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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.