past that into the gaping maw of Purgatory where it now resides. Once again, sorry about that one, folks.

• I’m pretty sure the reason San Antonio’s constantly been considered boring, outside of the general lack of ostensible flash (but with no lack of genius) in its superstar Tim Duncan’s game, is the team’s jersey, the blatantly dull silver-and-black. Before making the obvious comparison, note that the Spurs, despite all of its years of brilliant defense and Bruce Bowen-related violence, have none of the menace that made a similar color scheme work so well for the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. Weirdly, I often see San Antonio on writers’ best-dressed list, but I feel like this is out of pure deference to Spurs management for cutting out the pink and orange that made San Antonio players of the 90′s look like they had been wardrobed by Zubaz (gave Dennis Rodman something with which he could coordinate the hair, though). Perhaps distinctive uniform choices should be rewarded, yet I’m positive that this choice has only been remunerated through yawns.

Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here.

Listening to Luis Scola do an interview on a local radio station last night, he repeatedly made reference to the fact that he thought the Rockets actually played a relatively bad game last night, and he had a point: the first quarter had been a 40-25 bloodletting on the part of the Lakers in which the 16-time champs posted a filthy field goal percentage of 62% during which the all of the Lakers’ strengths (Kobe Bryant’s all-around offensive wizardry, their massively skilled and sized Gigantors inside, their ability to force turnovers and shots away from the rim) shined as reasons teams like the Rockets cannot beat LA. Throughout the game, the Lakers looked dominant on the interior (while Houston won the overall rebounding war, this was mostly thanks to a 17-8 advantage in the fourth), making Houston have to do what they also have to against better teams: play like madmen. Instead of trusting their two relatively newly acquired big men on the inside to hold down the fort, the Rockets played a constantly moving, ridiculously dangerous brand of defense focused on ball-hawkery that eventually worked out as the Lakers continued to try to feed their three dominant players in Bryant, Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol. As those three would predictably make their moves, even against double teams, third defenders would either take bear-like swipes at the ball or head to the weakside to opportunistically lunge at the kickout pass, hoping (and in this game, succeeding enough) to get their hands on what would lead to one of the team’s only easy buckets on the other end. While this kind of defense can often have adverse effects when kept up throughout the entirety of a game (I’m guessing everyone’s YMCA coaches have already established the moral failings of selling out for a steal), Houston recognized that it was terribly outmatched on one-on-one plays and had to cause just enough chaos to make the Lakers try to either beat them another way or foolishly keep at this brand of iso-ball.

Offensively, the Rockets had almost nothing coming consistently on offense, unable to feed Scola or Patrick Patterson in the post thanks to the moving forest of Lakers bigs or penetrate with Dragic thanks to mostly the same reasons; to combat this, they opted for the home run swing over and over again, whether it be the aforementioned layups on the fast break, the always beloved three-ball (the Rockets opted for 20 of em, 25% of their overall shots at the basket) or pull-up jumpshots in delayed transition. Without offensive anchors Kyle Lowry or Kevin Martin to either run the offense or run the offense through, the Rockets look to their sampler platter of sort-of offensive skills: pindowns for Chase Budinger and Courtney Lee, pick-and-pop plays run explicitly to get Scola open 16-footers, allowing Dragic enough air space on pick-and-rolls for the feisty Slovenian to gobble up some contact and go to charity stripe. On any given night, watching this mashup of plays and half-hearted ideas come to life can be alternately inspiring and cramp-inducing, both thanks to the simplicity and diligence involved, and a few times in this past month, the Rockets have been able to steal a few wins from the Thunder and Lakers thanks to similar tactics, along with some infantile moments from Russel Westbrook, Andrew Bynum and some NBA referees.

Playing superior teams can often feel like an endless burden for teams like the Rockets, stuffed full of players that can only do so much as opposed to the few Lakers types that can do so much, but when facing such limitless power, a team can either crumble and stick to the old game plan or do the only rational thing: go crazy. Taking risks can always lead to consequences no one wants to face, but if losing’s the worst that can happen, why not overstretch, overexert, overextend? Sometimes that’s the only way to victory.

The timing of this ultimatum seems particularly averse to a Rockets move thanks to a bacterial infection that has Lowry chilling in a hospital bed watching NCAA games at the moment rather than eking out victories in Oklahoma City, but he’ll be back in action in less than  a couple of weeks, making his trade value relatively unchanged. Still Lowry’s seen a big drop in all of his numbers since the beginning of the season, when the baby-faced bulldog routinely posted almost-triple-doubles and stood among the league leaders in PER. Those falls have shown up in places other than Lowry’s always shaky jumpshot, as well (February actually showcased Lowry posting up fantastic  percentages from the field, 47% overall and 43% from the arc); instead, Lowry’s passing has been suspect, declining from the league leader in assists in mid-January to a measly 4.8 per game in the Rockets’ latest losing streak.

If a Dwight Howard rental legitimately becomes an option for Houston, even with a lousy Hedo Turkoglu kicker, disregard that entire last paragraph. All this talk of trading for a star and collecting assets would have its truest validation if Howard spent even half a season in Rockets red.

The most commonly posited thoughts about a proposed deal shipping Kevin Martin and Luis Scola, along with some sort of melange of picks and bench assets (Jonny Flynn, we knew ye so little), for Gasol state that while Gasol might present an improvement over the existing Rockets team, the improvement would not be major enough to lose key contributors and/or take on his massive contract (which will pay him almost $40 million over the next couple of years, years in which he’ll be 32 and 33 years old). What could Gasol bring that either would improve or fail to change a Rockets team that seems to have less glaring holes than in recent years? There stands the obvious uptick in defensive efficiency, a marker of which the Rockets have been perilously close to the bottom leaguewide until this season, where Houston lands smack dab in the middle as the 15th best defense in the L; Gasol’s Lakers, of course, have done remarkably well on the oft-forgotten end of the court, posting top 10 finishes every year since his arrival, peaking at fifth in 2008-09. While many might attribute that to the added benefit of wing defenders like Trevor Ariza and Ron Artest/Metta World Peace/Tru Warier/my favorite human and another giant presence in Andrew Bynum on the interior, no proposed deal for the Spanish giant has dealt the Rockets’ recently acquired paint protector Samuel Dalembert, making the interior in Houston likely to be similarly formidable.

Photo courtesy of Philipp Klinger via Flickr

While that gives an overall idea of what the defense might improve to with Gasol helping to man the paint in Houston, we should look more carefully at the man he’d likely be replacing at the power forward position, Scola; while Scola’s production this year has plummeted and later risen back up to respectable levels of scoring and (somewhat respectable) rebounding, his deficiencies on the defensive end have always matched up nicely with those of the Rockets, and this year has been no different. On the block, Scola’s lack of height and foot speed make him an easy target to push around, predictably making him the 107th best post defender in the league, giving up 0.91 points per possession (PPP) on post-ups, a group that makes up more than 30 percent of the plays Scola’s defended this year. Spot-up shooters, those pesky open men who are just waiting for your team’s big man to collapse on a penetrating point guard or wing so that they can clean up on a kick-out pass (something Scola himself is particularly adept at doing, even if the stats don’t bear that out), make up the other heaviest portion of Scola’s defensive workload, accounting for 39.3% of his responsibilities on that end, and his stats are predictably middle-of-the-road there, ranking as the 97th best defender of the play in the league.  While spot-up shooting defense actually surprises as a strong point of the Rockets defense (12th in the league), post-ups compose one of the many Houston vulnerabilities inside, where the Rockets rank 18th in the league at guarding such plays.

Gasol’s Lakers unsurprisingly, with their massive frontline, dominate the paint on the defensive end, as even slowed down veteran defenders like World Peace, Matt Barnes and Kobe Bryant can funnel their offensive charges directly into the walls of Bynum and Gasol; on one-on-one post-ups, the Lakers’ towers rank even better. The team as a whole plays the sixth-best post defense in the league, but Gasol himself is no slouch; his numbers guarding post-ups, 35.7% of the possessions that he handles, ranks as 13th-best among all defenders, giving up a minuscule 0.59 PPP. While guarding the man headed toward the basket off of a pick-and-roll doesn’t happen nearly as often for Gasol (only 7.6 percent of his defensive possessions), he also stands among the best in that department as the fifth-best inhibitor of such plays, ones which have consistently given the Rockets trouble all year (Houston gives up 1.03 PPP guarding he roll man, the eighth-worst mark in the league).

Though generally more concise and informative than defensive stats, offensive marks for both Gasol and Scola seem like unfair marks given their respective down years on that side of the floor, both taking huge dives from last year’s numbers (dives that hopefully have nothing to do with age-related entropy). For a good guide on that side of the floor, we turn to adjusted plus/minus numbers that let us know exactly how much better their teams are offensive when they’re on the floor as opposed when they’re not; using this stat, Scola’s +.02 mark is slightly better than Gasol’s -.94 one, but the difference is negligible. When factoring in PER, though, Gasol’s 21.12 is still All-Star worthy, while Scola’s 14.03 makes him a blow-average NBA player on the year.

Important to remember in this discussion of how much of an improvement Gasol makes over Scola is that Martin would also be sent out in this deal; equally important might be the fact that those minutes will not just be given to a vacuum and that Courtney Lee would almost certainly eat those up. Martin’s production has taken a furious tumble from last year’s All-Star level offensive numbers, but rather than this year being an aberration, it rather looks like a return to the norm. His PER of 17.4 sure looks a lot more like the 17.1 and 17 numbers that he posted in the two years preceding the last one than the 21.4 he posted last season. Of course, he also posted similar efficiency ratings in the 20′s when younger; Lee, for his part, really has never had a season other than his second, a run in New Jersey for one of the worst teams in NBA history, when he got consistently big minutes; still, his efficiency numbers have number quite demanded such playing time. He’s posting his highest offensive rating and PER this year, but Lee’s already 26, pretty old for a fourth year NBA player, and unlikely to go through transformative offensive changes in the next couple of seasons, though he’ll likely sustain his current improved pace, if not slightly better it. More importantly, his on-the-ball defense ranks far superior to that of Martin, making that proposed starting line of Dalembert-Gasol-Parsons-Lee-Lowry look that much more dangerous when guarding opposing offenses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TldUEViX36c

Most of this disregards the most important, usually immeasurable aspect of having a player of Gasol’s caliber and utility: the star effect. Players will have to double team him, and his passing ability has been well documented while helping run the Triangle under Phil Jackson. His outside shooting can make a Lowry/Gasol pick-and-roll look damn near unstoppable when Lowry’s shooting well, and Samuel Dalembert could be looking at a lot ore bunnies inside if he’s ready for those beautiful touch passes that Bynum’s greedily enjoyed over recent years. Add to this the actual positive direction in which this will send the Rockets’ cap situation, and this deal seems like a no-brainer, at least on Houston’s part. A star, and no matter what the doubters have still lodged in their brains from years of media training or one miserable tango with Kevin Garnett years ago, he is a star, can change everything for a team; when that team is already just one game out of the number three seed and looking at a very cushy end of the season schedule, a star might even turn a little-outfit-that-could into a title contender.

Looking at a list of current NBA free agents reads like a Who’s Who of guys who were purported “not to get it”: Antoine Walker, Gilbert Arenas, Rasheed Wallace (retired but reportedly wanting for a comeback), and the crown prince of these lost men, Allen Iverson. While age and lack of productivity can just as easily be blamed for the passing on each of these players by GMs leaguewide, a stain marks every one of them as creatures of another time, one David Stern is only too happy to see passed. Anyone who thinks a talent like Iverson couldn’t still contribute at a minimal level, at least, to an NBA team has not been very attentively watching the last few years of the careers of guys like Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady and Shaquille O’Neal, one-time MVP-level talents that are so naturally gifted that they’ve each found (or in Shaq’s case, did find) their respective niches in which they’ve thrived. The read on Iverson does not simply state that he can’t play anymore; instead, his history of bad decision-making, both on and off-court, and his remarkably bad reputation have led him to scrounging for D-League minutes. Pushing aside all personal allegiance to a guy that defined what I loved about basketball in the Aughts, even if it was plenty of reasonable people despised, how the hell did he go from gifted troublemaker to locker-room poison so quickly? Just three years ago, this guy was starting in All-Star Games, even if the fans seemed to be voting him in out of nostalgia rather than any new highlight footage. Now soccer teams offer him pricy contracts as publicity stunts because, you know, maybe he’ll take it?

Maybe it’s my own conflated wistfulness for this lot that’s stirring up such a response, but this gentrification of the NBA has done some considerable damage to a league once built on its bizarre personalities. Yes, Portland and Indiana had to deal with year’s of season-ticket-sale rebuilding thanks to their respective eras of numbskullery, but in the process, we’re now entering almost-NFL-levels of banality when it comes to player’s personalities. In this new golden era of talent, endless stars have emerged out of recent drafts, from Derrick Rose to John Wall to Kyrie Irving to Kevin Love, but where are the weirdos, the guys that every reporter goes to for a quote that will lift up that night’s copy to something more than just a recollection of stats and lead changes? Even those who show a bit of tenacity, your Russell Westbrooks and Blake Griffins and Demarcus Cousinses, immediately become vilified when they shift from the milquetoast-type of stardom that Peyton Manning turned into years of soporific television endorsements to something more meaningful: a real person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itq80z3wyaU

The only thing resembling the JailBlazers of the this era or that brand of brilliant idiocy is the Washington Wizards, who, due to their miserable record and unwatchable play, are honestly more depressing than idiosyncratic. Obviously a devotee of the Rasheed Wallace School of Conditioning and Shot Selection, Andray Blatche nightly turns a diverse array of talents into some sort of PSA against taking oneself too seriously after limited success (so, so limited). Jordan Crawford and Nick Young are almost certainly jumpers somewhere right now, no matter at what time you read this, and JaVale McGee sadly seems like a sitcom trope instead of a true, sensible human being. I’m sure that many who criticize my argument as reminiscing over past misery will look to the WIzards, screaming, “Is this what you want?”, but remember, the Blazers of the early part of the 2000′s played well. As did those Pacers, the Melo-Iverson Nuggets, the “We believe” Warriors and most of the misfits many among us have loved. We only cared about their eccentricities because they could ball, and what passes for dysfunction these days in the NBA is just that: dysfunctional.

Perhaps the advanced stats movement did it, killed off an era of men for whom taking an ill-advised jumper was making a point rather than a coherent decision. The Daryl Morey crew simply will not abide such recklessness in the name of character or watchability or anything so intangible. Maybe Ron Artest or Stephen Jackson or Stern himself closed the lid on them whenever they played into every one of those racist, dehumanizing stereotypes that pervaded discussion of post-Jordan ball on that fateful Detroit night, knocking out plenty of drunk fans and any goodwill that had accompanied their brand of ball. The deluge of stars that followed them has quickly made their memories fade like so many AI shots at the end of a shot clock, replacing them with guys who request their steaks well done and cut up before served and slap stickers with Bible verses onto backboards. It’s probably for the better, probably made the game easier to watch, more efficient, less cluttered with racial tension, certainly more profitable, given it a higher profile. But every time you see a superstar take a remarkably poorly articulated media question this postseason and watch the mental gymnastics that the player goes through lest he respond back too rudely, remember: Sheed would have said something.

Photo courtesy of chatirygirl via Flickr

Every Friday, I’ll post this collection of thoughts accumulated over the past week, so named because it gives a perfectly arbitrary number limit to the amount of this rambling madness. And I won’t even mention Jeremy Lin. Beyond that time.

• There is a well known NBA tradition every February, filled with unwanted pageantry, interminably bland events and a meandering, if occasionally entertaining, trifle of an exhibition at its center; unrecognized by most of the public, though, remains that other winter-time custom that accompanies All-Star Weekend: the yearly moan of the occasional-NBA-fan-columnist. When these pillars of sports condescend to talk about this lowly sport and its annual showcase of its best talent, invariably looking over the Saturday night competitions’ (the Dunk Contest and Three-Point Shootout, obviously. Are there others?) talent, the result always amounts to some polemic decrying the fall of NBA basketball, the lack of talented competitors in these events and, if he or she is worth her salt as a national columnist without a clue, probably LeBron James. This annual group crowing session has come out in full force in 2012, particularly since the players involved in this year’s Dunk Contest were announced, and I feel as if something needs to be said. I will certainly not defend this upcoming celebration of blandness, one which I will undoubtedly watch and report to my friends as “aight”; even less so do these retread columns deserve our respect, or even tolerance. No, I simply don’t understand why we can’t accept the boredom of it all, letting it wash over us like Saturday morning cartoons on sugar-addled children. No benefit can be had by poking and prodding at the rampaging, hulkish cash cow that is the All-Star Weekend, so why not learn to tolerate it, lumps and all? As David Stern won’t be Goodelling the All-Star Game anytime soon, we should learn to love our Paul Georges and James Joneses; they’re all we’ve got.

• It might be strange to claim that a team with the league’s best record has had a quiet season, but could anyone accuse the Chicago Bulls of being particularly noisy this year? Besides inserting themselves into the Dwight Howard trade talks, the Bulls have found a reasonable, boring path to 25-7, one that’s reliant, as their success was last year, on an exacting, painstakingly executed defense. So, much of the same can be expected, right? Another Conference Finals burnout after a respectable run by the kids in the Windy City? The thing is, this team is very different from last year’s. In the last season, the Bulls enjoyed a ridiculous run of good health, much like the Thunder have for a few years now. Instead, this season has seen Chicago’s two best players, Derrick Rose and Luol Deng, miss a combined 17 games between the both of them; the team’s record in Rose, the reigning, if not justified, MVP’s absence? 7-2. Last season, while the Bulls’ defense, as constructed by Tom Thibodeau, carried the team’s 12th ranked offense, the Rose-only show kept the team (more than) afloat while new additions Carlos Boozer, Ronnie Brewer and Kyle Korver tried to fit into the offensive scheme. The 2012 Bulls, though, have been a wholly different beast: an efficiency monster on the offensive side of the ball, featuring some of the league’s best turnover ratios (3rd best leaguewide), assist ratios (2nd) and rebound rates (1st, along with a league-best mark on the offensive glass). Rather than being carried by the team’s still-remarkable defense, the Chicago offense has now found itself among the league’s premiere scoring machines, scoring at the league’s second-best clip of 105.9 points per 100 possessions. Those awaiting another Miami waltz to the title might just be surprised to find that the Heat may meet their match on both sides of the court come May.

Photo courtesy of C. J. via Flickr

• If one cheers for a team to continue an epic losing streak, is he or she truly a masochist? Who doesn’t want to see the Bobcats put up the worst record ever? Their two best players play the same position, one of whom is currently injured and the other posting a league-average PER. Maybe I’m not a monster? Maybe I just really want Anthony David to go to Charlotte? Maybe he’d like it there?

• Speaking of ridiculous streaks, the San Antonio Spurs currently stand atop the Southwest Division, riding high on a nine-game win streak that’s somehow coincided with their rodeo trip. Wasn’t this team supposed to crumble, if not after last year’s embarrassing fall to the eighth-seeded Grizzlies, at least after its best player broke his hand in this season’s fifth game? What gives? And as for those Grizzlies, were they too not supposed to fall in the standings with an impact similar to Zach Randolph tripping on a banana peel? These teams were supposed to clear the way for the Rockets’ ascendancy to the heights of the Western Conference, or at least a guaranteed playoff spot. Damn tenacious winning teams. Now, what is Houston going to do? Beat Oklahoma City or something?

• Seriously, Jon Leuer has a better PER than anyone on the Bobcats’ roster. Go ahead; look him up. I’ll wait. There are three Washington Wizards posting better efficiency numbers than anyone in Charlotte. THREE. One is JaVale McGee, king of all that is funny in basketball. Let’s take this in, people. In a season where the Rockets have been involved in two Chris Paul trades that didn’t happen, the Bulls are posting the second-best offense in the league, Andrea Bargnani’s been more than useful, Doug Collins is being referred to as a players’ coach, Chase Budinger is in the Dunk Contest and apparently something interesting is happening with the Knicks’ point guard situation, it’s nice to know one thing is going exactly as expected: the Charlotte Bobcats are horrifically, historically miserable. They’re like the world’s totem in this nonsensical lockout season.

Such established dominance didn’t come to fruition immediately, though. No, instead a well constructed collection of veterans led by a single basketball god took down those Heat in last year’s Finals, finally giving the 2004 Pistons some company as an alternate plan to winning a title besides “collect a lot of superstars, preferably three”. In the interim, many have argued that Dirk’s guidance of the Mavericks to the promised land doesn’t deviate too greatly from past champions, but only the 93-94 Rockets stand out so remarkably in memory as a team guided by one hand so greatly (though PER disparities between the top two players on champions of recent years tell a different story, most notably among the Spurs of the early 00′s and the Shaq-led Lakers). What Nowitzki and Dallas’ triumph might ultimately have done on a macro-level is change the strategy: since not every team can collect all of the stars, why not just collect as many of them as you can and instead amass all of the talented role players that those top-heavy teams can no longer afford thanks to their salary obligations up top? Or better yet, why not just do the talented role player collecting through the draft and keep that cap room flexible to be able to nab the first available superstar that will join the team in question? Enter Houston.

The Rockets obviously aren’t the only ones with this idea; the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season has been the year of the team, in its truest form. From the defensive-minded younglings in Philadelphia to the slightly bigger defensive-minded youth in Indiana to the gun-em-to-death athletes in Denver, many squads have found success in 2011 through a reliance on more than just a select group of players on both sides of the ball, replacing star power with good ol’ fashioned manpower, usually obliterating opposing benches with their endless platoons of guys (who can ball). Never before has piling up a collection of good pieces looked like such a viable strategy, even if pundits around the NBA universe seem more than happy to pour a bucket of spirit-crushing upon all who think these teams can actually do anything except take a couple of game come May. Still, this phenomenon might just be new enough that we will get a few years of it to crush the traditional notion of star-collection.

One team with a particularly strange hold on this group is the Portland Trailblazers, a group that seems the natural standard-bearers of the Mavericks’ legacy of last year (since the Mavs themselves don’t quite seem up to the challenge, even if both teams share a 14-11 record at the moment. Look at those point differentials, people). After years of building a Thunder-like trio of stars through the draft, injuries seemed to have robbed them of the Roy/Oden/Aldridge era, leaving just the latter to head a bunch of über-talented, lacking-in-traditional-position players that can basically all shoot, (mostly) all defend (looking at you, Crawford) and all play given the right matchups. If any one team has seen this shift in the traditional power structure of teams and embraced it, it’s been the perennially forward-thinking progressives up in the Pacific Northwest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Chx1DKgG4

Still, Houston holds it own strange place in this new paradigm as a team just waiting to be branded among these contenders, scraping and clawing for its chance both to be respected and completely vindicated once it gets its hands on one of those franchise-direction-shifting studs. Unlike most oft hese teams, the Rockets seem not to have fallen into this state by chance (Utah), portending-failure-turned-good-fortune (Denver) or rebuilding-gone-right (Philadelphia), but rather by outright strategy. While Houston’s GM, Daryl Morey, has taken his fair chance on high-risk assets who could turn out to be stars in Terrence Williams and Hasheem Thabeet, most of Houston’s plan has been to consistently contend with guys that other teams simply thought of as “good, but not good enough”. THose guys, Kyle Lowry and Luis Scola most obviously but several others, have helped turned Houston in to the kind of bare-knuckled, indefatigable grouping of talent that competes with just about any team any night, even as the Rockets’ organization tries at any cost to deal a handful of these men to any team with a disgruntled star that can come be this crowd’s Aldridge or Dirk.

What’s flatly silly about all of the doom and gloom foretold by those who short-sightedly claimed the Heat and its ilk would ruin the NBA landscape was that, for decades, collections of superstars had been ruling the league without (and sometimes with) cries of unfairness, from the Showtime Lakers’ triumvirate of number one picks to the old Boston big three to the Bulls’ ridiculous run with the league’s best player, best rebounder and best all-around player (somehow all different men). Miami’s hutzpah-showing move to snatch all three of the 2010′s prized free agent class was simply a new way of committing to a time-tested, true plan; instead, the Rockets, Nuggets and 76ers look to be the (don’t say trailblazers, don’t say trailblazers) pioneers here, trying what none, or at least very, very few before them, have done: win without the star

• One of the most endearing aspects of cheering for one specific basketball team is the relentless optimism of the beginning of a season; almost as pleasant is the ephemeral breeziness of a season lost once mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. No, the true misery lies with those stomach-churning, disemboweled-thanks-to-all-of-the-gut-wrenching followers of teams on the brink; on the brink of the one seed, of the playoffs, of the ability to completely humiliate and degrade a team’s rival, the pain afflicts those who have something to lose. Suddenly, Rockets fans find themselves back in such murky waters, facing the frustrating reality of logistics, as in, “Who in the hell can the Rockets logistically beat out for a playoff spot?” According to John Hollinger’s Playoff Odds, not many teams. Having had the 12th easiest schedule entering Friday’s play, the Rockets’ strength of schedule surely will increase in upcoming months, with a lot of those games coming against our most virulent rivals for these playoff spots: the surprise monsters of the Northwest (Utah and Portland) and every other team in the Southwest. In fact, the new month will bring with a great deal more crushing, horrifying certainty with two games against Utah, two against Memphis and one in Portland; if there were ever a time to see the Rockets show their mettle, this would be it. Yeah, I remember this feeling, a constant tension after every win, too ready for the other shoe to drop, or a dejected, slow gaze downward after every loss, sure that all of the other teams are having more fun without your team in the playoff hunt. Yup, the playoffs, or at least the promise of them, have returned to Houston; I’m going to need some TUMS.

• So Eric Todd and I were staring in dumbfounded awe at the entirety of Monday’s Clippers victory over the Thunder, from the 80-second-machine-gun-fire of threes to Blake Griffin’s destruction of al that is good and right over the outstretched arms of Kendrick Perkins’ exiting soul. The latter of course provoked a discussion of the best dunks seen live by the two of us, a dull talk to the say the least (though I think I’m all about LeBron’s full extension in Game 4 against the Celtics in the 08 semifinals), but one that led to much more fascinating gibberish: whether today’s players jump higher than past ones, an assumption I had simply taken as fact long ago. Generally, I firmly preach against the kind of “things done changed” blanket-statements like this one, firmly believing more in the concept that nothing changes in history but the names (the phrase “Kids these days…” is both a perennial punchline and annoyance in my life); still, the differences in body types and established workout regimens seem so vast when compared to those of the 80′s and even 90′s that the idea that these gods among men fly higher than those deities doesn’t really seem all that far fetched. Without reliable data on vertical leaps of NBA players in the past, actual empirical evidence might be missing here, but I don’t know. You guys should be the judges.

• About that whole “the great fall of the Western Conference” thing? When was that supposed to happen? 10 teams in the West rise above .500, while just seven do so in the East. The gap is closing, no doubt, but can we please stop declaring these paradigm shifts until they happen?

• So Jerry West’s comments about calling the bluffs of disgruntled superstars and forcing them to leave their home teams, which can offer significantly more money, have been making the rounds and even finding some high-minded (semi-)support. I would like to state my case in the defense of sending Dwight out as soon as the right deal is found; firstly, Dwight Howard will not be a member of the Orlando Magic past this year without a NBA championship won this postseason, meaning that holding on to him will come out of stubbornness, (quite truly) blind hope and hunger for some of the last playoff gate returns this team might see in a while. To add to this, this current collection of misfits wil not bring a title to Orlando, and I seriously doubt that it can do the damage some think it can. The hot start to the beginning of this year was similar to Portland’s, based on a lot of streaky jumpshooters raining it in for the first month. Unlike Portland, though, those Orlando shooters aren’t just streaky: they’re mostly just bad. Jason Richardson and Hedo Turkoglu simply aren’t solid shooters, and outside of one brilliant half-year that everyone continues to bring up, Jameer Nelson has never looked like a proper complement to a player of Howard’s talents. Any run they made would be based around MVP-level contributions turned in by Howard on both sides of the floor for an entire playoff run, which just doesn’t seem like a likelihood (especially for a team that he continues to request a trade from on a seemingly daily basis). Maybe the well has run dry in the two LA’s for their young, superstar bigs, though I doubt it; perhaps Atlanta and Chicago will start to have to look attractive quite quickly. Maybe treading water with a ton of talent like Denver (might be doing; they also might be on the path to a title) isn’t attractive. But playing the smug ex, assured that he/she’ll come back while still completely putting life on hold in the interim… that’s never been a good look.

• Watching Chris Paul in the last week may have permanently destroyed, or at least bisected, my basketball-loving psyche. For as long as I can remember (a cliché that, due to a pretty damn stupid first 23 years of life for me, doesn’t apply all that much here), my favorite NBA player has always been he who I deemed the league’s veritable best, however skewed that estimation might have been. From AI (I know that was never true) to Garnett to Kobe to Bron, I’ve egenrally just gone along with the one that could make me shake my head most; this year, however, that man is not LeBron James, the clear best player in the NBA. No, this year, Chris Paul and his new assortment of toys has made me wonder how anyone can play basketball with him and not still just ask for his autograph every time he runs back up the court. Words fail me. I think the next Clippers game will just do this to me.

Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZajssR79Ws

• There is no arguing that the New York Knicks suck when even the most obnoxious Manhattanites admit so themselves, and even in this post-Isiah world, it really feels like we’ve come to that point for the first time in a while. After an entire offseason of hype-inducing MSG commercials and free-agent signings that literally didn’t seem possible, the Knicks have had to actually play basketball games, and those haven’t exactly gone so well for them. As has been reported by anyone who’d had the displeasure of watching this team take the court this year, point guards don’t play for the New York Knicks anymore, a fact that has very quickly reminded all watching exactly how much Mike D’Antoni and Ama’re Stoudemire rely on those little guys with the vision and speed and sneaker deals and so forth. Somehow the blame for this has fallen on Carmelo Anthony, simply doing what he’s always done (take heaps of inefficient shots inefficiently) in a world where people actually care about what he does now, instead of all of the people who put them team together and forgot the cardinal rule of today’s NBA. See, some think that hat rule requires a team to have an elite point guard to compete, thanks to the 2003 rule changes that have allowed perimeter players with the ability to get into the lane free reign; rather, in this league, a team doesn’t really need one of the league’s best point men to vie for the title: it just need a competent one. Portland, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia— all battle for their conference’s top spot without a premier point running the show, yet none have the nightly disadvantage of a black hole of ball distribution. A similar problem to New York’s has popped up on the nation’s other pole in LA, where Derek Fisher and a hobbled Kobe Bryant seem like less than enough playmaking in a world without the Triangle; the main difference is the level of talent wearing purple and gold. The paradigm shift form the rule change did happen, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that instead of creating an unrealistic cutoff point for those striving for greatness, the shift just made sure that there’d be a bare minimum required for those who really wanted in the winner’s circle.

• Flip Saunders got the axe in Washington this week when he really didn’t deserve it, and that’s not so great for him. Still, my endless babbling brook of pity stops a little short for the Flipster, as his future employment as a head coach is all but assured thanks to the NBA’s eternally strange “blame the coach sort of for now until firing the general manager much, much later and blame him for everything” policy. Yes, Ernie Grunfield assembled a hodgepodge of basketball morons. Yes, he was already there before new owner Ted Leonsis took over, so Grunsy isn’t even the owner’s guy. Yes, things better change if the Wiz plan to hold on to their seminal, once-in-a-generation talent, John Wall… but none of this matters when there’s a perfectly good coach to fire. This is why the NBA’s coaching carousel exists; so rarely are good coaches let go for the right reasons that we invariably see their faces stalking some new sideline before he can buy a whole new tie collection to match his new team’s home colors (Just wait out Triano, Flip; you’d look good in purple). It would be nice, just once, for us to actually figure out whether a coach is good or not by giving him something with which to work. You know, something that’s not Jordan Crawford and Andray Blatche?

• Quick question: why wasn’t Kevin Love born and raised in Houston, where he’d invariably want to return after signing his four-year-extension that incomprehensibly allows him the opportunity to bounce to greener pastures (or at least less heavily-accented pastures) after three years? As if the Clippers and Lakers fans needed yet another thing to sweetly daydream about while they go grab fugu or wear pants with skull patches sown onto them or whatever terrible things that they do (I know this is borderline-illiterate gibberish. Allow me this). David Kahn’s Freudian desire for disapproval looks like it just cost the Wolves an all-timer, but the Rockets won’t even be able to touch him. Remember that before allowing yourselves to be inundated with false hope in a couple of years, Rockets fans; at this point, I’ve become the NBA fan version of a scorned lover, already dismissing future relationships because of how much they’re assured to break my (Houston’s) heart.

• Some look at the sudden disappearance of Lamar Odom’s production in 2012 and see a system player ripped from his comfort zone, left useless and irrelevant without the girders that had once propped him up still in place. I’d like to dispute that assessment by simply looking a few inches down the bench at Shawn Marion, a guy who got all of the same shtick only a couple of years prior. After leaving Phoenix and experiencing travails with the Heat (a team that started the likes of Chris Quinn and Mark Blount) and Raptors, Marion’s grave had been long buried. Plug him in the another fitting system, though, and he’s a World Champion game-changer. Both share a ton of versatility that can come off as aimlessness without the proper cookie-cutter shaping their talents into what they could  really be. What’s dough without shape? Well, it’s still delicious, salmonella-heavy cookie dough. Maybe that was a bad analogy.

Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHF2SI6PYtY

Every Friday, I’ll post this collection of thoughts accumulated over the past week, so named because it gives a perfectly arbitrary number limit to the amount of this rambling madness. Come get some.

• After a month of pissing and moaning from the base about how the Houston Rockets just can’t bang with the big boys of the NBA, Houston got its chance to do what all good teams should: sweep up the riffraff. As anyone who paid attention this week saw, the team did just that, collecting five wins in a row to completely leave all passers-by clueless as to exactly how worthwhile this Rockets team actually is— a problem these Rockets have had for quite some time. Rarely has the dichotomy been so obvious, though: against +.500 teams, Houston’s been a dismal 3-7, accumulating all of those wins versus good teams at home, but when facing the league’s bottom-feeders, the Rockets have gone an unblemished 5-0. Playing elite teams on the road (and the Rockets have been up against some truly premier talent, including back-to-backs with the Thunder and both Los Angeles teams) has represented this buzzsaw that seems to cut the Rockets off at the knees anytime that they appear to be overreaching from their station in the NBA, that of the perennial eight-seed contender. Still, strangely enough, if the Rockets kept their current pace up, beating every team they’re supposed to beat and going .500 at home against the league’s better squads, while losing everything else, they’d the season at a beyond respectable 37-29 record, one which would almost certainly line them up for the playoffs— and a lot of road games against playoff-quality teams. Ouch. This seems like a silly exercise given the rashness of playoff talk less than a month into this season, but almost a fourth of all games have been played, which, for the Rockets at least, has brought forth some interesting patterns.

Photo courtesy of Kevin Dooley via Flickr

• Like Houston’s bizarre record against the good and bad, the San Antonio Spurs have spent this season’s first month establishing a hard rule to follow all year: win em in all in San Antonio, lose everywhere else. I thought home court wasn’t supposed to mean much in the NBA? This is supposed to be the sport in which the cold-blooded killers, or stars, would rather hear the silence of thousands of adoring fans than the cheers of their own (or maybe that’s just the always sociopathic Kobe Bryant). No other obvious trends stand out: of the Spurs’ six road games so far this season, only three came on the second night of a back-to-back, one being the Spurs’ last game and first road victory against the Orlando Magic in overtime. Some of the team’s home wins have been on the bad end of back-to-backs as well, and seven of the team’s nine opponents in these home stands have been teams above .500. Though this trend has a high likelihood of lasting the weekend (the Spurs play Sacramento tonight in the AT&T Center, but travel to Houston tomorrow night to face the streaking Rockets), only the tiny sample size and some weird breaks can explain this one. Veteran teams, even ones that rely on notoriously home-court friendly shooters like the Spurs do, shouldn’t be expected to be so definitely shaped by the courts on which they’re playing, and I rather suspect the Spurs are just a very good team that have had some weird hiccups out of town.

• National television has not been kind to the Los Angeles Lakers in this lockout-shortened season, as “statement game” losses to the Bulls, Blazers and Clippers have left a nation of pundits to ponder the health of Kobe, the competency of Mike Brown and the overall existence of a Lakers bench; Thursday’s exploding failure of a loss to Miami looks no different, immediately prompting the Laker-obsessed media to wonder, “When is Dwight Howard coming already?” There’s oh-so-much wrong with that sentiment, but I’ll just point out the two obvious problems: one, that Dwight Howard can really go just about anywhere he wants, and two, that big kid the Lake Show has manning the post right now isn’t so shabby. The first point is obvious, as Chicago, Atlanta, soon-to-be Brooklyn, the other Los Angeles and just about any team with a general manager that’s watched a game of basketball in the last ten years wants Dwight so badly that he can taste the Executive of the Year award (Mmmm… bronzey). As for Bynum, his efficiency numbers take a little damage from his uptick in usage rate this year (while still not nearly as high as Howard’s), but his stats compare favorably: both have a ridiculously low defensive rating of 93, top the rankings in total rebound rate (with Bynum slightly trailing Howard’s league-topping, eye-popping 24.1 percentage of total available rebounds snagged) and rank among the centers with the highest PERs (my biggest stretching of the truth, in which Howard ranks seventh in the entire league whereas Bynum is only the third-best center with a usage rate over 20). All of this nonsense should be redirected at that aforementioned problem with the purple & gold: the complete and utter lack of depth. Early in Thursday night’s drubbing at the hands of the Heat, Bynum had to miss time thanks to foul trouble, and in those moments, there were no viable options for the Lakers on offense. The Heat loaded up on Pau Gasol while only allowing Bryant contested mid-range jumpers, and the rest was just a reason to click over to the more exciting, if perhaps more depressing, Rockets/Hornets ending (or the entirely more depressing GOP debate). Superstars make champions, sure, but good teams can’t exist completely independent of worthwhile contributors who won’t show up on All-Star teams.

Photo courtesy of "an untrained eye" via Flickr

• So many Rockets observers warned about the possible dangers of Luis Scola’s contract last offseason, even if they did so feebly, because the end of this deal would come when the highly “experienced” (read: old) Scola would be 35 years old. Most wondered what a tired-looking, even-less-athletic Scola would look like at the end of that run; like some damned Dickensian peer through the looking glass, we’re seeing exactly how ineffectual Scola can be this year. Precipitous drops in just about every meaningful statistical category have come along with Scola’s flaccid start to 2012, including in rebound rate (14.2 in 2010-11 to 10.3), true shooting percentage (53% to 48%) and win shares per 48 minutes (.110 to .016!); nothing quite encapsulates the failures like John Hollinger’s catch-all stat of Player Efficiency Rating, though, which has fallen from a near All-Star-level 18.4 from last year to a significantly below-average 12.7 in this young season. I’m hopeful we’re all just getting a brief, terrifying look into Scola’s future, but if the inevitable fall has already begun, who knows where in the hell he could end up at the end of this contract?

• I promise I don’t hate the Utah Jazz. Promise. I did cry when John Stockton (and a dirty pick by Karl Malone) ended the Houston Rockets’ last meaningful title run in 1998. I certainly fumed and said several words that almost certainly wouldn’t be found acceptable within the Provo city limits when the Rockets fell in seven (in Houston. This is where I smack my forehead because the tear ducts don’t work anymore) to Utah. No, I don’t hate the Utah Jazz, but I certainly don’t think they’re among the best teams in the West, an echelon in wich an early-season burst has seem to have placed them, despite their paucity of believable NBA guards and anything that would differentiate them from other NBA teams. A middling +1.9 point differential tells part of the story, but Zach Lowe probably put it best earlier this week when he said that he’d be “pleasantly surprised” to see the Jazz come postseason time. NBA pundits, pay attention: records mean something, but Jesus, they don’t mean everything. Watching last night’s game, would anyone reasonably argue that the Jazz are a better team than the Mavericks? Now that that’s settled, would anyone argue the Mavericks are better than about six teams ahead of them in the West? Exactly.

Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here, and pay your respects to Etta James, a beautiful talent lost today. Rest in peace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0iGzo3tBH4

Every Friday, I’ll post this collection of thoughts accumulated over the past week, so named because it gives a perfectly arbitrary number limit to the amount of this rambling madness. Come get some.

• Now that Terrence Williams officially catches splinters with the bottom of his shorts for a living, the time may be now to proclaim Daryl Morey’s grand “Let’s see what the 2009 NBA Draft’s least productive players can do for us!” experiment dead in the water. Johnny Flynn has gained more ire as the most inconsequential Rockets point guard since Brent Price than anyone else on the team, including Hasheem Thabeet, who people either completely ignore or endlessly pity (before feeling bad for themselves for having to watch him play basketball rather than, say, give giraffes high fives to make end meet). Jordan Hill does some things sometimes, and I think that may be the most laudatory comment I can make on the former Wildcat.  Chase Budinger, a man currently second in the rotation to a rookie who was also a second-round pick, currently stands as Houston’s lone respectable investment in that draft, a disheartening fact that brings me to a much more enervating one about our dear Rockets: they are currently entering an era in which they look to be that worst kind of bad, the Pistons kind. The kind that no one cares about. No name on this team brings back the same immediate dry heaves that Walt Williams or Glen Rice long after he had stopped escorting around a certain future reality-TV-star/vice-presidential nominee, but that epoch of Rockets basketball is the last that I recall being this ostensibly hopeless. Maybe a month of games against the lowly trolls under the bridge of quality NBA basketball can change this, make all of these bits and pieces of respectable professional basketball players into reanimated corpses at least because if not, the basketball gods might just remind me exactly what it’s like to get what I asked for: a lottery team, and a remarkably dull one at that.

Photo courtesy of Richard Heeks via Flickr

• Maybe the convolution of the particularly tantalizing stories in the national media about the insufferably offensively deficient New York Knicks and the “Free Steve Nash” mini-movement, but I feel as if I’ve done the ultimate New-Yawk-fanboy machination and preemptively written the tale of “Nash saves the Garden!” in my head. In a vacuum, better fits nor angles for feature stories in May don’t exist. The Knicks desperately search for a consistent pick-and-roll option, or basically anyone who actually enjoys the action of passing a ball while having the physical capabilities to do so; Nash and his agent dig around the NBA for a viable place to end his career in pursuit of a ring or at least an appearance in the Finals that has eluded the virtuosic little genius. He comes back to the fold with the man who gave him the career he has now, and in turn keeps that man’s job, reunites with his old PNR buddy from his salad days and transforms Carmelo Anthony into the efficient scoring moster we all thought he could be. I’m writing sweeps week stuff here, people. Too bad this couldn’t work financially in any way (unless the Suns amnestied Nash,  a terrible personnel move that’s about as likely to happen as Robert Sarver making a smart personnel decision ever). I know i’m not the first to think of this, but now that I have, I feel closer to Peter Vescey than I ever have, which can’t be a good thing.

• Gosh, Kevin Martin can’t be this bad, can he? Going into this season, the press gave Martin a pair of pre-cooked excuses to pop into the microwave whenever he started to disappoint this season (unhappy with being traded and then not, the demise of the rip-through), and through ten games, he’s every bit the flop that he could have been. What tears at fans of the king of ugly scoring is his dip in efficiency, mostly due to his embarrassing numbers from behind the arc this year (a below-league-average 32% on 5.6 attempts per game); while his True Shooting Percentage hasn’t taken the epic fall it probably should thanks to a masterful mark from the free-throw line (though he’s putting his worst TS% since an injury-plagued half-season with the Kings before he was sent south to Houston), he’s getting to the line far less than ever before given his minutes. No matter the reason, whether it be the two reasons mentioned already, a natural decline thanks to his more-than-bizarre path toward advanced stats stardom or just a miserable early-season slump, Kevin Martin will continue to hurt the Houston Rockets every time he plays as he has up to this point in the 2011-12 season. Christ. What a season.

Photo courtesy of Meredith Farmer via Flickr

• Wait, so why can’t LeBron just have bad games? Sports really hasn’t had this bad of a Catch-22 since maybe Tiger Woods or something; I don’t even know, just grasping for straws here. When he  pillages the league, starts the season as well as any NBA player ever has, crushes teams into chalky bone dust, everything he does should be expected, just the king taking his birthright. When he fails? Dywane Wade’s the closer. What? How does that work? I feel like the vast majority of people who watch NBA basketball are sports radio hosts. Weird, wild stuff.

• Looking at the All-Star voting yesterday, I noticed Ricky Rubio placed third in Western Conference guard voting, behind Kobe and CP3, and I must say, that’s just glorious. Maybe it’s just the entirety of Minnesota stuffing the ballot box or a nation of 11-year-old girls who thought they were voting for bizarro Bieber, but however this is happening, I am proud of NBA fans who actually would like to watch an exciting exhibition game come February. I love you all, sports radio hosts of America.

Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here.

Image courtesy of Neil Kremer via Flickr

When Mike Brown first occupied the movie director’s throne left by Phil Jackson in Los Angeles in the summer of 2011, a bevy of legitimate and nonsensical worries began to crop up about the former Cavaliers coach and Spurs assistant. Some thought he wouldn’t be ready for the magnifying glass (and mischievous child trying to start a fire known as the press accompanying it) that goes with working not only in the nation’s second-biggest market but also with the NBA’s most storied franchise. Others worried that the Lakers’ de facto leader and seeming misanthrope Kobe Bryant would not take too kindly to taking orders from anyone other than the best coach of all-time, who he still battled with on a constant basis. The silliest problem followers of the purple and gold had with the hire stemmed from the fumbling, kid-gloves approach that Brown and he rest of the Cavaliers organization took to handling superstardom in Cleveland, where LeBron James and his camp appeared to run roughshod over anyone in the Midwest who stood between them and what they wanted, which were mostly warmer French fries apparently. That fear looked to be completely lacking in context, altogether unaware of the wildly different situations in LA and The Forest City. The only thing all onlookers were sure of the Brown signing was that it meant more prominent roles in the team’s offense for the Lakers’ bigs, a move ostensibly quite obvious given Bryant’s age, Brown’s conservative playcalling and the immense talents, both literally and figuratively, present in the Lake Show’s interior. This all seemed painfully clear to everyone, everyone except Bryant who is leading the NBA in shots attempted per game and might just be tanking one of this current Lakers teams’ last chance at a ring.

Kobe Bryant’s name remains synonymous with a great deal of things in both casual basketball fan and junkie circles, some of which are unrepeatable here. Two of those labels, though, come into play here, dependent on which color of glasses one looks at the output this year by this generation’s most divisive player. The first tag that comes to mind is that of “warrior”, as Bryant once again plays through another miserable and noticeable injury, on his shooting hand no less. One who see the way Bryant’s been playing this year could easily walk away from watching a game like last night’s against the Suns, an old foe of Bryant’s Lakers on its last legs that the Mamba torched for 48 points (this young season’s leading point total as of yet), and say, “Man, that dude just isn’t going to be beat.” And said observer would have a point: how is this hobbled, rapidly aging superstar able to continue this ridiculous production season-after-season, deep-playoff-run after deep-playoff-run? Are they putting something in these damn Cortisone shots? Can self-contained fury really function this long as motivation for a star that’s basically accomplished everything that any NBA player could ever hope to in his career? How in Jeebus’ name does this fella keep doing this?

But if one falls on that other divide of Mr. Bryant, he or she’s likely to ask a wholly dissimilar question: why in the hell does he keep doing this? That brings the avid follower back around to that other relevant classification of Kobe: “chucker”. Or “gunner” or “ballhog” or just plain “selfish player”. Whatever one thinks of the Kobester’s capability of hitting game-winning shots or “putting a team on his back” (a very old back, by the way), most can agree that an injured 33-year-old taking more than a fourth of a team’s shots (more than 3/8ths in last night’s dominance over the Suns) isn’t likely to be conducive to any extended periods of winning, including in an upcoming postseason. The fact that Bryant leads the league in shots per game on a team featuring two of the game’s best scoring big men (one of whom is a 24-year-old stud who represents the team’s future but still continues to put up the best numbers of his career right now) on a team with one of the league’s slower paces only serves as a glaring symbol of the offensive poison that Bryant’s shooting pours along with the healing elixir he provides with every one of his shots. “Hero shots” are called such for a reason, and that reason is not that the shooter’s always valiant and audacious, simply that he thinks that he is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0uQwG9ycF0

Admittedly, later into his career, Bryant’s become a more efficient scorer in terms of where he gets the ball on the floor, favoring operating out of the post both this year (using about 16% of his possessions of post-up opportunities, per Synergy Sports) and in the latter years of running Jackson’s Triangle Offense. But even these flirtations with smart shooting come hand-in-hand with a nod to Kobe’s more ridiculous tendencies, such as using up 32% of his possessions on isolation plays, something to be expected in Brown’s new, evolving offense but a giant number nonetheless. Why is a player who plays with Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum using his possessions like he’s Carmelo Anthony in the hollowed-out corpse of a D’Antoni offense in New York?

The more ardent Kobe apologists will likely rest on the argument that most do when debating the wisdom of Bryant’s on-court decision-making: what would Mike have done? Anyone taking a close look at the last years of Jordan’s run with the Bulls and Bryant’s numbers so far this year will see a favorable comparison, as Jordan also put up an insane amount of shots given his age (averaging 23 a year in his last three runs with the Bulls, coincidentally the same as Kobe this year) and the amount of wear-and-tear on his body while posting similar all-around numbers and PERs. However, ignoring Jordan’s propensity for being a more focused defensive presence than Bryant (which should almost never be ignored in comparisons of the two), one must remember that while Jordan’s late 90′s Bulls were flushed with offensive talent, he and Pippen represented the offense’s only real initiators on-the-ball(though Toni Kukoc obviously served that role off the bench), with mike being the team’s best post player in his final days in Chicago. While Kobe’s a more than dangerous weapon out of the post, he has the ridiculous luxury that Jordan didn’t of having two soft-handed, quick-footed, endlessly intelligent giants camped out in the paint for his team while still gunning at every availability. Were Mike in his shoes (which he wouldn’t be, because Jordans will always look better than Kobe’s ankle-breakers), I doubt he’d have had the same hesitance to throw the rock inside.

Like most young men who were 16 at one point and love basketball, there was most certainly a time when Kobe Bryant was my favorite basketball player, a renegade superhero akin to Batman firing up the kind of shots most wouldn’t dare take in a game of HORSE in actual NBA games and draining them in so many frustrated, sighing faces. He still defines NBA masculinity, toughness and stubbornness and genius all in one kind-of-an-***hole vessel; he’s still Kobe goddamn Bryant. But he only remains so by virtue of his game, by virtue of his willingness to do whatever it takes to win at all times, and right now, as he heaves up contested jumper after contested jumper, even as he makes more of them than he has in a few years, he kills that Kobe Bryant, the one whose “hero shots” really gave the term new meaning. Of course, maybe that’s the point: maybe the fact that he’d never mind attention like this is exactly what makes him Kobe goddamn Bryant, and if so, bless him for it. Just don’t expect any new banners in Staples Center anytime soon.

• Our own Kyle Lowry, the one with the puppy-dog face and tenacity of a giddy child, accused of battering a woman? Of course, in the midst of a season that seems quickly headed for a middling lottery pick (is that a good thing? Isn’t that what we want, sort of?), the Rockets’ only semblance of a bright spot has quickly dulled as the stud point guard was formally charged with one count of misdemeanor battery in Vegas Thursday. I kind of wish I had more to say about this besides, “What in Christ’s name else could go wrong?”, but even that invites the kind of “luck” for which this team’s been famous in the last few years. Perhaps this will lead to nothing, but it’s certainly strange that Lowry’s been playing throughout while waiting for the other shoe to drop.Work can be a man’s sanctuary in a time of crisis, but no one could be happy that the climax of said situation comes concurrently with his or her own peak of personal success.

• Looking at the league’s top 10 defensive teams can be downright befuddling at the beginning of this season, even though the vast majority of the list makes perfect sense. Orlando and its human pendulum round out the list, topped by Philadelphia, Indiana, Miami, Chicago, Milwaukee and other teams with sterling defensive reputations. But at the top of this list? The Denver Nuggets. What statistical aberrations a few games playing the selfish Kings, flailing Mavericks and confused Jazz can produce, but still, something strange must be brewing behind a George Karl  team leading the league in defense even just two games into the season. Given the losses of well reputed defenders Kenyon Martin and Wilson Chandler to Far East, a Nuggets D that had not ranked in the top 10 for years seemed less than primed to make the jump this year. Alas, after a closer viewing of the Nuggets against the Kings Wednesday night, little was clearer than that the effort of the Nuggets has changed. Against a team ready and prone to taking bad shots, Denver’s perimeter defense shined, chasing shooters off of their spots and (more often against a team full of mindless gunners like Sactown) putting the hands in the faces of all men daring to pull up for one behind the arc. Add to that center Timothy Mosgov’s nimble feet that are more than capable of showing hard on PNR plays before getting back to his assignment, and suddenly the Nuggets’ emergence, at least given the competition, is less surprising. Still, let’s hope that calms down before the mighty Northwestern Division soon swallows this entire conference whole.

• Where the hell is Marcus Morris? Chase Budinger’s experience makes sense to ensure the volleyballer the starting spot, and Terrence Williams needs to get as many reps in as possible before he is piled onto the rest of the screw-ups and jokes from the 2009 NBA Draft class sitting on Houston’s bench. Still, Morris looked to be a major part of the rotation coming into the season, especially after that breakout preseason game against San Antonio, but somehow high-flying white boy (sound familiar?) Chandler Parsons has found his way into a lineup desperately lacking a true wing. As Morris waits patiently on Houston’s pine, I can’t help but wonder exactly what the hell happened to the kid or whether Kevin McHale’s good graces are really that fickle.

Photo via comrade jason from Flickr

• After gobs of Rockets bashing, let us all remember when giant stars roamed the Toyota Center floor through the inspiration power of David Banner’s new single, “Yao Ming”. *****, may we all be as tall as Yao Ming.

Catch me on Twitter @JacobMustafa and in this weekly notebook every Friday. Thanks for spending your time here.

Photo via askal bosch on Flickr

Despite Michael’s understandably dour take on things, Tuesday’s loss to the Los Angeles Lakers had to bring smiles to Rockets fans, at least for three quarters. Regardless of the not-so-sudden realization that the Rockets, along with almost every NBA team, have no answer for a skilled 7-footer with length and strength to spare or that fella named Kobe Bryant, Houston embroiled itself in a very even-footed struggle with a team still capable of dismembering squads that have no business sharing a court with it. Some of the Lakers’ greatest weaknesses remain some of Houston’s best attributes: dominant point guard, depth, perimeter shooting; that might give any viewer pause that wants to credit the Rockets too much for their ability to hang with the former champs, but that’s not what those unadorned in Rocket red got out of this. They just got to watch one helluva game.

What is a sadder realization than knowing that you’d love something more if you just didn’t know it so well? The moment a lover’s quirks turn into his or her frustrating habits, the one when a once beloved job’s duties become its unending tedium, that first time the usual at your favorite restaurant just tastes too damn usual— unfortunately, that’s exactly where I find myself with these Houston Rockets. Their game-to-game development into something worthy of attention, if not quite admiration, stands out as something that a follower should be proud of, at least up until the moment he or she remembers exactly how much mediocrity all of that “development” ensures for the team’s future. Where the outside fan can marvel at Kyle Lowry’s improved jumpshot and ability to finely thread passes through the tightest of passing lanes to hit a charging Luis Scola or Samuel Dalembert, all I can do is wish for more, ever the petulant ingrate. What if he shot like Eric Gordon or passed like Ricky Rubio? What if Patrick Patterson and Jordan Hill could combine their skill sets and become even the brokest man’s Amar’e? When cheering for almost pretty good, the viewer only gets an amuse-bouche for greatness, never the fulfillment of an entrée.

Now I might be (or definitely am) another greedy Rockets fan trumpeting the horn for immediate misery in hopes for future ecstasy, but this flirting-with-good-business has left me and a host of other Rockets heads left in a perpetual purgatory, while other onlookers get to see Houston for the rollicking barrel of excitement that its offense really is. For them, Lowry’s growth represents just that, not a failure to be something that never reasonably could have been expected of him. Scola and Kevin Martin, suddenly anchors dragging the Rockets down to the lowly territory of the winning, look like the competent craftsmen they are, established professionals working within the framework of the low post and open jumper, respectively. Jordan Hill’s jump toward respectability at defense? The mercurial Nash-isms of Goran Dragic? Every single thing about Terrence Williams? All of these random strangers are getting to enjoy the fruits of the team I cover, the team I’ve kept my eye on since I can remember having eyes, all because these bystanders have nothing invested in the team rather than a rooting interest in the game and teams that play it interestingly, that play it well.

What has become of us viewers if we cannot appreciate that? The Rockets, if nothing else, remain a League Pass staple for those who like to see a team actively push and struggle to win nightly and brew up some fun doing it. Crisp perimeter passing and unprecedented angles for scoop shots make the nights of most fans surveying the daily NBA landscape, so Houston’s status as “everyone’s fifth favorite team” (I’m realistic about the space the Rockets occupy in the minds of even the most devoted hoops junkies) works perfectly, especially for a team so used to being the unofficial squad for the world’s biggest country. This seems like a reputation worth embracing, something the Golden State Warriors and Phoenix Suns have at times in the past, because the ones who win aren’t always the ones people like, and there has to be a place for the lovable loser.

Well, the night’s other big contest, the Iowa presidential caucuses, produced a winner in Mitt Romney that plenty of those that wish him well don’t even particularly like, other than for one reason: he can win. He didn’t always seem like the most enchanting option to those ready to elect him, but it didn’t matter if he could get the job done. So forgive us unappreciative suckers who can’t even find a heartwarming, captivating team for which to cheer even if its underneath our noses; we’re too busy trying to figure out how to turn all of this excitement into some plodding, monotonous winning.

Most disheartening about Monday’s actually tedious drag of a contest between the Rockets and Orlando Magic was the extension of Kevin Martin’s slump past his miserable preseason, a situation seemingly spurred by the cancelled deal that sent him and several other Rockets to the New Orleans Hornets for about an hour, apparently the exact amount of time necessary to frustrate Martin into inefficiency. The Rockets faithful can comfort themselves by Martin’s sudden appearance as a functioning basketball player Thursday night, almost single-handedly dropping the guillotine upon the wizened necks of the Spurs in the second quarter. His three-ball gave the Rockets the push necessary for a 22-6 run that ended the first half, a lead the team never really came close to relinquishing for the rest of the night.

The most hopeful note to take about Thursday night has to be the sudden appearance of a viable Houston Rockets defense, one that swarmed to the ball-handler, chased down the open shooter, fought and scraped for every loose (and soon-to-be-loose) ball. Samuel Dalembert and his seemingly endless reach (that, my friends, is the hyperbole of a Rockets follower who hasn’t seen anything resembling a shot-blocker fill the lane for Houston in three years) most blatantly represents this transition, but the tenacity that Kyle Lowry (who gave another mini-Rondo-esque performance in which he put up a near-triple-double with 16 points on 10 shots, 9 rebounds, 8 assists and 3 steals in 27 minutes of brilliant work), Courtney Lee and Goran Dragic showed for attacking the ball and frustrating any Spur in position to score felt like the rarest of flashbacks to an era long since past in the annals of Rockets history. Whatever got into them (let’s hope it was the direction of Kevin McHale), Houston’s defense stood apart as the one facet of Houston’s victory that seemed replicable on a night on which the Rockets shot 50% from the field, including 59% from the starters.

Because of the Rockets’ almost embarrassing dismissal of the veterans from San Antonio, the misfits of the 2009 NBA Draft/Rockets bench got some run, and everything went about as expected. Terrence Williams dribbled a lot, leading to some miserable half-possessions generally turned into something simply messy by Dragic’s Steve-Nash-influence-on-his-sleeve approach, but Williams did give defenses greater reason to make sure not to step off his jumper by nailing a couple of open threes, a blessing for a man with the handles and first step of Williams. In the tallness department, Hasheem Thabeet still finds himself amongst the league leaders; basically everything else the big man does lags behind that ability. Johnny Flynn was given the chance to come in and dribble into several traps in which Gregg Popovich bet that Flynn couldn’t find his 7’3″ roll man, a gamble on which the Spurs coach looked as wise as ever. Jordan Hill also played (that’s doing he of the seven rebounds a disservice, but his presence as a starter seems absolutely superflous in the face of the work Dalmebert’s doing at this point).

A Kevin Martin showing. Another bout of Lowry do-it-all dominance. A return to the productive reliability of Luis Scola (18 points on 12 shots of mid-range butter). A defense that appeared out of thin air to enchant an excited home crowd in the team’s first appearance in Houston. For a night, all is right for the Houston Rockets, and even the din of all of the disappointment can’t drown out the ebullience that a terrific win can stir up.

I sincerely don’t think I’ve ever heard a preseason press conference in which an NBA head coach doesn’t mention that his team’s “going to run this year”; no matter how patently false this may be, no matter how little you believe Doug Collins or Nate McMillan or Larry Brown, we all ooh and aah in false anticipation, hoping that this will be the one year when every team just decides to fling the playbook to the wind (oh, and Mr. Collins’ would take one hell of a heave) and start flying. That this never comes to pass is immaterial because we’ll all nod, smile and hope the next year in the exact same manner, even if there’s a new guy on the sidelines lying to us about how fast his team will be. But why the hell don’t they just run? Obviously, personnel reasons to be the most prominent explanation for most coach’s preternatural inclination to slow that ball down and reconsider this whole “speed” business, but what if a team seems almost intrinsically built to give chase to the fast break, begging the viewer to ponder the dominance of every easy open-court bucket, only calmed by the completely nonsensical reluctance that this team shows to running? That team was the Miami Heat, that frustrating coach was Eric Spoelstra, and that era is over.

Too often in the 10-11 season did Miami find itself applying common sense to a team that didn’t really make any. Playbooks reigned over play, patience over power, execution over exuberance. What this team had done in its construction, brilliantly risk everything to try something dangerous, innovative and eventually genius, it had completely counteracted in its first year of play. LeBron James, always labeled a wing while his style had negated the relevance of that term as applied to him a million times over, found himself lingering on the wing, idly watching pick-and-rolls develop while waiting to step into a open three-point shot, a waste akin to making James Joyce stop digressing from the main idea or featuring Stevie Wonder on a song to diddle away on a harmonica. Making James and Wade look rudderless effectively left Spoelstra to act the same part on the bench, his parted, greased hair and oversized suit making him seem like a kid dressing up as his dad for work, if the kid’s father were Pat Riley. The entire enterprise of the 2010-11 Miami Heat felt flawed in nature, a forced obsession with syntax when a little bit of free-form poetry was so obviously needed. Apparently it took some weird peyote trips with some gnarly shamans to do the trick, but Miami has finally transformed into the rancorous, fuel-injection-leaking chimera of an offense that it always terrified the NBA into thinking it could be.

Oh, and how glorious has the Heat’s descent into madness been. Even minus the hand-tap, double-lobbed alley-oops and wrap-around, behind-the-back feeds to a thundering Chris Bosh (yes, I just described that guy as “thundering”), the Heat look to be the NBA’s only team that’s high-powered offense will not come at the risk of losing its trapping, eye-poppingly violent defense; in fact, in another preseason coach cliche, the defense of the men in red actually seems to be powering the freak show that they pull on the other end, exemplified by the bone-crushing blocks that Dywane Wade has been handing Ray Allen and Dirk Nowitzki that are inevitably turning into layups or something more inconceivably brutal at Miami’s rim. So little that has succeeded for Miami’s offense has looked premeditated, and I say this not to denigrate the job Spoelstra’s done but to bolster it, to note that instead of shoving all of the talent he had into frustrating positional roles, he’s unleashed their most horrifying, Earth-devouring weapon: unconventionality. Yes, LeBron is a point guard shaped like a big man with breakneck speed and unlimited range; allowing him to function as all of those roles simultaneously rather than one per quarter or game or play means that all of the craziness that it takes simply to explain his game becomes all of the raw nonsense that no defense comes equipped to handle.

Maybe it’s ridiculous to be patting a team that seems almost predestined to win a ring on its back for finally using its limitless skill in a way that actually reflects the grandness of it all, but after seeing the routs handed to Boston and Dallas in the last three days, one can’t help but feel the need to give his or her compliments to the chef.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N8qc_bktRE

Jacob Mustafa: Holy Christums, Eric, this is why these guys waited so long to start the season: the NBA has no clue what the hell is going on (and nor do I). Tyson Chandler, David West and Lamar Odom, a guy who wasn’t even a free agent going into this three-week orgy of knee-jerk reactions we’re calling an offseason, have all essentially switched teams more than once in the past three days. Anyone over the height of 6’9″ has been signed to an offer sheet worth more than $10 million; Olden Polynice just bought a new Hummer, and they don’t even make those anymore. And Chris Paul hates David Stern almost as much as Dell Demps and Daryl Morey do. Speaking of our fair leader, I’ve appreciated his Frank White-esque mentality with regard to making trades, splashing the Rockets’ name on basically anything resembling a big deal. Can’t knock a man for trying to save his job, if not quite a team.

Eric Todd: Can’t knock Morey, but we sure can knock the NBA (ahem, David Stern/Dan Gilbert) for pressing its/their totalitarian boot(s) to the throats of three of its franchises for the sake of some vague agenda that reads more like the mob fixing boxing matches than a benevolent shepherd looking after a stray ewe. The problem with the party line is that the “basketball reasons” the league cited for nixing the deal imply that New Orleans was getting screwed, that the team could and should, for the best interest of the franchise and its fans, find a better deal, which, in my opinion, it probably can’t and even more probably won’t. Even disregarding the fallout for the Rockets and Lakers, the varied reports of the league’s/Stern’s motivation for vetoing the trade and the carelessly ambiguous language of its official press release set a frightening precedent and generally left a bad taste in my mouth as a fan, not only of the Rockets, but also of the entire NBA.

JM: It definitely felt like Stern shoved something unseemly down our throats. I’m not entirely sure that were Stern trying to procure the best deal for Paul, the one made Thursday wasn’t the best offer; however, the talent sent to the Hornets seemed the least of Stern’s, or Gilbert’s or Cuban’s, concerns. Those men wanted to keep a top-five talent out of Los Angeles, which they did, unless playing for the Clippers counts as playing for Los Angeles (which it doesn’t). Stephon Curry, Eric Gordon and Rajon Rondo all seem like more attractive centerpieces of a deal than the spare parts the Rockets and Lakers sent Demps’ way before Generalissimo Stern called the whole thing off; too bad that never mattered. The only thing I’m left wondering is exactly what does matter to the Commish (no offense to Michael Chiklis, who at this point has a far better reputation than Stern). Is it good PR? A safe journey to the top for some Western symbol of light and goodness to combat the Satan incarnate that resides in Miami, unobstructed by a new powerhouse in purple and gold? Some salvation for his filth-encrusted, malodorous bathroom mat of a reputation that just gets defiled more by the day?

ET: And the Rockets? The team we love/are here to write about, where does all this leave our hopes? Reports are that Houston put an offer sheet out on Marc Gasol yesterday. Wouldn’t it have been a nice incentive to have already had his brother in tow? But alas, what we’re left with are a pair of ego-bruised borderline all-stars (who’ve never actually been) and a pitch to a player that Memphis will more than likely match. So the team is exactly where it started, only more dysfunctional, like a couple who separate because of infidelity only to get back together for the sake of their children. What if Morey doesn’t pull off any trades or free agent signings at all? Won’t Houston just end up exactly where its been for the past two years, at the top of the trash heap, too good for a decent draft pick but not good enough to actually compete? What about trading Martin to Utah for Paul Milsap or Scola to Toronto for draft picks? (Also, how sad/angry are you that we lost Chuck Hayes? Personally, I blame Stern for that, too.)

JM: Eventually, we can all get back at Stern for all of the messy divorces and broken homes he’s caused in the last week, but you’re more than right when you note the absolute lack of regard with which the league office and Stern treated Houston. The Rockets’ meddling, endless planning proved that chess is far less predictable than the irrationalities of a madman in charge of an entertainment enterprise fell apart at their very seams, a wadded ball of beautiful stitching that just couldn’t withstand the endless undulations of Hurricane Stern. So we’re left minus a mini-hero in Chuck Hayes, minus a couple of Gasols (most likely), minus a big, seemingly interested Brazilian warrior/efficient post-scorer/cancer survivor, minus an identity or a sense of cohesion or anything resembling a well constructed team. All thanks to some unintelligible reasoning by an old, power-mad man and a lot of bad breaks, of which not the greatest understanding of game theory (and I most certainly do not possess that) could have prepared any of us. Maybe it’s all for the best (what other platitudes do Rockets followers have to placate themselves with at this point?), as this might jumpstart a true rebuilding process, one that’ll send off our tradeable assets (as you mentioned, Scola and Martin) in order to lead to draft picks and cap space and sugarplums and non-drug-induced-euphoria. The Rockets were so keen on taking wild chances just a few days ago; we can only hope Morey has the foresight, or fortitude, to take this one.

Photo courtesy of Kyle Lowry's Twitter

Ranking this year’s thin-but-fascinating class of free agents soon to be swallowed whole by the upcoming whirlpool of machinations and scheming that is 2011 NBA free agency, Tom Ziller came upon Houston’s own beloved, incomparable, ineffable Chuck Hayes and had this to say:

I’m not asking you to understand Chuck Hayes, because I don’t. I’m asking you to accept him. He’s among the best defenders in the league at both frontcourt positions — yes, he mostly played center at 6’6 last season — and he’s essentially replacement level on offense, ignoring the offensive glass, where he’s brilliant. His triple-double last season remains a feat of man no one can explain. God bless Chuck Hayes. Feed him a mini mid-level, someone. Just do it.

While I’m loath to neglect mentioning Hayes’ ability to defend basically any position (I’ve seen him switch off to guard players from LeBron James to Chris Paul to Rajon Rondo and handle himself remarkably well), we must all thank Ziller for spreading the good news about the walking tree stump of a human that is the Chuck Wagon, a man so impressive in his heart that he’s even led me to kind of like that idiotic nickname. While the idea of the Rockets losing Hayes this year literally breaks my heart (seriously, crumbling apart like so many crackers in the bottom of the package), if anyone deserves to finally be fairly paid for the unending workload given to him, that man is Chuck.

I’ve never even been able to consider the thought of missing NBA games. The very notion gives me crackhead shivers, the kind that you get in the morning after a particularly long night of dehydration and/or dancing. As a man with his fair share of not-so-enviable bad habits, though, I know that simply satisfying every carnal urge does not make a man (or lady) happy, at least not for very long. In the end, a little bit of contentment cannot replace the lasting serenity afforded by some sense that all is right, for the most part; therefore, I watch this NBA lockout from afar with just enough sense to know that a quick, ridiculously unfair end to this misery Wednesday will not sate me. This thing has to end with a little damn justice.

Am I forgoing my own happiness for a ton of millionaires’ pocketbooks (theoretically, of course, since I have no actual say in when this thing ends)? Sort of, yes, but those millionaires are our millionaires, the only reasons people like me and everyone reading this stay up far past our bedtimes to ooh and ah at terribly though-out J.R. Smith jumpshots, the only justification for entire DVRs full of local sportcaster banality and meandering storytelling, the only rationalization for grown men waking up wives, roommates, children, neighbors and friends of all stripes with infinitely mockable sounds that seem the sole means of articulating the deep joy caused by seeing Blake Griffin dunk. How can we the viewers abide the unending concessions made by a union that appears to simply be clinging to its last bits of dignity, as that same organization continues to be pounded into submission by far richer, even more privileged bullies out for blood on some misguided, warped mission of vengeance and arrogance? There has been more than enough dirt flung around during this entire charade of a negotiation to point fingers at both sides of the table, waiting for a single target at which to aim the fans’ collective darts of frustration, both at these rich men’s petty bickering and our own impotence to bring back the thing we love so dearly, but the owners and the league have clearly been pretty unequivocally smug while playing the villain, daring the players to court public sympathy while inundating the press with deliberately misleading information.

And what villains they’ve been. Ultimatums, looming giants of their trades (Paul Allen, of business; Michael Jordan, of basketball; Dan Gilbert, of jackassery), ludicrous requests eventually transforming into still terrifically unfair policies, complete lack of anything resembling negotiation in good faith‒ the owners have displayed a Darth-Vader-like scroll of reasons to hate them, all with the confidence of a lot of men used to winning quite assured they will be doing more of the same once this deal goes through, whenever that might be. Yes, the players have been incompetent at times, self-effacing at others, showing the kind of indecision and infighting that made the league so certain that the union would cave like a souffle, full o hot air just waiting to be released at the first hint of a puncture in its protective shell. But the players just keep giving and giving and giving, all to keep seeing that finish line nudged just out of their reach every time a deal seems ready to be finalized. Wealthy men or not, labor has been run over and left for dead in the last half-century of this nation’s history, and this NBA brawl fought by men in droll, gray suits looks no different.

But, as Bethlehem Shoals so eloquently put it, “if millionaires don’t have labor rights, then really, who the **** does?” Could a decertification vote spell the end of NBA basketball as we know it? Should those men’s bank ledgers, already so much more replete than my own, weigh at all in a battle of my ethics versus my ability to watch the thing that’s kept me content, joyous and sane for the last twenty years? Does it seem even close to scrupulous to compare the struggles of these affluent young professional players of a game to the thousands upon millions of workers worldwide who have fought tooth and nail for the rights of every member of the proletariat? We know the answers to these questions, but I cannot help but think of what this fights represents in a climate in which “class warfare” is so liberally used as a buzzword to denigrate the very real problems of economic disparity in this country and those around the world. No, I don’t think protestors and politicians and working-class Americans look to professional sports when trying to make sense of the current political and sociological climate, but these games are covered with such passion, written about with such (admittedly, sometimes pointless) fervor, for a reason: the sports we watch symbolize something to us, whether consciously or not. That something differs from person to person, but to be able to see this microcosm of the very real, very important battles being argued over and fought every day gives us all a chance to better understand exactly what it is for which we’re all aware or unaware we’re fighting: some fairness, some damn sense to all of it. Is it so crazy to desire a little justice, even when faced with losing that which maters to us most?