Matt Zeitlin

Something is rotten in the state of Dub Nation. Although sub-.500 performance is something Warriors fans have come to expect, this year was supposed to be different. We have a new coach who “preaches defense” — and yet they give up a 28th best 106.5 points a game while scoring an 8th best 103.3 points a game. Oh yeah, and Warriors-typical atrocious rebounding — 20th in the league. But we do have a trio of talented offensive players — David Lee, who despite his poor defense can rebound and has impressive offense range for an undersized power forward, and the best scoring backcourt in the league, with Monta Ellis and Steph Curry. Some think that it has come time to split up this high-powered backcourt because Ellis and Curry are both undersized and Curry is especially poor at defense, leaving Ellis to try to guard big shooting guards, which is something he can only do so well. So who to trade?

As far as injuries go, Ellis gets the edge. He’s had one significantly injury shortened year — 2008-2009, when he was suspended for tearing a ligament in his ankle in a low speed moped accident — but considering the amount of minutes he plays and how hard he plays for those minutes, he is surprisingly resilient. He is, however, 25 and in his sixth NBA season. Curry, on the other hand, is in his second year of starting professional ball, is 23 and has had a nagging ankle problem which has limited him this year and kept him out of seven games.

And then the stats. Although one is tempted to ignore their frontline stats like points per game, Ellis’s ability to be able to play 40 minutes a game is noteworthy because it means the Warriors have someone who can create his own shot in for all but eight minutes and he keeps their defensive bench out of the game for even longer is noteworthy. Curry, however, is no slouch, and gets 35 minutes a game.

But when it comes to advanced stats, on most counts it’s a wash or Curry with a slight edge. All stats from basketball Reference.

Curry’s true shooting percentage this year is .592, Ellis’s is .539. Curry’s Win Shares this year is 4, Curry’s is 3.7. Ellis’s points produced per 100 possessions is 107, Curry’s is 115. Ellis’s estimated defensive rating per 100 possessions is 112 and Curry’s is 111, although this can be attributed to Curry often having to guard the better scoring guard on the opposing team. There’s also the fact that Curry, despite being only three years younger than Ellis, is only in his second season, and has seen his offensive efficiency go up since his rookie year and will probably continue to rise, whereas Ellis can probably continue his current production and this rate for a while longer, but has probably plateaued.

Another thing to keep in mind is that effective point guards are a rare commodity, but then again, so are high powered scorers like Ellis. And, more than anything, the Warriors need a defensive-minded, big center who can patrol the lane, block shots and get easy boards. But then again, who doesn’t?

First of all, the criticism of Jay Cutler from former players, who presumably have some idea of how dehabilitating knee injuries are shows just how inextricable permanent physical damage and football are. In a world where your own peers will openly question your determination to win unless you play on a torn MCL and can not plant your foot, players will inevitably damage themselves for the long term so as to avoid appearing to give up on their teammates. It also shows that  some players  are just as asinine, brutish and uncaring as message board denizens and sports-talk radio hosts.

Another problem is with commentators like Michael Wilbon who won’t Cutler for complying with his coach’s and medical staff’s instruction that he not go in and instead let players do it, sometimes anonymously. Even though Wilbon gets on the record tweets and quotes from Derrick Brooks, Deion Sanders, Darnell Dockett and Mark Schlereth criticizing Cutler, he also has a quote from “A lineman who played more than a dozen years and won multiple Super Bowls” who was “was stunned Cutler was standing on the sideline, not on crutches, receiving no treatment while his team played on” (but if it was thought to be an MCL injury, it’s not like in-game treatment would have done anything). Wilbon doesn’t give a reason why this player had to be anonymous — it’s not like he was telling Mark Mazetti about Duane Clarridge’s private spy ring — but still we have this silly, unsubstantiated criticism that Wilbon probably wouldn’t make himself.

The problem with Jay Cutler that’s unique to Jay Cutler — he is, after all, an above average starting quarterback who’s rarely hurt, plays behind a porous offensive line and lead the Bears to a division championship and an NFC championship game — is that he isn’t like liked, and he’s especially despised by the media. Sure, we hear all sorts of little things about why teammates don’t love him, but isn’t part of the reason his own peers so quickly turned on him is because people like Wilbon and Rick Reilly are telling them to?

In a review of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining, the Times‘ reviewer has an interesting way of divvying up the classics:

“All Things Shining” offers fascinating readings of works of literature chosen to illuminate this narrative — from Aeschylus, Dante and Melville to David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert — as well as passionate glimpses of the attitudes toward the world the authors urge us to regain.

Clearly, Susan Neiman is grouping Aeschylus, Dante and Melville together and then Wallace and Gilbert. Superficially, this makes sense. Aeschylus, Dante and Melville are all authors who are mostly read in academic settings and whose works are in stately Penguin and Norton editions, while Wallace and Gilbert were/are bestselling authors. Julia Roberts has never portrayed Beatrice Portinari or Clytemnestra; she did star in an adaption of Eat, Pray, Love. But chronologically, and even stylistically, this is a bizarre.

Aeschylus died in 456 BC, some 16oo years before Dante’s birth in 1265, whose death proceeded Melville’s 1819 birth by around 500 years. Melville, however, is a mere 143 years older than Wallace and is writing in roughly the same form — the long, sprawling philosophical novel — and even has an interesting mirror image relationship to literary Modernism, which Moby Dick proceeded by about 70 years and Infinite Jest follows by about 50 . Dante, on the other hand, wrote the Divine Comedy almost three hundred years before the publication of Don Quixote.

And while Moby Dick is an intentional pastiche of literary styles and has hints of the epic and Biblical literary traditions, it is still very clearly a novel, a form that’s totally foreign to Aeschylus or Dante. And yet, because of the fact that the typical reader tends to only engage with anything besides contemporary, 20th century and some British 19th century literature in an academic setting, we get this weird feeling that Melville must be somewhat like Shakespeare or Dante, because we read Moby Dick in sophomore year English and Hamlet in junior year English and were forced to recite the themes in crafted, five paragraph essays; whereas we read (well, some of us) read Wallace for fun.

But just because books get academicized due to their age and influence should not let us make lazy connections and groupings that obscure more than they illuminate. Well, maybe we can be lazy, but the Times should not be.