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The Trail Blazers blog Bust a Bucket was thinking about team chemistry recently, and what better way to work on some chemistry problems than to break out the old periodic table? Okay, not this one... This one:
"We narrowed it down to 108 of the most influential Blazers ever. However, keep the following disclaimers in mind: (1) We only included players that were on a Blazers roster for more than one season (sorry, Jim Barnett fan), (2) We included the front office and coaches (those that really mattered) and thus (3) were unable to mention every single Blazers' cubicle warrior, despite everyone's best effort to make the Portland Trail Blazers the one we've come to love and support unconditionally, just as (4) you'll have to come to support my being a die-hard Blazer fan and a big, fat, nerd.
But, this is chemistry. Regular old water? That's easy - H(2) + O - or, in this case Drexler(2) + Porter. Another example brings up three of my all-time favorite Blazers: Silver Nitrate - Ag + N + O(3), or - Aldridge + Petrovic + Porter."
Bill Simmons' new 700-page tome (and I just got it in the mail today, it's a legit 700 pages, there are no typeface shenanigans going on here) is called "The Book of Basketball", and the amount of work he put into it certainly lives up to the title's lofty aspirations. But for as many trees that had to die to make TBOB happen, is it so thick that it can stop a speeding bullet?
Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, EA Sports composer Traz Damji put together a series of ridiculously funky (and catchy) background songs for the best years of the NBA Live franchise. They became synonymous with video hoops action for a generation of young, impressionable gamers, and now they're available in all their old-school glory courtesy of YouTube:
This is apparently an old blog that hasn't been updated in quite a while, but when it was active it ran for a few years... A guy named John Marzan took the time to type in many of the player comments from the old Zander Hollander 1986 Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball. If you're an eighties-era NBA head (which I expect almost all of you are), odds are you read the Hollander books back in the day, and even if not, these are fun scouting blurbs to look back on.
Over the past year, I've dabbled a bit in the realm of what I like to call "translating" stats -- that is to say, the process of taking a player's numbers out of one context and plopping them down in another context. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean the usual "what would Player W from Year X have averaged had he switched places with Player Y in Year Z?" strain of time-travel fantasizing, but more like, "given that Player A's averages were worth B wins in Year C, what would have had to average in Year D to create the exact same number of wins?" The difference is a nuance, a shade of meaning, but still very important, because typically we're in the business of making value judgments in the latter sense, and we leave the former to the alternate-history crowd.
This isn't specifically basketball-related, though he did encounter his share of hoops memorabilia: Bill Russell's signed Converse All-Stars, a replica of Larry Bird's Wooden Award, this awesome collection of throwbacks, a copy of Dr. J. vs. Larry Bird in: One on One, old-school card sets like this and this, a 1969 Minnesota Pipers Schedule featuring Connie "The Hawk" Hawkins, a Robert Parish RC Cola can, and... a game-worn Keith Closs Clippers jersey. (Which one of these doesn't belong?) It was all part of ESPN's Bill Simmons' trip to the National Sports Collectors Convention in Cleveland, where he encountered what would be (for me) a bankruptcy-inducing amount of awesome items from years gone by. He wrote about the experience here, but the best part is this monstrous photo gallery chronicling all the cool stuff he saw during his visit. Is it just me, or is there something about old sports memorabilia that can turn even the most level-headed consumer into a crazed spendaholic?
In the style of this hilarious piece he did a few summers back, ESPN's always-entertaining Bill Simmonsbrings us his takes on the offseason's biggest storylines using quotes from "Almost Famous". From a statistical perspective I don't always agree with what he writes, but it's still always worth reading, if not simply for the humor and the references.
"While coach Phil Jackson said losing to the Celtics by 39 points in Game 6 of the 2008 NBA Finals motivated Bryant to succeed, he acknowledged that Kobe could not overcome Walton's utter lack of talent alone.
'Kobe certainly put up big numbers, but he also rallied this young group of players and took their play to another level with him,' Jackson said. 'Winning in the Luke Walton era took a total team effort. They should be proud of what they accomplished. You have to be at the very pinnacle of your game to rise above a player of Walton's caliber.'"
Posted in Just For Fun, Layups, Playoffs | Comments Off on Layups: Kobe Bryant Proves He Can Win A Championship… With Luke Walton
Back when I was a kid, my friends and I used to play this old dice basketball game on rainy days when conditions didn't permit outdoor hoops. The game was pretty simple in and of itself, but the way we approached it wasn't -- we eventually created entire leagues with hand-scribbled schedules and logos, the copies of which have long since been scattered to the four winds. But the thing was, we always had a problem with player names. We tried using real NBA or college players and teams, but since every player had approximately the same "skills" (if you could call it that), it wasn't exactly fun to play a game where Michael Jordan and Craig Ehlo had the same probability of taking over and scoring at will. So we devised fictional players, but the names were so ridiculous, contrived, and lame that the original rosters were destroyed years ago.
