Getting into "The System"

If you’re anything like me (and who isn’t?) then when you read sports articles you want more than the standard recap. You read the sports page for intriguing stories or an analysis of the facts you can’t get anywhere else. I despise any sports writing that attempts to create an incredibly simplified view of the sport. I understand the idea of providing the public with information, but that’s the purpose of box scores in the corner. If a trained journalist sits down at his computer to share her thoughts with her readers, than I think we all expect more from her than two sentence blurbs on who’s hot and who’s not. (This is to say nothing of the fact that I’m sure every educated sports writer in the country would much rather share her thoughts at as great a length as possible. Well, at least Bill Simmons does.)

Now, I’m speaking of sports writing in general, but for anyone familiar with me or my writing, I am most certainly speaking of basketball. In this instance I am actually addressing the all too common practice of power ratings. In these columns some writer or combination of writers tries to create one very simplified list from top to bottom of where all the teams in the given league, i.e. NBA, rank. They write these pieces as if all the teams exist on some sort of imaginary ladder where each team is trying to climb their way over the others to the top. I know this strain of writing does not exist solely in the NBA columns of the world (heck, the college sports seem to support their whole pseudo-industry on just these concepts).These power rankings are fun, and often colorful, and occasionally they provide real insight into the NBA, but they just don’t describe the reality of the NBA. An NBA team’s goal from week to week isn’t to climb any ladder; it’s to win the next few games they have on their schedule. Sure, you can argue they want to climb the league standings, but those are real and tangible, and aren’t as simple as one top to bottom ranking. It’s a complicated set of relationships, involving conferences, rivalries, three way ties, and playoff seedings that aren’t settled until everyone has played all 82 games. You might want to argue that all teams want to be at the top of this imaginary ladder by the end of the season, but sports champions aren’t declared by winning over the opinion of a bunch of sports journalists (again, the noticeable exception being college football). If a team wants to reach the top of that metaphoric ladder, they know, it’s about winning in the playoffs, not overcoming one team, but just the sixteen games, against the four teams that really matter.

At this point I’m sure everyone has lost patience with my self-righteous ranting. Anyone who writes a piece like this can’t just criticize the standing idea, she has to create one of her own. Actually, she really should demonstrate how her idea can function, just to really prove her point. So I’m going to spend the remainder of this space describing my own idea for how to rate the teams in the NBA.

First, let me be clear I have no qualm with a tiered rating system, one that sorts the thirty NBA teams into several levels. All teams are not equal. Not in the off-season, not in the play-offs, at no point are all the teams close to equal. Any observer has to acknowledge the disparity between teams in terms of talent, financial backing, chances of success, and most importantly current competitive position. Where I draw the line is any system of power rankings that claims to divine the relative strength of the Atlanta Hawks over the New Orleans Hornets. There is no credible information which would justify ranking one 26th and one 29th in the league. Some teams do belong on a level all to themselves, but most exist in tightly knotted clusters of competition. Or, (and here’s where I begin to subtly introduce my metaphor) you could say that similar teams in habit the same basketball planet, where everyone is playing under the same conditions and measuring their success largely compared to each other.

Second, I think a strict enumeration of rankings does a disservice to the abilities of both the writer and the reader. When I see the latest power rankings I can tell that some of the decisions are based on judgments that are either too arbitrary of too temporary, all for the sake of creating a single file procession of teams. Have you ever noticed how Team X is ranked at number 7, because it’s a young club with strong financial banking, and media darling who’s living up to the hype? While at the same time Team Y is ranked at number 17 because even though it has a young club with strong financial banking and it’s best player is a media darling, he just hasn’t lived up to the hype. Both these teams are a three game loss or win streak respectively from taking the other’s position. Does that justify putting a third of the league between them on the ladder? Does it help you understand why one is so much better than the other right now? If two teams are essentially in the same situation, save for minor differences in their record doesn’t it help you more to see like teams grouped together. If you insist on separating wheat and chaff, then we can create tiers among these groups. Overall though, the team’s situation can be as important a factor in measuring them as their record. Or to put it in Wall Street terms, past performance is a poor indicator of future success.

Third, understanding what makes a good team a title contender and what makes another good team simply a play-off hopeful involves a lot more than just a straight up listing. Often it involves understanding something about the relationships between teams and the rest of the leagues. Last year the Miami Heat and the Phoenix Suns each had much improved seasons and became the top seeds in their respective conference. Yet the Heat were considered a legitimate title hopeful, while the Suns weren’t expected to survive the play-offs. It was because the Suns had to beat more good teams to win out of the Western Conference than the Heat had to in the East. These relationships make a lot of difference in understanding what separates elite teams from also-rans.

Simply put, I believe I have a ranking system that will incorporate more information than traditional power rankings and do so in a manner that expresses this information in simple to understand terms. The technique I employ may take some getting used to, and I’m not even certain yet the best way to present it. It will take us all a while to work the kinks out, and I’m sure to experiment here in the beginning. But without further ado, my idea: solar system rankings.

Rank the teams in tiered groups whose relationships and positions can be described by the nature of the solar system. With nine planets and the sun I have ten categories of teams in this unholy amalgamation of astronomy and basketball. The categories can be described in terms of a ladder, or in a more complicated method, in terms of the interactions described by the heavenly bodies themselves.

At this point I am certainly draining the patience of anyone still reading. So here are the categories tiered into ladder order. The order of the categories won’t change, but a team may change categories at any time for many reasons. So you can still understand this as a list from top to bottom (or here from Sun to Pluto) and just make your own judgments as to how teams rank within the categories.

I. The Sun- This should be pretty obvious. The Sun is the center around which all the other planets revolve. Its heat and gravity shape the very nature of the solar system. Quite simply it’s the biggest thing in the system. In the same way the team or teams in this tier are the center of the league. They have the power, and they are the one’s setting the trends and determining what kind of league its going to be. They are the presumptive champions until someone else fills this tier, because they, quite simply, are the biggest thing in the league.

II. Jupiter- Here’s where this rating system becomes difficult to follow. One of the things that makes my solar ratings different than normal power rankings is that I do not want the ordering of the tiers to be as simple as a top to bottom list. Accordingly the orders of the tiers do not come in the same order as the planets outward from the Sun. Ask any astronomer what the most important body in our star system is after the Sun, and none of them will say Mercury. Jupiter could almost be a star itself with just a little more mass and energy. So I think it’s only proper that we label the second best set of teams in the league after the largest planet. This way anytime you see a team in the Jupiter tier, understand it’s on the brink of jumping out to Sun status. I also like using Jupiter as the second tier, because its distance from the Sun lends itself to the concept of conference. Thus in the common case where the conferences each have their clear favorites, we can easily rank one as the Sun and one as Jupiter. This is the kind of relevant relationships and extra information I can describe in a solar system of ratings that you can’t get across in your usual power rankings.

III. Earth- You could argue that other planets are more important for some astrophysical, geological, or other reason. But we all know the Earth is an important planet, because that’s where the life is. So I use this tier for teams that seem to be the life of the NBA. These are the teams that are doing something exciting, making a major statement, or otherwise earning our respect. They may not be currently leading the pack or dominating the league, but there is something impressive about the way they play ball. Maybe it’s the numbers they put up. Maybe it’s a hot streak they’re riding. Someway, somehow these teams give us the sense that if they won the title, we shouldn’t be surprised in the least.

IV. Saturn- Just as Saturn is almost as impressive as Jupiter, and even has some features Jupiter doesn’t, these teams are almost as impressive as the top dawgs but not quite. You could almost say Saturn is a more interesting planet, but really you know that Jupiter is the bigger deal. This is the tier for the next-in-lines and the heir-apparents. If the teams in the Sun or Jupiter slots fall these are the teams waiting to rise up to replace them.

V. Venus- Just as the teams in the Saturn tier are the almost-Jupiters, the teams in the Venus tier are the almost-Earths. Venus has a lot of the same characteristics that Earth does. From a distance they might even seem to be about the same. Venus is way too hot to support the life of Earth though. Venus needs more stability and more time to become as habitable as Earth. These teams are good enough to go on a hot-streak or put on impressive displays like the Earth-tier teams. They just don’t have everything quite right yet. Maybe the team’s too young, or undisciplined, or just not as physically tough as they need to be to compete. They don’t have the influence of the teams in the Earth-tier, but every team in the league is watching out for the moment they come to life.

VI. Mars- Again these are teams that are approximate to the Earth-tier, but for different reasons. Where Venus was too hot, Mars is too cold. Where the teams in the Venus-tier could soon become an Earth-tier team, it appears that the Mars-tier teams are headed in the other direction. Mars may once have been like Earth, but that was in its past. Similarly, these teams may once have been the centers of life in the league, but now they are on the decline. They could be too injured, or too old, or just tired and other wise out of the running. These teams could climb back into one of the top tiers, maybe even make the playoffs, but odds are against it. From here on out we’re looking at the bottom half of the league.

VII. Mercury- Youth can be good. Energy can be good. Athleticism can be very good. But all of these things can be very dangerous too. Mercury is lucky in that it gets too bask in the sunlight so much. Except that it’s proximity to the sun is what makes it completely uninhabitable. The Mercury-tier teams are those teams that have potential, but their proximity to the powerhouses, means they aren’t likely to rise to the tops of the league. They have a lot of good qualities, but they have a lot to overcome before they can rise to the upper tiers.

VIII. Neptune- I don’t have much to say here. Neptune is one of the planets people tend to forget about. It’s somewhere in the back of the system and no one knows anything interesting about it. This is for all those teams that aren’t successful, but aren’t spectacularly bad. Neptune is not an especially interesting planet, and these are not especially compelling team.

IX. Uranus- Remember Uranus is the planet who rotates on an axis like a wheel instead of like a globe. That’s the key to this tier. These are those teams that are so bad they are interesting too watch. There’s just something fundamentally off about them. They could be successful, maybe even great, but something just isn’t working for these teams.

X. Pluto- These are the teams left out in the cold. They are so far out of the race for the title that they might as well be in a different league. These are the NBA franchises that seem to only barely meet the standards of the NBA, just as I’ve recently learned Pluto no longer counts as a planet.

Since I’ve rambled on for far too long already, I’ll just put out my Pre-Season Solar Rankings. Can we all agree that pre-season rankings tend to be mostly guesswork and supposition? So, you can’t really defend them, because they are all pretty subjective right? If we all agree on those terms, then I’ll just put forward my rankings without any explanation and we can live and let live.

I. Sun- San Antonio Spurs

II. Jupiter- Miami Heat

III. Earth- Phoenix Sun, Houston Rockets, Cleveland Cavaliers

IV. Saturn- Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, Minnesota Timberwolves

V. Venus- Seattle Sonics, Denver Nuggets, Chicago Bulls

VI. Mars- Boston Celtics, Orlando Magic, Los Angeles Lakers, Sacramento Kings, New Jersey Nets

VII. Mercury- Memphis Grizzlies, Washington Wizards, Dallas Mavericks

VIII. Neptune- Portland Trailblazers, Philadelphia 76ers, Milwaukee Bucks

IX. Uranus- Toronto Raptors, Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks, Utah Jazz

X. Pluto- Carolina Bobcats, New Orleans Hornets, Atlanta Hawks, Los Angeles Clippers