Who Cares About The Rules?

Ogged suggests an NBA rule reform:

But I also have a minor suggestion that I’m now completely in love with: instead of two shots and the ball for things you really want to discourage, change the penalty to free throws until the shooter misses, with a maximum of some number…say ten. These would happen rarely (how many flagrant 2s are there in a season?) and wouldn’t much affect the stats, but they’d be fabulously exciting when they did happen, especially on the road.

Assuming that possession changes after the tenth made free throw or that at least the fouling team gets the ball, this refrom would just elevate the hack a shaq to something approaching combat zone wrestling. If Shaq were in this situation, the fouling team would get the ball back 45 percent of the time after the first shot (50% free throw percentage x 90% defensive rebound percentage). Ogged’s idea probably would cut down on the straight muggings that guards get when they have fast breaks. Kobe or Ray Allen could probably score 6-9 points on every flagrant.

But on the subject of NBA rules reform more generally, I don’t think that the solution is to change the rules or to make flopping fineable or anything like that. Instead, it’s to encourage accountability with the refs. Just like in football, every game should be reviewed and refs should be reprimanded and/or fined for egregiously mixed calls. And though this may be idealistic dreaming, the NBA should try to phase out protecting superstars. It’s really hard to talk about the enforcement of rules when Dwayne Wade can  run people over without sanction and LeBron can travel twice on game winning shots. Even though this type of protection is only given to a few elite players, it shows that at a very basic level, the rules and fair refereeing aren’t a high priority for the NBA.

Basketball Conservatism Makes Me Angry

Jemele Hill’s column wishing for a Pistons-Spurs series reads like something written by a 82 year old white guy, pining for the days of crisp bounce passes and the great play of George Mikan. And that’s the sensible part of the column. Hill’s first argument in favor of a San Antonio-Detroit finals is that it would put to rest any talk of a conspiracy to put these two major-market teams with a historic rivalry in the finals. But wouldn’t a Pistons-Lakers or Spurs-Celtics finals achieve the same? The “substance” of Hill’s argument is that a Pistons-Spurs finals would show that the NBA still has its “core values.” And also shouldn’t someone point out that the Pistons have been in six consecutive conference finals, won the championship in 2004 and lost to the Spurs in 2005. Oh yeah, and the Spurs have won four championships since 1999. So it’s not like the NBA isn’t rewarding the Spurs and Pistons for their style of play.

Hill goes on to enunciate how the Spurs and the Pistons, because they are slow paced, defensive oriented teams who score a lot of their points off open jump shots created by ball movement, are somehow purer than teams populated by “And-1 wannabes” who just want to see themselves on SportsCenter. This, of course, is a critique of the modern NBA that goes back to Pete Maravich (how dare he take shots from so far away! Showboat!) and is unfailingly pronounced every season. But the major reason this line of criticism never makes sense is that the NBA, even compared to other professional sports leagues, has the most talented players. The 300 or so NBA players are of a higher class than the 1650 in the NFL or the 900 in MLB.

Which means that the Spurs starting line up, or the Pistons, could play “And-1″ style basketball, by which Hill must means some combination of a fast break offense and a half court strategy based on isolation plays for the best players, against any group of basketball players, with the exception of the rest of the starters in the NBA. The reason they don’t play that way is because they aren’t skilled enough on the margins to do so. It makes more sense for a group of players with the Pistons skll set (lots of good, yet somewhat old and slow shooters who can all pass) to play the type of offense they do. The same goes with those teams that play And 1 basketball - the Warriors or the Suns could play patient, half court offense, but it just so happens that considering their lineups, a more run-and-gun approach is effective.

Hill’s column makes even less sense when you consider that it’s in the context of the Celtics not being in the finals. The Celtics, who have the best defense in the league, don’t play a particularly flashy brand of basketball and the press has been practically salivating over how well integrated the team is. But Hill gets out of this by saying that we should prefer the Spurs and the Pistons because they built their teams “the old fashioned way.” By which she means good draft picks (like Kobe Bryant or Paul Pierce, perhaps) and trades for underrated players. But is there really any good reason to think that big trades and free agent signings - by which she surely means Garnett, Gausol and Allen - are in any way less legitimate or organic or pure? And where does my favorite Piston, Rasheed Wallace, fit in to this? Last time I check, that was a pretty inorganic importing of superstar.

These types of arguments are especially lame coming from old white guys, and I usually ascribe it to some sort of latent racism or conservatism; but for a black woman, who is a real basketball fan, to argue that the NBA is afflicted by players showboating and not trying on defense is just depressing. The NBA has some of the most talented athletes on the planet, of a higher caliber than in any other professional sport. The small differences between playing styles simply represents marginally different strategies, not varying approaches to the game itself.

The Hack-a-Shaq Is Nothing Short of Strategic Elegance

John Hollinger commends Gregg Popovich’s creative use of the tactic:

For years, coaches have tripped all over themselves with how to use the Hack-a-Shaq. In the first-round series against Phoenix, Gregg Popovich became the first to really master how to use this weapon to his advantage. He used it in second quarters, when he had guys like Jacque Vaughn and Robert Horry in the game anyway and didn’t care if they picked up fouls, and used it when he had the lead to eliminate the chance of a 3-pointer.

Most of all, he used it at the end of quarters to get the last shot, and is continuing to use it with Tyson Chandler and Melvin Ely in the New Orleans series. If New Orleans has the ball with 25 seconds or less left, Popovich simply fouls intentionally so he can get the ball back for the Spurs. This should be a Eureka! moment for other coaches, and I expect it will be the league’s most widely copied tactic next year.

Popovich is smart to get the last shot by way of fouling, especially if he foul Chandler or Ely and get a poor free throw shooter on the line, which lets the Spurs possibly get a +4 point swing.  The one worry is that fouling with under 25 to get the ball back for the last shot could lead to downward spiral whereby both teams constantly foul each other to get possession at the end. Unlike other strategic uses of the hack-a-shaq which are limited by the fact that the player getting hacked has to be awful shooter for it to be effective, the hack-for-last-shot can “work” even if you’re fouling good shooters. I guess we’ll have to see how widely adapted this hack-adaptation is.

Also, Popovich using it with a lead is especially canny because a whole lot of scoring happens during big runs, so eliminating the potential for a momentum shifting three, or even a big dunk, is incredibly valuable. But like the regular hack-a-shaq, this will only work if the free throw shooters are poor. Because even if you prevent teams from having 8-14 point runs, shooting 70 percent from the line translates to a 1.4 points per possession, which is incredibly high.

Oh yeah, and fearless prediction for the two game sevens. Home team wins.

Something Here Is Weird

I’m sure that I am not the only one thinking this, but sitting here watching the Spurs-Hornets game, isn’t it a little weird that not only is Joey Crawford reffing this game, he’s also handing out technicals like candy on Halloween. Of course, this is the same Crawford who ejected Tim Duncan for laughing too loudly in a playoff game last year. I mean, it was questionable why this 31 year veteran was ever let back into the Association, but shouldn’t he at least not be doing Spurs games? On the bright side, he isn’t throwing games for the mob.

Home Court Advantage

Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen all wonder why basketball has the most pronounced home court advantage of any major professional sport. I think that most of the more science-y explanations - different types of courts, travel time, not having sex before games, refs being bullied by the home crowd - are not sufficient to explaining the scale of the NBA home court advantage as compared to other sports. Yglesias points out that in football, the crowd has major effects on the game and that in baseball, the fields are really different. So what makes basketball special?

I’m inclined towards the idea that a good crowd can give the home team momentum which allows them to go on 8-12 point runs and win games by a comfortable margin. This theory at least has strong anecdotal and sentimental evidence. Anyone who was at a Warriors game in their legendary playoff run last year knows how the crowd and team fed off eachother. Also, coaches at least think that momentum and streaks are incredibly important, that’s why they’re always calling time-outs after big dunks, three pointers or scoring runs. And since the timing and frequency of these runs is more-or-less random, the small edge that a loud crowd provides can then be a tipping point for a scoring run.

It’s also worth nothing that basketball, as compared to football and baseball, is played indoors, so crowd noise is actually a bigger factor. Also, fans can get much, much closer to every single player on the court in basketball than in any other sport. So maybe the home-court advantage isn’t all that mysterious.

South Africa and the World Cup

Jamie Kirchick argues that because South Africa isn’t taking a hard enough stance against Robert Mugabe, the international community should consider either a boycott or “independent organizations and individual players–[should] begin a public debate about the suitability of South Africa as a host for the World Cup.”

When you think about it, if merely not opposing a brutal dictator was enough to deny a country the opportunity to host a major sporting event, or at least to talk about doing so, the rest of our Olympics and World Cups would be in Northern Europe, which would make the Summer games a dicey proposition. Kirchick doesn’t make such  a silly argument, however, and instead insists that if South Africa wanted to, they could oust Mugabe:

South Africa’s and Zimbabwe’s histories are closely intertwined. In the 1830s, Zulu tribesmen trekked north and settled in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland. Then it was settlers from the Cape who subdued the Matabeles and founded the Rhodesian colony. To this day, landlocked Zimbabwe relies on South African ports and, more important, energy supplies–such as electricity, which South Africa provides to Zimbabwe at a 36 percent discount. It is no stretch to say that South Africa could force regime change in Zimbabwe overnight.

Indeed, there is a precedent for this, back when South Africa was ruled by a white minority government and Zimbabwe was Rhodesia. In the late 1970s, reading the writing on the wall, apartheid prime minister B.J. Vorster cut off military and economic aid to Rhodesia’s leader, Ian Smith, and told him to accept some form of majority rule. Without the backing of apartheid South Africa, a white-ruled Rhodesia couldn’t stand, and a power-sharing agreement between blacks and whites soon followed in what became Zimbabwe.

Today the situation is no different. Without the support of South Africa, the continent’s economic powerhouse, Mugabe could not hold onto power.

I doubt that this is actually true. It’s not like Zimbabwe’s economy hasn’t gone from bad to worse to historically horrendous, and Mugabe’s hold on power looks as strong as ever. If Mugabe could portray the entire world, and especially South Africa, has aligned against him, he might even be able to consolidate power. There’s also the humanitarian costs to consider if South Africa were to be cut off from Zimbabwe. Surely Kirchick would argue that a. fuel and food doesn’t actually get to the people and b. it can’t get much worse for those in Zimbabwe. Although it’s certainly true that Zimbabweans are hardly well fed, it’s also not a certain proposition that cutting off Mugabe will release Zimbabwe from his shackles or improve the humanitarian situation. Ultimately, we need to pursue some sort of negotiated step-down or power sharing agreement, otherwise a wrenching transition war will only make things worse for Zimbabwe.

On the issue of discussing a boycott for South Africa, I’m conflicted. Sure, they’ve been shameful on Zimbabwe, but at what point will “international civil society organizations” have waisted their opportunities to use sporting events as a time to protest? If China doesn’t meaningfully change their behavior (which is much worse than South Africa’s) is Mbeki supposed to take any hypothetical protests seriously?

Hack-a-Shaq Revisted

The last six or so minutes of the first half in the Suns-Spurs game really demonstrates why teams would be stupid to avoid the hack-a-shaq. Shaq right now is shooting 5-14 from the line, 36%, which translates to an expected points per possession of .72. The Suns’ PPP during the regular season was 1.095. So there’s no reason why Gregg Popovich should abandon the hack, especially towards the ends of halves. Not only does it reduce the number of points the Suns score, it was also able to stop their momentum. This is especially important for a team that plays in a run-and-gun offense. When you take away the possibility of getting up the court and scoring easy buckets and force Shaq to get points at the line, it’s nearly impossible to maintain the pace and energy that the Suns best offense requires. It also forced D’Antoni to take Shaq out of the game in the last 2 or so minutes.

And it wasn’t even that bad to watch! Sure, it was kinda annoying to see Shaq get up there and brick free throws every possession, but the Spurs were still playing offense and they took Shaq out soon enough, and it was all back to normal.

But more importantly, the last six minutes of the half were a great example of why it would be impossible to coordinate the collective action problem that is enforcing a “no hack” norm. There’s just too much to gain by defecting.

Another non-trivial point in defense of the hack-of-shaq. There’s no reason why a star player shooting 36% deserves any protection from his inability to make the easiest shot in the game

Isn’t Doc Rivers Still A Horrible Coach?

Yglesias notes the weirdness of Bill Simmons claiming that Rajon Rondo has experienced some vast improvement as a player, when in fact his stats have been mostly stable since last season and the only real change is the fact that he’s on a vastly better team and so has the opportunity to take better shots and contribute meaningfully to wins, rather than to the series of blow outs and debacles that typified the Celtics 2006-2007 season. So Rajon Rondo probably hasn’t, in some pure Platonic sense, turned into a better player. I doubt his trade value is that much higher, or that much higher than could have been expected last year. But what about Doc Rivers?

Doc Rivers, as anyone who read Bill Simmons last year could attest to, was the worst coach in Celtics history, the destroyer of a great franchise, a total embarrassment, a tanker etc. Has anything changed in the last year? Has he gotten any better at coaching? Of course not. Like Rajon Rondo, instead of being on a team where a discouraged and oft-injured Paul Pierce was the best player, he’s now coaching a team with the best core three players in the league. For all we know, he’s still the same, mediocre coach as always.

This, of course, brings up the question of what makes a good coach. There aren’t any statistics for coaches, because any of them would just be aggregate totals of their players performance. Of course, wins shouldn’t be the best metric for coaches. Wins can oftentimes be determined by general managers who assemble the teams. So what value added can a good coach provide? This is a very hard question to answer, and I don’t pretend to know. If anything, a coach can add, or detract, from a team’s performance on the margins.

Just look at the career of Phil Jackson. Sure, he’s won all those championships, but he’s also been able to coach the most talented teams of their respected eras. And when the Kobe-Shaq relationship finally deteriorated, he was unable to do much about it. But, on the other hand, there’s someone like Don Nelson. Nelson hasn’t been able to coach teams as good as Jackson’s, but most would say that he’s a good coach from a tactical and motivational stand-point. As far as tactics and strategy goes, he has consistently been able to innovate. He invented the point forward when he was with Milwaukee, introduced the hack-a-shaq with Dallas and brought the run-and-gun offense to suit his undersized Warriors. But how could we measure the contribution of someone like Nelson? I guess the best way to look at coach contributions would be to compare team records and stats with a certain coach to the year before without that coach, assuming that the roster remained the same. But it’s really rare for a team to significantly improve without new talent. Sure, Don Nelson was the coach of the 06-07 Warriors team that made the playoffs, but that’s also the team that jettisoned Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy and acquired Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington. There are just too many confounding variables to isolate Nelson’s contribution.

All of which brings us back to Doc Rivers. Maybe he wasn’t such a horrible coach after all, maybe it was just that he was coaching a terrible team. But even so, his coaching abilities haven’t greatly changed over the last year.

Defending the Hack-A-Shaq

Bill Simmons is really angry about the revival of hack-a-shaq:

Name me one good/fun/useful thing that comes from hack-a-Shaq. You can’t. It’s not entertaining, it ruins the flow of the game, it’s dirty pool, and it sucks to watch. How have they not fixed this loophole? Really, it’s OK to bear-hug someone as they’re running up the court? Why can’t we give officials the leeway to say, “Look, you did that intentionally, even if we can’t technically prove it, and we are penalizing you for it”? I just hate it. I hate it. I really, really hate it. If I were coaching the Suns, I would be fouling Bowen and Duncan every time and turning it into an “Eff-You” free-throw contest so David Stern had to break away from exchanging late-night e-mails with Clay Bennett to act like a commissioner for 10 minutes and fix this unforgivable tainting of a fantastic series that could have been headed for the Pantheon if not for such a garbage turn of events. That’s not basketball. I can’t stop shaking my head.

(Two people I’m disappointed in: First, Gregg Popovich, the best coach in the league and someone who’s much, much better than this. Shame on you, Pop. And I mean that in the most condescending way possible. And second, Shaq for not telling the refs as well as the Spurs bench, “If this foofer Oberto tries to bear-hug me one more time, I’m just warning you right now, I’m going to run him over like a mack truck and send him to the hospital for the rest of the playoffs.” Come on, Shaq, you have four rings. Make a statement. Don’t put up with this crap. As you can tell, I am passionate about the evils of hack-a-Shaq.)

As someone who saw $250 evaporate before my eyes due to Memphis’ inability to shoot free throws, I should be sympathetic to Simmons’ argument, but I’m not. The hack-a-shaq debate gets to the heart of a key division between those who participate in sports and those who watch them. Those who actually participate (say, Gregg Popovich and the Spurs) care about one thing: winning games. Now, some fans share this desire - Spurs supporters, of course, are thrilled with the hack-a-shaq, but on the whole, it’s not clear why Popovich (or any other coach whose team is playing the Suns) should care about Simmons’ aesthetic preferences.

The NBA as an organization, on the other hand, is supposed to be concerned with the overall appeal of the game and making sure its an appealing product for the players and the fans. So what are they supposed to do? They already made it so off-the-ball fouls with under two minutes get punished with a free throw and possession, thus ending the embarrassing hide-and-seek spectacle that Wilt Chamberlain was forced to endure late in every game. But that was more than 40 years ago. They could do what the NCAA does and make obviously intentional fouls, like the Shaq bear-hug, result in a free throw and possession, but anyone who watched Memphis play this season knows that won’t stop a hack-a-fest.

Other teams could just wrap up Shaq when he shoots, pull at his jersey, push him in the low post or do just about anything. If Simmons watched any college games, he’d know that having a rule against intentional fouls doesn’t prevent intentional fouling. Just look at baseball. Let’s say they banned “intentional walks” and made it so there was some punishment for having the catcher actually stand up, and catch a pitch 10 feet wide of the plate. Well, anyone who watched the Giants play in Barry Bonds’ prime knows perfectly well that he got “unintentionally intentionally walked” all the time. And there is no reason to think that it would be different in basketball.

Simmons suggests that even if the NBA couldn’t make a rule to get rid of hack-a-shaq, they could informally enforce a norm that late-game hacking of a poor free throw shooter is something that’s totally unacceptable. Could an informal norm enforced purely by players and coaches work? The two best comparisons are the “unwritten rules” of baseball and what soccer teams do when a player gets injured.

The unwritten rules of baseball are informal norms that are enforced reputationally and occasionally by things like intentionally hitting batters on the teams that break these rules. The two most notable unwritten rules are not bunting and not stealing in late innings when one team has an insurmountable lead. The reason this rule exists is because bunts and steals are “unnatural” plays that are essentially trying to “force” through runs with base advances and steals as opposed to more “natural” ways of getting runs like simply hitting and advances the number of bases that you can without doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. And while this norm, from a crude cost-benefit standpoint, is worse for the team that’s up a bunch of runs, it’s ultimately one that is easy to enforce because it is reciprocal. Because the baseball season lasts 162 games, there will be a handful of games for every single team in which they get blown out. And so they know that if they don’t break these norms when they’re up, they can reasonably expect that they will get a similar treatment in a blow-out.

The second widely enforced, informal norm that would be somewhat comparable to what Simmons is proposing is what happens in soccer when a player gets injured. Because there are no time-outs in soccer, the only way to stop the game and allow for a substitution is a foul, goal or for the ball to go out of bounds. This is tricky when a player gets injured and needs to be substituted out. If the team with the injured player has the ball, they will stop play by kicking the ball out of bounds and making the substitution. But there’s a problem: now the other team has possession, purely by virtue of one of their players getting randomly injured. So, an informal norm has evolved whereby the team that originally had possession when the injury occurred will kick the ball out of play, and then on the subsequent throw-in, will get the ball back. The reason this norm can be followed is that injuries are fairly random and are pretty evenly distributed, so that no one team is likely to have way more injuries than other teams, and so following the norm will ultimately break even for everyone involved. Also, it resolves the short-term, long-term cost/benefit problem of having an injured player on the field. Of course, it’s best to get an injured player off the field as soon as possible, but if that means sacrificing possession in the short term, it’s a choice a team would rather not make. By establishing the “give back possession” norm, teams can switch out players as soon as possible to the benefit of everyone involved.

So, why has no norm against the hack-a-shaq evolved, even though we know it’s possible to enforce such norms in sports? The most obvious reason is that it works. And more importantly, it works in a limited number of cases in close games. What’s important about the baseball bunting and stealing norms is that they don’t actually affect the outcome of the game, just the margin of victory. The Hack, on the other hand, can really help teams win games by reducing the Suns expected points-per-possession from 1.14 to something approaching 1.06 (which would be the Suns points per possession if every possession ended in Shaq shooting a two). Also, as Simmons points out, the hack-a-shaq can force the Suns to take him out in late game situations, which is a huge advantage for the opposing team. Because the hack can actually change the outcome in games, most players (with the exception of those who get hacked) and coaches (including Mike D’Antoni) don’t have a huge problem with it. Teams are unlikely to adopt norms if their widespread violation will have very specific advantages to most teams and only will disadvantage a few. Awful free throw shooting is not as widespread, nor as random, as soccer injuries, and so there’s no reason for a team with decent free throw shooting to enforce a norm that only advantages team who can’t hack it from the line.

There is, of course, a simple solution to the hack-a-shaq. Players could shoot 60% from the line. If every player could hit 60% of their free throws, making a team’s expected points for every two shots at least 1.2, teams wouldn’t hack unless they were down with under 2 minutes left. And considering that they get paid millions of dollars to play in the NBA, this isn’t an unreasonable expectation. Sure, it’s harder for a 7 footer to shoot free throws, but plenty big men are able to do so. Just look at Vlade Divac, Dirk, Rasheed Wallace, Hakeem and Amare Stoudamire, all of whom have career averages above 70%. And even more infuriatingly, Shaq doesn’t seem to care about his free throw shooting. He even said “I don’t care about my [free throw shooting] percentages. I keep telling everyone that I make them when they count.” He worked with a free throw shooting coach and was able to average above 60% in the 02-03 season. He since abandoned his coach and now is back to shooting in the low 1950s.

To put it simply, atrocious free throw shooting is not endemic to basketball, the same way injuries are to soccer or the occasional blow out is to baseball. Professional basketball players should be able to shoot at least 60%, and if they don’t, they should not complain about getting hacked.

Don’t Blame the Soft Schedule for CDR’s Epic Choke

There’s a tendency in lots of sports writing to declare that when a great team loses in the championship game, they are a failure. In a certain sense, this is true - the point of sports is to win championships - but it obscures how freakish the championship game (or series) can be and how much a team can accomplish in the regular and post season that is quite impressive, apart from winning a championship. I’m talking, of course, about my beloved Memphis Tigers. From my financial standpoint, their season was an utter failure, but that’s clearly not the whole. They lost a total of two games, destroyed Texas and UCLA, and were one free throw away from winning it all. Keeping in mind how easily they could have won the final, I think that Robert Weintraub’s conclusion about the Tournament and Memphis’ season is incorrect:

Calipari insisted all season that criticism of his squad’s poor free-throw shooting was misplaced, because his guys made them when it counted. Not this time. Against most other teams, the Tigers would have won, despite the misses, but the battle-tested Jayhawks (who survived a tight game against Davidson in the regional final) squeezed through that tiny crack. In the crucible of the final game, Memphis’ soft Conference USA schedule and seasonlong struggles at the stripe finally caught up to it. Despite an otherwise magnificent season, that will be this team’s legacy.

I guess Weintraub is trying to say that Memphis never worked on their free throw shooting because their soft schedule in Confrence USA meant that shotting 60% never really mattered that much. And I guess he’s right, but it’s hard to see how a major confrence schedule would have made things much better in the Kansas game. If you just look at the tournament up until the final, Memphis played Michigan State, Texas and UCLA - all teams that were very good in major conferences. And Memphis blew them out, and they shot well from the stripe! So their free throw shooting didn’t matter against most good, major conference schools. The Kansas game was obviously different, but one game against the best team in the country is hardly indicative of the rest of the season up until that point. Had Memphis made two out of their last five free throws (a 40% average) or had Kansas not made the miracle shot with 2.2 seconds left or if Memphis had managed to score as time ran out, we wouldn’t be having this conversation and Memphis still would have had a soft schedule and awful free throw shooting.

Kansas Is Not The Emancipator, Memphis Is Not the Slaveholder

Stephen Suh sounds kinda weird when he gloats that “KU’s last three opponents in the NCAA tournament - Davidson, North Carolina and Memphis - are from the old Confederacy.” And while Suh is right to point out that Lawrence (Berkeley of the Plains!) is a center of progressivism in a pretty red state and that Kansas has a wonderful history of being a free state, tying college basketball to the Civil War, or  any cultural conflict is pretty stupid.

Why is it stupid? Because every player on the the “old Confederacy” team of Memphis is black. And so are most of the Davidson and North Carolina players. Hell, the overwhelming majority of college basketball players are black.  And lot’s of them aren’t from the same state their school is in!

Suh’s grafting of historical conflict on college sports is hardly unique, however.  Michael Lewis pointed out once that in many Southern states, the main college football rivalry often has lots of class-based undertones to it. Look at, for example, Ole Miss vs Miss State or Auburn vs Alabama. Lots of these games are essentially, for the alumni, middle and upper-middle class vs lower middle class and working class. The only problem is that the game itself is mostly played by inner-city black athletes who have no real connection to these largly white class-based rivalries and divisions.

Really?

One out of the last five free throws? Really? That’s $250 I’ll never have.  Thanks for nothing Chris Douglas-Roberts.

(Matt York - AP Photo)

You Really Should Root For Memphis Tonight

The contrast would have been more stark if they hadn’t already defeated “old school” Kevin Love or were playing “will over skill” Tyler Hansbrough in the final, but if you care about the representations of black athletes in college basketball, root for Memphis. Jason Zengerle argues that most of Memphis’ outlaw reputation doesn’t come from its all black team but it instead comes from their just-sleezy-enough coach, John Calipari. And Zengerle is convincing - Calipari did turn around the program from nothing to potential national champions in eight quick years, and did plenty of skeezy stuff along the way, but there’s no getting around that Memphis is the “blackest” college basketball team in recent memory, and since the media has been collectively sucking the toes of two undersized white big men (Hansbrough and Love) - we should all try to balance out the karma.

So why is Memphis the blackest team ever? That’s because they are clearly the most talented team out there, both on a physical level and on pure basketball ability. They appear to have a team of junior Tracy McGradys - tall, athletic guards and swingmen who can run the floor and finish with impunity. And despite the fact that their second best player - Chris Douglas Roberts – went to a magnet school in Detroit, he still has some very intense ink all over his arms that surely creeps out white sportswriters. They also play in a very “black” fashion - as in most of their points come off either fast breaks created by their players being the quickest on the floor or by Douglas-Roberts and Derrick Rose creating opportunities off the dribble. Why do back-door cuts (even though Memphis actually executes them very well) when you can just isolate your best players have them blow by the defense? Another reason for so much of the national media doubting that the team that clearly had the best players (and only one loss) could make it this far was that they couldn’t shoot free throws. This criticism, despite how well it fits into the portrayal of Memphis as a team with all talent and nothing else, had the side-benefit of being true. In the regular season, they really couldn’t shoot free throws. Too bad they hit 20/23 against UCLA and in the Conference USA tournament and in last years Tournament, they shot around 75%.

So if you’re a basketball fan - and not some annoying student-athlete fetishist who yearns for a mythical past when college players went to class, stayed in school, did backdoor cuts, and didn’t dunk (which actually happened) - then you should root for Memphis. Memphis is basketball at its best - a group of incredibly talented individuals who work together to play some amazing ball.

Conflict of interest alert - If Memphis wins, I win my school’s tournament pool. So please, if you care about my happiness, root for Memphis.

Bad Trades

The Raiders are hardly known for their front-office competence, but this trade for DeAngelo Hall is just horrible.  Let me count the ways.  For one, we really don’t need two pro bowl defensive backs.  Sure, it’s nice to have a good secondary, but absent a competent defensive line, it’s not really an area you need to focus on.  Especially considering that the Raiders have already put the franchise tag on Asomugha, Hall is just superfluous.  What’s even more worrying is that the signed Hall to a seven-year, 70 million dollar deal, which on a per-year basis, means they’re paying Hall more than Asomugha.  This is especially insulting considering that Asomugha  only guaranteed to be on the team for another year, at 9.5 million dollars.  So, in all likelyhood, they’ve screwed their chances of keeping Asomugha past 2008.  So what do we get for essentially swapping defensive backs?  Oh yeah, we’ve lost another early round (2nd) draft pick.

What the Raiders front office and Al Davis need to realize is that we don’t have anything resembling a real football team, meaning that one-off free agent signings of skill players isn’t going to do us much good.  Instead, we should be trying our best to get good linemen (the signing of Kwame Harris and Cornell Green helped)  and stocking up on draft picks so that we can build around some good young players.  Instead, the Raiders now only have the 4th overall pick in the first three rounds of the draft.   Great way to rebuild the team.

The Western Arms Race

Yglesias is right that the Mavericks trade for Jason Kidd is awfully short-sighted and probably isn’t he best move for the long term health of the franchise.  Where I disagree with Yglesias is how important long term team building is.  As I see it, the Celtics haven’t really proven themselves to be the team to beat, meaning that the champion is likely to come out of the West.  And with the Lakers acquiring Gasol, it makes sense “to be responding with panic.”  He’s right that panic trades don’t really, or even commonly, come out to be useful, but acquiring Jason Kidd, for just a year, is a very high upside proposition.  While this is certainly a trade that was made because the Mavs felt they had to, it wasn’t signing Larry Hughes or acquiring Shaq.  Kidd is still the NBA’s elite point guard with a ton of playoff experience who’s likely to fit in well with the Mavs pretty quickly.  And since when a western team gets better, every other team’s chances of winning the Finals  fall drastically the cost/benefit analysis for a drastic trade should be tend towards favoring a small chance of making the team significantly better.

This is assuming, of course, that the Mavericks can avoid hitting the Warriors in the playoffs…

That Was Close…

For about the last hour, the power was out…on Super Bowl Sunday.  It’s come back, but I’m still a bit on edge…

What We’ll All Be Missing

Despite Kevin Riley and the Cal offense eviscerating Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl, star receiver DeSean Jackson, who would have been a senior this coming season, has declared for the draft. Although I’m disappointed that DeSean won’t be in Berkeley for another year, he’s provided me and all Golden Bears fans with some amazing memories from his three years at Cal. We’ll miss ya, number one.

Here’s a little taste of what a lucky NFL team will soon see:

The Flip

In the course of smacking Illinois around, USC receiver Desmond Reed caught a 34 yard pass from fellow receiver Garret Green to put the Trojans up 14-0.  It was a totally sweet play, and as Reed ran into the endzone unobstructed, he did a complete front flip into the end zone, and stuck the landing.  In, college football, boosters are allowed to pay coaches million+ dollar salaries — which, for public universities, makes the coach the highest paid state employee — colleges and the NCAA and schools make hundreds of millions of dollars off students who aren’t allowed to receive any compensation, but players aren’t allowed to do front flips as they cross the goal line, because that would show a lack of sportsmanship.  It’s just petty.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Another instance of college football lameness.  Hawaii is no longer known as the Rainbow Warriors.  Wouldn’t the blue-red narrative be even better if the gayest football team ever could beat Georgia?

Easterbrook Wrong!

While the above headline probably surprises no one, it’s long been said that despite Easterbrook’s sins of prudishness, repetition,  global warming denialism,  bizarre attacks on film makers and general pretentiousness, that he should be commended for his work on Tuesday Morning Quarterback, largely because he’s been so adamant about going for it on fourth down.  Well, Easterbook committed a minor, yet telling sin in his most recent column:

TMQ likes the “flip” run, when the quarterback fakes a handoff in one direction, then backhand flips to a runner going the other way. On the Sunday before Christmas, Washington added a new wrinkle — a flip pass, with Clinton Portis taking the flip lateral, then pulling up to throw a touchdown pass

In yet another horrible case of east coast sports bias, Easterbook seems to have forgotten that San Diego pioneered this play last year.  Here’s the YouTube evidence.

Culture War

So Cal put the beat down on Air Force, coming back from 21-0 to win 42-36 and put some frosting on what was otherwise an awful second half of the season.  But since this is a political blog, let’s focus on the politics.  Cal didn’t just beat our nation’s Air Force Academy, they beat them in the “Armed Forces Bowl” which featured all sorts of militaristic pomp and circumstance, including not only an fly-over, but the starting line ups being read from the jet’s pilot.  Air Force , perhaps the whitest 9-4 team in college football, was lauded by the announcers for being so “disciplined.”  Of course, Cal’s players are way better, and blacker.  And so we hear about how “athletic” and “big” they are.

The cultural undercurrents are interesting to.  The Air Force Academy is, of course, conservative in the sense that all military academies are, but it’s exceptionally so. Based in Colorado Springs, there’s been persistent complaints about evangelical influence in the Academy and of religious discrimination and evangelizing.  Cal, on the other hand, is the original radical campus and has had a testy relationship with the military (except of course when it’s designing and testing their nuclear arsenal). While the football team itself is estranged from the student body, they are still representatives of everything Cal stands for.

So one could say that Cal vs Air Force is a battle between defense spending and social spending, militarism vs humanism or a whole set of imagined academic vs military conflicts.  What the game really was was an amazingly talented yet highly inconsistent team finally getting its act together with a freshmen quarterback and delivering an offensive beating of the sort that’s been absent for the last seven games.

Go Bears.

PS - I wonder who neocon extraordinaire Max Boot was rooting for.  While a big fan of bombing stuff, he is also a Cal alumnus.