Wikipedia does more than provide a new location for information. It provides a whole new way of thinking about, and processing information. I say this not on the basis of my bubbly optimism for internet resources, though my apparent glee in previous posts may suggest it. Rather this comes from my own observations of how individual's interactions with Wikipedia vary from those with other resources.
The other day I was observing a group of high-school age students preparing for a research paper in a library. They had access to an abundance of traditional print resources (I should compliment this library on their magnificent taste in resources. There were many great books to be found there.) as well as computer terminals to access the internet. The students did seek out many books and spent a lot of time doing the traditional sort of research (taking notes from a desk, cross-referencing, that sort of thing). So, I felt satisfied that their schools, must be teaching them something about the old ways to find out information. That reminded me of medieval scholars who had to work so hard for their knowledge and wisdom, that their learning was seen as all the more noble for having been hard won.
Then something interesting happened. One of the students asked me if I knew who Levi Strauss was. She had found his name among a list of topics she would like to research. I told her that Levi Strauss was the Levi of Levi's Jeans. She became really excited and set off to learn more about him. I became concerned that I might have made a mistake, that maybe Levi Strauss didn't have a thing to do with jeans. So I went to the reliable Encyclopedia Britanica. I didn't find anything under S for Strauss. I didn't find anything under L for "Levi's brand jeans", the entry on denim was not very helpful. After ten minutes I decied to consult Wikipedia. One simple search and there was all the information you could bear on ol' Levi and his company and a plethora of links to even more information. Then I noticed that while the students did use the books to answer deep questions, they were relying on resources like Wikipedia for all the basic questions. For them knowledge wasn't isolated and static, like it was for those medieval scholars working by candel light. They saw information as dynamic and instantaneous, just as Wikipedia presents it with information flowing on and off the pages.
I do think it is important to teach from books, and show students how to learn from books. One of my favorite facts about books is that if you want to get rid of the ideas they contain you have to burn them. Wikipedia, and any of the information it contains, can be deleted, gone forever, in an instant. That sort of resource may be handy, but it cannot replace traditional encyclopedia's. For a book says that the information contained therein is so important, someone chose to write it down, someplace safe, someplace permanent, so that we should never forget. Information should flow and change, but any knowledge you think is worth keeping should be written down on a physical piece of paper, as if to say, "here are my thoughts for all to see, and I stand by them". Knowledge than can be destroyed with a keystroke will never have the same meaning as that which has to be burnt.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Monday, September 05, 2005
Some Historical NBA Musings
How good is Tim Duncan?
The discussion on this topic seems to have centered on Timmy’s place among the historical greats. It is clear Duncan should rank high, but how high isn’t clear. As others have noted, using career totals for comparison isn’t fair to Duncan, since he hasn’t played long enough to compile the really big numbers. On the other hand, career averages tend to favor Duncan since he’s been consistently good since the start and hasn’t entered his decline phase yet. Additionally traditional stats tend to over value certain offensive skills, while hardly representing a player’s defensive value.
To address both these problems I decided to run a side by side comparison against the other great big men of recent NBA history. I used a variety of advanced stats and variety of comparison methods to try and get as complete a measure as I could of Tim’s rank among the all time best. For stats I did separate comparisons for Personal Win Percentage, PW%, (which I believe measures a players overall efficiency and balance of offensive and defensive skill), PER (a good measure for the impact and power a player has on offense, like measuring the payload of a bomb), Win Shares (a measure of how much a player carries his team), and Offensive Rating, ORtg, above and Defensive Rating, DRtg, below the league average(which helped me understand the source of the players value as well as their impact compared to the league in which they played). I then compared the players on these stats on a career average (fair in this case because many of these numbers don’t depend on a player contributing a lot, just doing it well) their top three years (to get some sense of their value at their peak), and the average of their five best consecutive seasons (to see how consistent they were at their prime). In all of these things I kept track of the year in which it occurred to get some sense of how each player developed over time as well as how contemporaries faired under the same conditions.
I could not compare Duncan to legends like Kareem, Wilt, and Russell, because too much of their careers happened before the advanced stats were available. Also, I don’t think Tim’s resume can seriously match some of their accomplishments, like 11 championships, 50 points per game in a season, or 6 MVP’s. For similar reasons I will not be comparing him against the very recent legends, MJ, Magic, Bird, because either you believe these guys were gods or you don’t and you can’t convince people one way or the other. Assessments of the great players like Baylor, Dr. J, and the Big O have the same problems mentioned above, plus their skills and styles were so different from the Big Fundamental’s. It’s an apples and oranges thing. Who’s better is very subjective and depends on what you value. Still even if you grant that all these players were better than Tim Duncan (not to say I do, but we’ll get to that later) there’s still an open spot in the All Time Top Ten, so the stakes are very high.
With all that said let’s do the run down of Tim Duncan, versus the great big men of the last twenty-five years. I envision this as an Enter the Dragon tournament, where we pit Duncan against tougher and tougher opponents until someone takes him down. So, in descending order of how well Tim faired against the opposition, they are…
Tim Duncan vs. Patrick Ewing
No, need to go into much detail here. Duncan’s level of play has been higher and done more for his team than Ewing ever had. Ewing had terrific defensive value at some points, but Duncan’s career average for DRtg below league has been better. There’s no question about who’s been a better offensive force. Duncan’s career average of 35.3 Win Shares is better than any season Ewing ever had. Also Duncan never had a PW% as low as Ewing’s career average. Test it anyway you want. This might as well have been a bye round for Duncan.
Tim Duncan vs. Moses Malone
Moses’ career represents the furthest back I was willing to go into pro-basketball history to start looking for comparable players to Duncan. His entire career can be measured by advanced statistics, and while he is remembered fondly, he hasn’t slipped into that category of unquestionable legends. Some people who remember his three MVP’s and a lot of long time Philly fans will think he was more valuable at his prime than Tim is now. The numbers tell a different story, though. Moses had a long career, playing many years after his peak, so his averages are obviously weighted down, by years of sub par performance. His peak seasons were great with a PER of 25.1, a PW% of .929, and his best defensive and second best offensive seasons. He was a little better in certain ways than TD, averaging 40.8 Win Shares in his top 5 seasons, rather than 39.0. I was even surprised to see that while that “Fo’ fo’ fo’” season of ’83 was terrific, his 1982 season was almost as good –noticeably better offense but significantly weaker defense. Still, he peak didn’t last as long as Duncan’s has, and his play and numbers fell off a steep cliff. He didn’t have one season of note after 1985. Duncan has played more consistent ball during his career so far than Moses did in his prime. While Moses had better pure offense at his peak, Duncan has had better overall value at his. The most important factor for me though, is that Tim’s value over the league at what he does best (defense) has always been higher than Moses’ value over the league at offense. So to all the Moses fans out there, your guy is still a legend, but next to Duncan it’s not even close.
Tim Duncan vs. Hakeem Olajuwan
This match-up has a lot of interesting aspects to it. Both were born outside North America. Both have played in “Twin Towers” style offenses, both won championships as the team leader. Both have tremendous defensive reps. On offense Duncan was the pure mechanic, playing like he was a diagram in a textbook, while Hakeem was all agility and grace. If this were a contest between nicknames The Dream would crush The Big Fundamental. Two interesting discoveries I made doing this comparison. First, Hakeem’s best years may not have been his back-to-back titles, but the years preceding it (if anything, this is a testament to how good the league of that day was). His best straight five-year run definitely includes his championships though. Second, The Dream played better defense than Duncan. Olajuwan had better peak years, a better five-year prime and would have had a better career average on D if I adjusted for the dwindling years he played at the end. Outside of that though, this contest is all Duncan. Not by a little either, but by a lot. In terms of PW%, PER, Win Shares, and offense, Duncan just had more to offer. Hakeem’s two titles and two-year domination of a very tough league put him high up in my book. Still in terms of an individual player’s value, Duncan takes the prize.
Tim Duncan vs. Karl Malone
At first, when I reviewed Karl’s stats, I thought that this would be a close competition. Then I took a closer look and realized that like most things dealing with the Mailman his value came from sustaining a very good level of play over a lengthy career. He certainly delivered (ugh) on offense. The PER and ORtg numbers from his prime that clearly prove he had more power and skill (and not just at the pick and role, either). His PW% and Drtg don’t match up to Duncan’s, but they are close and speak to his ability for consistently balanced and efficient play. Also, Malone shouldered a much heavier share of the load than Duncan has had to as reflected in the Win Shares. Karl’s lifetime average of 34.7 just misses Tim’s 35.3, and Malone’s average of 44 in his prime years easily outstrips Duncan’s contribution so far. However the accumulated accomplishments don’t tell the whole story. I want to know if Malone had, at any one point, more value than Duncan. I don’t think the numbers show that, but let’s go into it in more detail.
The big knock on Malone is he has no real prime. He played his best single seasons -as measured by most of the factors- in ’97 and ’98. So that’s a good two year speak, even if it comes unusually deep into his career. But for the next best season you have to go back to 1993, and next best after that was either ’89 or ’90. It seems odd that Malone’s career came in such odd spurts. I would not expect the skill curve of a player who has always had a rep for consistently high quality play, like Malone, to look like that. I thought I’d see evidence that his value rose during his early years, then hit a high level for a few years, and the drop a little, before hitting a plateau until the end of his career. Instead I see a number of instances where his value jumps then falls. Since the Mailman never had a “bad season” to drag his averages so far down from his peak, it seems clear that he wasn’t consistently great. He was very good most years, fantastic a few years, and kept it up long enough to have great career overall.
Looking for an explanation for this, I notice that his best years on defense and in Win Shares came in the late eighties, before the Jazz became a dominant force or the Stockton-Malone combo really gelled. It seems that Malone was happy to transfer some of that burden to his teammates over the years. Given the odd hops Malone made in his power and efficiency, I have to conjecture that he had to rely on his team to get those gaudy numbers. Duncan however has clearly been the team leader, and has spent his whole career doing the things Malone only did intermittently. I think the choice is clear. It looked close at first, but now I’m certain. Whether it’s for one year, five years, or nineteen, I’ll always take Duncan over Malone.
Tim Duncan vs. Charles Barkley
This is a tough contest, and some of my decision may be a little subjective. First of all, Barkley had more of his value come from offense than any other player I looked at. His record for offensive firepower isn’t that far ahead of Duncan’s. Barkley’s watered down career average PER, 24.6, is only a little behind Duncan’s, 25.3. Though Barkley’s best five-year average of 27.1 is as high as Duncan ever got in a peak year. Barkley’s peak years are all slightly better than Duncan’s in everything but defensive value. It’s interesting to note that some of Barkley’s best defensive seasons were also some of his best in terms of PW%, and both came in years, ’93 and ’97, when he came the closest to winning a title.
At this point in my analysis, Duncan’s defensive numbers and career consistency are apples, and Barkley’s narrow edge at the peak and offensive skills are oranges. I don’t want this to be decided on MVP’s and titles, so if Tim Duncan is going to win this there has to be a statistical justification. I found it in comparing the two power forwards’ prime runs. Barkley’s top years all seem to fall in his last stretch with the Sixers, when he took the team on his back and tried to push it through an Eastern conference crowded by Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and Isaiah Thomas. Between, 1988-91, he clearly took on a huge amount of responsibility for his team as indicated, by his high number of Win Shares, and his offense exploded, shown by high PER’s and ORtg’s. However this is offset by the fact that he played better D and more efficiently later in his career. But of course Duncan had high value and all of these things for pretty much his whole career. Plus he had higher PW% throughout. Plus, his best years stretch from 2000 through now (essentially every season he played after his rookie year that wasn’t shortened by a lockout). And he’s had to carry a big load for his team since he started, 36 Win Shares in 1998. So it comes down to Barkley’s highly concentrated peak of four years, against Duncan’s marathon of greatness, measuring at least six years. I think the argument could be made that from ‘88-’91 Charles made the bigger contribution to his team, but in ’93 and ’97 he made the better contribution. With Duncan you don’t have that divide. He did what his team needed to win, he did it in heavy doses and he did it for a long time. Barkley may have had better individual value for a short time, but Duncan has propelled his team to more wins and been more responsible for them. To argue that the Round Mound of Rebound had a better peak is to ignore certain factors in the light of a better-rounded player. Duncan got more out of several great years than Barkley got out of a few fantastic years. This isn’t about peak versus career value. This is about one player with a longer and more productive peak than another.
If you really want to bicker about it, I’ll point you to Barkley’s own comments after the 2005 Finals. Duncan had just delivered another major season for his team, and once again did it being the exact opposite kind of player Sir Charles was. So in numerous interviews Barkley was asked wear he’d rank Duncan amongst the all time greats. He said that Duncan was the best power forward of all time, better than him and many others on this list. Say what you want about Sir Charles, but he has always displayed lots of ego and lots of honesty. If his ego bowed to his honesty, then that’s good enough for me. Duncan survives for another round.
Tim Duncan vs. Kevin Garnett
This is pretty much an argument of “will be better” versus “has been better”. I’ll go into it in more detail here, but I should be clear up front. I will always take the player who did deliver over the player who could have, or might still.
First though, I’m going to get on my soapbox for a moment. I trust we’ve all noticed that these two are clear rivals in terms of talent. Between them they won three straight MVP’s and have been in three straight Western Conference Finals. Presently the battle between them to rule the league couldn’t be closer, but the differences between the beginnings of their career couldn’t be broader. One fact I don’t think has been mentioned enough is that they are the same age. Much has been made of the fact that Kevin Garnett entered the NBA straight out of high school, which eventually made the way for a flood of prep level talent. Duncan conversely attended Wake Forest, had a terrific college career, and entered the league full of promise. KG didn’t exactly struggle in his first few years, but it was clear he had not yet become a great player. TD had an instant impact, and though he had much better teammates, he was still the best player on a championship team. While lately Garnett has come up to have just as much value as, if not more than, Duncan, Kevin still had to spend a lot of his basketball life to get to that level. I feel like this perfectly summarizes the argument for how high school players have weakened the NBA.
With that out of the way, we can talk about the numbers. It’s much what you would expect. Duncan has had better averages and better stretches, but KG’s peak has been better at everything except DRtg than Dunc. What’s more all of The Big Ticket’s top numbers have come in the last one or two seasons. It seems very likely that Garnett will have more value than Duncan in the next few coming seasons. But that hasn’t happened yet, and you never can be sure that a player won’t just hit some kind of mid-career collapse. So, like I said at the top, I’ll favor value already earned over value potential. But Tim should consider himself warned, that these ratings could change significantly over the next five years.
Tim Duncan vs. David Robinson
I was surprised when looking over all of the players we talk about here to discover that Duncan’s toughest opponent was one of his own teammates. In fact is you look over the numbers I did in the ranges I defined them it looks like The Admiral might have been the best player of all. His PW% and DRtg are way better than Duncan’s. Plus his Win Shares, PER, and ORtg are all excellent as well, indicating that he played incredibly balanced, efficient and powerful basketball. While that may be true, the apparent numerical evidence of Robinson’s dominance just doesn’t pass the laugh test. We know that Robinson was hardly the best player in the NBA at any point in his career. He won his championship at the end of his career, when everyone thought he wasn’t even the best player on his team.
So how does he put up such great numbers? Do those numbers prove greatness? As far as the latter question goes I think they certainly indicate greatness. I rank Robinson higher among the all time greats than others seem to. However, I hardly think he’s in that upper echelon. My reasons for making that distinction also answer the first question.
There was a reason I looked at primes and peaks as well as career values, as well as the years they occurred. It was so that I could keep track of when and how a player lifted his average. I don’t believe that a player who has great at many things each at a different time should be put on the same level as someone who was great all at once, even though their careers may look similar in a broad view. I applied this thought to Robinson’s careers. It’s clear that his best PER and ORtg’s occurred in years that also were his best in terms of Win Shares. This does show that he had the ability to take over a team and still have a major impact. However his best years of PW%, indicative of team success, came at the years he shared with Duncan. Those years also contain his DRtg prime. So it becomes apparent that although Robinson could carry a heavy offensive load and be efficient, but not effective.
In my consideration, Duncan made Robinson better, because he took over the offense and allowed The Admiral to focus on his defense and become a more balanced and overall more effective player. Robinson’s individual value deserves recognition, but his contribution has to be judged in light of what his contribution accomplished. Duncan’s contribution went to more team success and lifted the play of his teammates, including Robinson. I think the situation with Duncan and Robinson is analogous to Magic and Kareem’s relationship. Both Robinson and Kareem had more individual value, but Duncan and Magic elevated their game and took over the burden of leading the team, which allowed their legendary teammates to have a more effective contribution. I say the Duncans and Magics are the better players. While the Kareems and Robinsons had gaudy numbers, that came overtime and accomplished little, their peers did something they never could and accomplished much.
Tim Duncan vs. Shaquille O’Neil
Now we reach an opponent Duncan cannot best. While Duncan has bested Shaq on the floor and is currently the better and more dominant player, he still hasn’t earned as much value as the Big Aristotle in the “all-time” arguments. Duncan’s on pace to supplant Shaq in overall value, but he’ll never touch Shaq’s offensive feats. True, Shaq hasn’t been as efficient or as balanced as Duncan, he’s shouldered a much bigger burden for his teams. What’s especially impressive about Shaq is how long he’s been able to sustain a high value. Looking across the different measurements, there hasn’t been a year he hasn’t either had a peak year or been in one of his prime stretches. To me this speaks of a career with as much value as Duncan has had so far, over a longer period of time. So I’ll give the edge Shaq for now, though he better watch out because even if Duncan’s doesn’t over take him Kevin Garnett might.
To Summarize:
Rating the top big men of the last twenty-five years, I put them in this order-
1. Shaq
2. Duncan
3. Hakeem
4. Robinson
5. Moses
6. Karl
7. Barkley
8. Garnett
9. Ewing
If you want to know, why this order is different than the order I listed them above, it’s because the order above was purely for show. I listed them in order of how they compared to Duncan based on my method. Here they are ordered compared to each other and incorporating things like their contribution to championship teams (which seriously helps Hakeem and Moses, but hurts Karl Malone). These ratings more accurately mirror where I would place them on an all-time list of all players. Speaking of which …
Rating the All-Time Greatest Players (noting that these are a work in progress for me)-
1. Jordan
2. Russell
3. Wilt
4. Magic
5. Kareem
6. Bird
7. Shaq
8. Oscar
9. Duncan
10. Cousy
11. Mikan
12. Baylor
13. Dr. J
14-20. Hakeem, Robinson, Moses
21-25. Karl, Barkley
40-50. Garnett, Ewing
I can’t fully demonstrate these ratings mostly for the reasons I mentioned above (insufficient info, subjective judgments about the value of different positions, and playing styles), and partly because I’m not certain about these ratings yet. I will say that I favor substance over style, which is the main reason Duncan and Mikan are rated above Elgin and Erving. Both those forwards had amazing accomplishments and an historical impact on the game they played, so I rank them both very high. Still that doesn’t overcome the equally great accomplishments and proven success of Duncan.
When I tried to think of a good way to summarize the career of Tim Duncan, I became captivated with a particular analogy. I believe Tim Duncan is the Derek Jeter of basketball. His individual value doesn’t look great in comparison to historic greats, and he played after expansion in a less talented era. His team success could largely be attributed to the incredible organization he had backing him, and the richness of support he had beside teammates. With all that said he still stood out among the rest and won at the highest levels. Most of his value comes through things that are hard to measure, like leadership, consistency, and various intangibles. His legacy won’t be made up of great images or a media friendly personality, but it will be of championships and greatness.
The discussion on this topic seems to have centered on Timmy’s place among the historical greats. It is clear Duncan should rank high, but how high isn’t clear. As others have noted, using career totals for comparison isn’t fair to Duncan, since he hasn’t played long enough to compile the really big numbers. On the other hand, career averages tend to favor Duncan since he’s been consistently good since the start and hasn’t entered his decline phase yet. Additionally traditional stats tend to over value certain offensive skills, while hardly representing a player’s defensive value.
To address both these problems I decided to run a side by side comparison against the other great big men of recent NBA history. I used a variety of advanced stats and variety of comparison methods to try and get as complete a measure as I could of Tim’s rank among the all time best. For stats I did separate comparisons for Personal Win Percentage, PW%, (which I believe measures a players overall efficiency and balance of offensive and defensive skill), PER (a good measure for the impact and power a player has on offense, like measuring the payload of a bomb), Win Shares (a measure of how much a player carries his team), and Offensive Rating, ORtg, above and Defensive Rating, DRtg, below the league average(which helped me understand the source of the players value as well as their impact compared to the league in which they played). I then compared the players on these stats on a career average (fair in this case because many of these numbers don’t depend on a player contributing a lot, just doing it well) their top three years (to get some sense of their value at their peak), and the average of their five best consecutive seasons (to see how consistent they were at their prime). In all of these things I kept track of the year in which it occurred to get some sense of how each player developed over time as well as how contemporaries faired under the same conditions.
I could not compare Duncan to legends like Kareem, Wilt, and Russell, because too much of their careers happened before the advanced stats were available. Also, I don’t think Tim’s resume can seriously match some of their accomplishments, like 11 championships, 50 points per game in a season, or 6 MVP’s. For similar reasons I will not be comparing him against the very recent legends, MJ, Magic, Bird, because either you believe these guys were gods or you don’t and you can’t convince people one way or the other. Assessments of the great players like Baylor, Dr. J, and the Big O have the same problems mentioned above, plus their skills and styles were so different from the Big Fundamental’s. It’s an apples and oranges thing. Who’s better is very subjective and depends on what you value. Still even if you grant that all these players were better than Tim Duncan (not to say I do, but we’ll get to that later) there’s still an open spot in the All Time Top Ten, so the stakes are very high.
With all that said let’s do the run down of Tim Duncan, versus the great big men of the last twenty-five years. I envision this as an Enter the Dragon tournament, where we pit Duncan against tougher and tougher opponents until someone takes him down. So, in descending order of how well Tim faired against the opposition, they are…
Tim Duncan vs. Patrick Ewing
No, need to go into much detail here. Duncan’s level of play has been higher and done more for his team than Ewing ever had. Ewing had terrific defensive value at some points, but Duncan’s career average for DRtg below league has been better. There’s no question about who’s been a better offensive force. Duncan’s career average of 35.3 Win Shares is better than any season Ewing ever had. Also Duncan never had a PW% as low as Ewing’s career average. Test it anyway you want. This might as well have been a bye round for Duncan.
Tim Duncan vs. Moses Malone
Moses’ career represents the furthest back I was willing to go into pro-basketball history to start looking for comparable players to Duncan. His entire career can be measured by advanced statistics, and while he is remembered fondly, he hasn’t slipped into that category of unquestionable legends. Some people who remember his three MVP’s and a lot of long time Philly fans will think he was more valuable at his prime than Tim is now. The numbers tell a different story, though. Moses had a long career, playing many years after his peak, so his averages are obviously weighted down, by years of sub par performance. His peak seasons were great with a PER of 25.1, a PW% of .929, and his best defensive and second best offensive seasons. He was a little better in certain ways than TD, averaging 40.8 Win Shares in his top 5 seasons, rather than 39.0. I was even surprised to see that while that “Fo’ fo’ fo’” season of ’83 was terrific, his 1982 season was almost as good –noticeably better offense but significantly weaker defense. Still, he peak didn’t last as long as Duncan’s has, and his play and numbers fell off a steep cliff. He didn’t have one season of note after 1985. Duncan has played more consistent ball during his career so far than Moses did in his prime. While Moses had better pure offense at his peak, Duncan has had better overall value at his. The most important factor for me though, is that Tim’s value over the league at what he does best (defense) has always been higher than Moses’ value over the league at offense. So to all the Moses fans out there, your guy is still a legend, but next to Duncan it’s not even close.
Tim Duncan vs. Hakeem Olajuwan
This match-up has a lot of interesting aspects to it. Both were born outside North America. Both have played in “Twin Towers” style offenses, both won championships as the team leader. Both have tremendous defensive reps. On offense Duncan was the pure mechanic, playing like he was a diagram in a textbook, while Hakeem was all agility and grace. If this were a contest between nicknames The Dream would crush The Big Fundamental. Two interesting discoveries I made doing this comparison. First, Hakeem’s best years may not have been his back-to-back titles, but the years preceding it (if anything, this is a testament to how good the league of that day was). His best straight five-year run definitely includes his championships though. Second, The Dream played better defense than Duncan. Olajuwan had better peak years, a better five-year prime and would have had a better career average on D if I adjusted for the dwindling years he played at the end. Outside of that though, this contest is all Duncan. Not by a little either, but by a lot. In terms of PW%, PER, Win Shares, and offense, Duncan just had more to offer. Hakeem’s two titles and two-year domination of a very tough league put him high up in my book. Still in terms of an individual player’s value, Duncan takes the prize.
Tim Duncan vs. Karl Malone
At first, when I reviewed Karl’s stats, I thought that this would be a close competition. Then I took a closer look and realized that like most things dealing with the Mailman his value came from sustaining a very good level of play over a lengthy career. He certainly delivered (ugh) on offense. The PER and ORtg numbers from his prime that clearly prove he had more power and skill (and not just at the pick and role, either). His PW% and Drtg don’t match up to Duncan’s, but they are close and speak to his ability for consistently balanced and efficient play. Also, Malone shouldered a much heavier share of the load than Duncan has had to as reflected in the Win Shares. Karl’s lifetime average of 34.7 just misses Tim’s 35.3, and Malone’s average of 44 in his prime years easily outstrips Duncan’s contribution so far. However the accumulated accomplishments don’t tell the whole story. I want to know if Malone had, at any one point, more value than Duncan. I don’t think the numbers show that, but let’s go into it in more detail.
The big knock on Malone is he has no real prime. He played his best single seasons -as measured by most of the factors- in ’97 and ’98. So that’s a good two year speak, even if it comes unusually deep into his career. But for the next best season you have to go back to 1993, and next best after that was either ’89 or ’90. It seems odd that Malone’s career came in such odd spurts. I would not expect the skill curve of a player who has always had a rep for consistently high quality play, like Malone, to look like that. I thought I’d see evidence that his value rose during his early years, then hit a high level for a few years, and the drop a little, before hitting a plateau until the end of his career. Instead I see a number of instances where his value jumps then falls. Since the Mailman never had a “bad season” to drag his averages so far down from his peak, it seems clear that he wasn’t consistently great. He was very good most years, fantastic a few years, and kept it up long enough to have great career overall.
Looking for an explanation for this, I notice that his best years on defense and in Win Shares came in the late eighties, before the Jazz became a dominant force or the Stockton-Malone combo really gelled. It seems that Malone was happy to transfer some of that burden to his teammates over the years. Given the odd hops Malone made in his power and efficiency, I have to conjecture that he had to rely on his team to get those gaudy numbers. Duncan however has clearly been the team leader, and has spent his whole career doing the things Malone only did intermittently. I think the choice is clear. It looked close at first, but now I’m certain. Whether it’s for one year, five years, or nineteen, I’ll always take Duncan over Malone.
Tim Duncan vs. Charles Barkley
This is a tough contest, and some of my decision may be a little subjective. First of all, Barkley had more of his value come from offense than any other player I looked at. His record for offensive firepower isn’t that far ahead of Duncan’s. Barkley’s watered down career average PER, 24.6, is only a little behind Duncan’s, 25.3. Though Barkley’s best five-year average of 27.1 is as high as Duncan ever got in a peak year. Barkley’s peak years are all slightly better than Duncan’s in everything but defensive value. It’s interesting to note that some of Barkley’s best defensive seasons were also some of his best in terms of PW%, and both came in years, ’93 and ’97, when he came the closest to winning a title.
At this point in my analysis, Duncan’s defensive numbers and career consistency are apples, and Barkley’s narrow edge at the peak and offensive skills are oranges. I don’t want this to be decided on MVP’s and titles, so if Tim Duncan is going to win this there has to be a statistical justification. I found it in comparing the two power forwards’ prime runs. Barkley’s top years all seem to fall in his last stretch with the Sixers, when he took the team on his back and tried to push it through an Eastern conference crowded by Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and Isaiah Thomas. Between, 1988-91, he clearly took on a huge amount of responsibility for his team as indicated, by his high number of Win Shares, and his offense exploded, shown by high PER’s and ORtg’s. However this is offset by the fact that he played better D and more efficiently later in his career. But of course Duncan had high value and all of these things for pretty much his whole career. Plus he had higher PW% throughout. Plus, his best years stretch from 2000 through now (essentially every season he played after his rookie year that wasn’t shortened by a lockout). And he’s had to carry a big load for his team since he started, 36 Win Shares in 1998. So it comes down to Barkley’s highly concentrated peak of four years, against Duncan’s marathon of greatness, measuring at least six years. I think the argument could be made that from ‘88-’91 Charles made the bigger contribution to his team, but in ’93 and ’97 he made the better contribution. With Duncan you don’t have that divide. He did what his team needed to win, he did it in heavy doses and he did it for a long time. Barkley may have had better individual value for a short time, but Duncan has propelled his team to more wins and been more responsible for them. To argue that the Round Mound of Rebound had a better peak is to ignore certain factors in the light of a better-rounded player. Duncan got more out of several great years than Barkley got out of a few fantastic years. This isn’t about peak versus career value. This is about one player with a longer and more productive peak than another.
If you really want to bicker about it, I’ll point you to Barkley’s own comments after the 2005 Finals. Duncan had just delivered another major season for his team, and once again did it being the exact opposite kind of player Sir Charles was. So in numerous interviews Barkley was asked wear he’d rank Duncan amongst the all time greats. He said that Duncan was the best power forward of all time, better than him and many others on this list. Say what you want about Sir Charles, but he has always displayed lots of ego and lots of honesty. If his ego bowed to his honesty, then that’s good enough for me. Duncan survives for another round.
Tim Duncan vs. Kevin Garnett
This is pretty much an argument of “will be better” versus “has been better”. I’ll go into it in more detail here, but I should be clear up front. I will always take the player who did deliver over the player who could have, or might still.
First though, I’m going to get on my soapbox for a moment. I trust we’ve all noticed that these two are clear rivals in terms of talent. Between them they won three straight MVP’s and have been in three straight Western Conference Finals. Presently the battle between them to rule the league couldn’t be closer, but the differences between the beginnings of their career couldn’t be broader. One fact I don’t think has been mentioned enough is that they are the same age. Much has been made of the fact that Kevin Garnett entered the NBA straight out of high school, which eventually made the way for a flood of prep level talent. Duncan conversely attended Wake Forest, had a terrific college career, and entered the league full of promise. KG didn’t exactly struggle in his first few years, but it was clear he had not yet become a great player. TD had an instant impact, and though he had much better teammates, he was still the best player on a championship team. While lately Garnett has come up to have just as much value as, if not more than, Duncan, Kevin still had to spend a lot of his basketball life to get to that level. I feel like this perfectly summarizes the argument for how high school players have weakened the NBA.
With that out of the way, we can talk about the numbers. It’s much what you would expect. Duncan has had better averages and better stretches, but KG’s peak has been better at everything except DRtg than Dunc. What’s more all of The Big Ticket’s top numbers have come in the last one or two seasons. It seems very likely that Garnett will have more value than Duncan in the next few coming seasons. But that hasn’t happened yet, and you never can be sure that a player won’t just hit some kind of mid-career collapse. So, like I said at the top, I’ll favor value already earned over value potential. But Tim should consider himself warned, that these ratings could change significantly over the next five years.
Tim Duncan vs. David Robinson
I was surprised when looking over all of the players we talk about here to discover that Duncan’s toughest opponent was one of his own teammates. In fact is you look over the numbers I did in the ranges I defined them it looks like The Admiral might have been the best player of all. His PW% and DRtg are way better than Duncan’s. Plus his Win Shares, PER, and ORtg are all excellent as well, indicating that he played incredibly balanced, efficient and powerful basketball. While that may be true, the apparent numerical evidence of Robinson’s dominance just doesn’t pass the laugh test. We know that Robinson was hardly the best player in the NBA at any point in his career. He won his championship at the end of his career, when everyone thought he wasn’t even the best player on his team.
So how does he put up such great numbers? Do those numbers prove greatness? As far as the latter question goes I think they certainly indicate greatness. I rank Robinson higher among the all time greats than others seem to. However, I hardly think he’s in that upper echelon. My reasons for making that distinction also answer the first question.
There was a reason I looked at primes and peaks as well as career values, as well as the years they occurred. It was so that I could keep track of when and how a player lifted his average. I don’t believe that a player who has great at many things each at a different time should be put on the same level as someone who was great all at once, even though their careers may look similar in a broad view. I applied this thought to Robinson’s careers. It’s clear that his best PER and ORtg’s occurred in years that also were his best in terms of Win Shares. This does show that he had the ability to take over a team and still have a major impact. However his best years of PW%, indicative of team success, came at the years he shared with Duncan. Those years also contain his DRtg prime. So it becomes apparent that although Robinson could carry a heavy offensive load and be efficient, but not effective.
In my consideration, Duncan made Robinson better, because he took over the offense and allowed The Admiral to focus on his defense and become a more balanced and overall more effective player. Robinson’s individual value deserves recognition, but his contribution has to be judged in light of what his contribution accomplished. Duncan’s contribution went to more team success and lifted the play of his teammates, including Robinson. I think the situation with Duncan and Robinson is analogous to Magic and Kareem’s relationship. Both Robinson and Kareem had more individual value, but Duncan and Magic elevated their game and took over the burden of leading the team, which allowed their legendary teammates to have a more effective contribution. I say the Duncans and Magics are the better players. While the Kareems and Robinsons had gaudy numbers, that came overtime and accomplished little, their peers did something they never could and accomplished much.
Tim Duncan vs. Shaquille O’Neil
Now we reach an opponent Duncan cannot best. While Duncan has bested Shaq on the floor and is currently the better and more dominant player, he still hasn’t earned as much value as the Big Aristotle in the “all-time” arguments. Duncan’s on pace to supplant Shaq in overall value, but he’ll never touch Shaq’s offensive feats. True, Shaq hasn’t been as efficient or as balanced as Duncan, he’s shouldered a much bigger burden for his teams. What’s especially impressive about Shaq is how long he’s been able to sustain a high value. Looking across the different measurements, there hasn’t been a year he hasn’t either had a peak year or been in one of his prime stretches. To me this speaks of a career with as much value as Duncan has had so far, over a longer period of time. So I’ll give the edge Shaq for now, though he better watch out because even if Duncan’s doesn’t over take him Kevin Garnett might.
To Summarize:
Rating the top big men of the last twenty-five years, I put them in this order-
1. Shaq
2. Duncan
3. Hakeem
4. Robinson
5. Moses
6. Karl
7. Barkley
8. Garnett
9. Ewing
If you want to know, why this order is different than the order I listed them above, it’s because the order above was purely for show. I listed them in order of how they compared to Duncan based on my method. Here they are ordered compared to each other and incorporating things like their contribution to championship teams (which seriously helps Hakeem and Moses, but hurts Karl Malone). These ratings more accurately mirror where I would place them on an all-time list of all players. Speaking of which …
Rating the All-Time Greatest Players (noting that these are a work in progress for me)-
1. Jordan
2. Russell
3. Wilt
4. Magic
5. Kareem
6. Bird
7. Shaq
8. Oscar
9. Duncan
10. Cousy
11. Mikan
12. Baylor
13. Dr. J
14-20. Hakeem, Robinson, Moses
21-25. Karl, Barkley
40-50. Garnett, Ewing
I can’t fully demonstrate these ratings mostly for the reasons I mentioned above (insufficient info, subjective judgments about the value of different positions, and playing styles), and partly because I’m not certain about these ratings yet. I will say that I favor substance over style, which is the main reason Duncan and Mikan are rated above Elgin and Erving. Both those forwards had amazing accomplishments and an historical impact on the game they played, so I rank them both very high. Still that doesn’t overcome the equally great accomplishments and proven success of Duncan.
When I tried to think of a good way to summarize the career of Tim Duncan, I became captivated with a particular analogy. I believe Tim Duncan is the Derek Jeter of basketball. His individual value doesn’t look great in comparison to historic greats, and he played after expansion in a less talented era. His team success could largely be attributed to the incredible organization he had backing him, and the richness of support he had beside teammates. With all that said he still stood out among the rest and won at the highest levels. Most of his value comes through things that are hard to measure, like leadership, consistency, and various intangibles. His legacy won’t be made up of great images or a media friendly personality, but it will be of championships and greatness.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
A Passing Summer Fancy.
I could win hundeds of dollars in bar bets, with this one. I bet you can't guess my favorite genre of music.
Go ahead. Guess. (immediate family and close friends are disqualified)
Hmmm. You think something ecclectic and obscure, that's probably what it is.
"Bluegrass?"
No.
"Jazz fusion?"
No.
"Barbershop quartet?"
Nope.
"Psychedelic Funk, you know George Clinton. Acid Rock. Parliment. That kind of stuf right?"
Not even close.
"Gregorian chants?"
Niet.
"Oh God, not ... ska!?"
No. Wait what's wrong with ska?
"They use stupid intstruments instead of guitars."
Stupid instruments? Like trombones and saxaphones?
"Yeah, and trumpets. Totally awful stuff."
Worse than key-tars?
"Key-tars rule, okay! You don't know what you're talking about!"
Right anyway it's drum and bugle corps.
"What's that?"
It's like a marcing band.
"God that's even worse than ska."
No, it's not! And, hey, there's nothing wrong with ska either.
"Yeah, if you have no musical taste whatsoever."
How was jazz-fusion acceptable and ska isn't?
"Totally different. You don't know what you're talking about."
Anyway. A drum and bugle corps (that's pronounced "core" not "corpse") or, more commonly drum corps. Is like a marching band except they don't have woodwinds, flutes, saxaphones, clarines that kind of thing. It's just brass instruments and percussion. Except they don't just entertain football crowds and march in parades. They put on shows full of action, theatrics, and fun. It's a musical extravaganza played out with the energy of a sport. Like if someone mixed those cheerleading competitions with a Broadway musical, a military band, and a track and field meet. No other performance is as big and loud and wonderful live as a great drum corps show.
"Sounds totally lame."
IT IS NOT, OKAY! You sure use "totally" a lot what are you some kinds of lame '80's surfer?
"Totally."
Okay, Spicoli, whatever. The highest level of drum corps competition is the Drum Corps International World Final, held once a year. Now, to partticipate in DCI you pretty much have to be between the ages of 16-21 years old. You audition for a corps and then spend your summer touring with them, competing at different shows, sleeping on gym floors, eating all your meals out of the back of a reconverted RV, and generally having a miserable time. But for ten minutes a night, when you're on the field it's worth it.
"So, did you do ever do this?"
No, I tried out once, but life had other plans for me.
"So you weren't good enough?"
I think I was. But most people aren't good enough to play in the NFL or tour with the Stones, that doesn't mean they can't be fans.
"Yeah . . . but"
But, what?!
"But the Stone and football are cool, this is . . ."
Totally lame. I know, I know. Trust me you aren't the first person to tell me that. So DCI held their World Championships a few weeks ago. The competition was close all throughout the season but the Cadets from Bergen County New Jersey won the title. Their show was supposedly this really weird performance piece, like someone made a Twilight Zone music video. It had dream sequences, freaky music, some special effects, and costumes to make it look like the people we're facing forward when they were facing backward. It was crazy and wild and like nothing else a drum corps had ever done before. I wish I could have seen it live. The DCI champion tends to do something really fantastic no one every tried before. They put a lot of weight on being innovative and daring, rather than just tooting through a bunch of old Sousa marches.
"Hey, when you put it like that it sounds . . ."
Totally lame. I know, I know.
"Yeah, but not as totally lame as it used to.
Thanks that's all I want people to say.
The point of all this was to congratulate the Cadets and encourage people to check out the DCI TV special coming up on September 6th at 10pm Eastern on ESPN2 (check it out at http://www.DCI.org/2npse/) . Here's a news segment on the DCI Finals from the CBS Evening News. Be warned though it's drenched in liberal bias.
Go ahead. Guess. (immediate family and close friends are disqualified)
Hmmm. You think something ecclectic and obscure, that's probably what it is.
"Bluegrass?"
No.
"Jazz fusion?"
No.
"Barbershop quartet?"
Nope.
"Psychedelic Funk, you know George Clinton. Acid Rock. Parliment. That kind of stuf right?"
Not even close.
"Gregorian chants?"
Niet.
"Oh God, not ... ska!?"
No. Wait what's wrong with ska?
"They use stupid intstruments instead of guitars."
Stupid instruments? Like trombones and saxaphones?
"Yeah, and trumpets. Totally awful stuff."
Worse than key-tars?
"Key-tars rule, okay! You don't know what you're talking about!"
Right anyway it's drum and bugle corps.
"What's that?"
It's like a marcing band.
"God that's even worse than ska."
No, it's not! And, hey, there's nothing wrong with ska either.
"Yeah, if you have no musical taste whatsoever."
How was jazz-fusion acceptable and ska isn't?
"Totally different. You don't know what you're talking about."
Anyway. A drum and bugle corps (that's pronounced "core" not "corpse") or, more commonly drum corps. Is like a marching band except they don't have woodwinds, flutes, saxaphones, clarines that kind of thing. It's just brass instruments and percussion. Except they don't just entertain football crowds and march in parades. They put on shows full of action, theatrics, and fun. It's a musical extravaganza played out with the energy of a sport. Like if someone mixed those cheerleading competitions with a Broadway musical, a military band, and a track and field meet. No other performance is as big and loud and wonderful live as a great drum corps show.
"Sounds totally lame."
IT IS NOT, OKAY! You sure use "totally" a lot what are you some kinds of lame '80's surfer?
"Totally."
Okay, Spicoli, whatever. The highest level of drum corps competition is the Drum Corps International World Final, held once a year. Now, to partticipate in DCI you pretty much have to be between the ages of 16-21 years old. You audition for a corps and then spend your summer touring with them, competing at different shows, sleeping on gym floors, eating all your meals out of the back of a reconverted RV, and generally having a miserable time. But for ten minutes a night, when you're on the field it's worth it.
"So, did you do ever do this?"
No, I tried out once, but life had other plans for me.
"So you weren't good enough?"
I think I was. But most people aren't good enough to play in the NFL or tour with the Stones, that doesn't mean they can't be fans.
"Yeah . . . but"
But, what?!
"But the Stone and football are cool, this is . . ."
Totally lame. I know, I know. Trust me you aren't the first person to tell me that. So DCI held their World Championships a few weeks ago. The competition was close all throughout the season but the Cadets from Bergen County New Jersey won the title. Their show was supposedly this really weird performance piece, like someone made a Twilight Zone music video. It had dream sequences, freaky music, some special effects, and costumes to make it look like the people we're facing forward when they were facing backward. It was crazy and wild and like nothing else a drum corps had ever done before. I wish I could have seen it live. The DCI champion tends to do something really fantastic no one every tried before. They put a lot of weight on being innovative and daring, rather than just tooting through a bunch of old Sousa marches.
"Hey, when you put it like that it sounds . . ."
Totally lame. I know, I know.
"Yeah, but not as totally lame as it used to.
Thanks that's all I want people to say.
The point of all this was to congratulate the Cadets and encourage people to check out the DCI TV special coming up on September 6th at 10pm Eastern on ESPN2 (check it out at http://www.DCI.org/2npse/) . Here's a news segment on the DCI Finals from the CBS Evening News. Be warned though it's drenched in liberal bias.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Comic Shop Musings 7/30/2005
This post will rescue my blog. I have written a lot on this blog about education, my professional interest, which was bound to happen as that's where my head has been these last few weeks. I refuse to let my loyal blog audience (who do I think I am?) be victimized by my recent narrow mental focus though. I have diverse interests and I can expound on many of them for great length. Of course to bring you the many facets of my mind, I need to occasionally take a deliberate break and steak out a new topic. I have written a little about my personal interests on this blog before, and I have some more ideas to share. However it seems like I'm crowding the landscape with only stuff on professional basketball, so I will spend a some of my lovely webspace on one of my lifelong passions: comic books.
I have read comic books since I was a small child, and have always had a place in my heart for the cape and tights crowd. Superheroes are often criticized for being overly broad or simplistic. While at the same time many complain that it's hard to read comic books because there's too much history involved. I trace this apparent paradox back to the basic nature of the genre. Superheroes are in my mind the descendant of ancient mythologies. This naturally results in archetypical characters engaged in epic quests. Every culture at all points in history has had a use for this kind of story told through one kind of art form or another. Still, some detract from comic books in general because they feel the fail to achieve the greatness appropriate of Art. I take great offense at such judgments. We've created figures of unreal dimensions and characteristics not as a failure to achieve some higher art, but as an exact expression of certain needs the human mind and spirit can't find elsewhere.
I am obligated by my union rules (Comic Book Fans, Trekkies and Role Playing Gamers Amalgamated Local Chapter #513) to remind everyone that there is great diversity at the comic racks. Any decent comic book vendor will point you to any number of genres, art styles, and formats that might please your particular artistic aesthetics. As I have grown and matured as a reader my tastes and interests in comic books have also become more sophisticated and diversified -though I have been missing out on certain genres since, Crossgen Comics went under, but that's nothing you really care about. I urge everyone to buy some comic books RIGHT FREAKIN' NOW! All you have to do is think of your favorite movie of the last five years or so, and then go into a comic book shop and ask them to recommend something like that. I say all of this because I will now go on to discuss superhero comics at great length. If anyone wants to check out of this column now feel free to do so. I'll write something soon about drum and bugle corps, which come to think of it I'm pretty sure the general audience care slightly more about comic books than drum corps (or as my brothers call it dork corps) But I will be writing some more about basketball in a few days and that should appease you lot.
I've recently been forced to find a new comic shop. Not only has this made me reconsider my choices for what I purchase on a month to month basis, but has also introduced me to some new characters and got me started thinking about a few major events going on in comic books right now. I have begun to think about events in comic books less in terms of how the relate to the artists who work on the titles, or the characters, or even the plots, and much more about how they reflect corporate policy.
At this point you'll need a little information about the current state of the comic industry, so you can either skip ahead or be patient with me. To summarize recent history in comic books for the uninformed (or as you apparently prefer to be called "normal") in the early 1990's comic books became a hot speculative item for investors with more money then brains who were waiting for Reaganomics to finally start paying out (funny how they never did until there was a Democrat in office). This meant the market for comics jumped tremendously. The problem with that was that the market didn't really want good comic books. No, it wanted comics that had that sheen of being $HIGHLY COLLECTIBLE$. Naturally the capitalist system forced the comic companies to pursue these profits by doing things like launching "events" or redundant title just to produce more issues with that supposedly collectible #1 on their cover. They also tended to put more thought into creating new "special edition features" like foil-embossed covers, holograms, and other gimmicks than they did thinking about how to tell good stories and use the artform of comics effectively. Then tech stocks got hot, so everyone sold back their comic books and the industry went through its own private recession. Over several years the major comic companies started focusing on quality again, and there has been something of a creative renaissance across all comic books, thankfully including superhero titles. Now the major comics companies Marvel (think Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four) and DC (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) are finally healthy again, and they are both out to make some serious mullah as their readership begins to grow, which has them positioning to try duking it out.
Now, I was talking to an employee at my new comic shop and he was pointing out that Crossgen Comics recent rise and fall was due to the company ownership's certainty that what they had to do to succeed was claim as much market share as possible. This lead to them releasing many, many titles in a brief span of time. They also tried to add a special incentive to readers to buy all their titles, by making them connected in a larger story. This story was so large that each title could effectively exist alone beneath it as a stand alone story in itself, but it was also so involved that after more than four years it only began to crack the surface when the whole company collapsed. Their idea was daring and it certainly shook up the landscape of comics, but it ultimately failed. Meanwhile DC and Marvel were fattening themselves back up by cutting down on the number of titles and focusing on self-contained stories under the eyes of focused artists. There was an undeniable nugget of truth in what he said with which I had to agree. Yet, something in the back of my mind bothered me about this. Then a few days ago it dawned on me. Marvel and DC have slipped back into the dangerous habit of title proliferation, big events, and intra-company crossovers.
At Marvel the story line is called "House of M" and it essentially transports the Marvel heroes to a world where Magneto, the X-Men villain, has risen to global domination. It has a lot of interesting takes on how the lives of our beloved heroes would be different. It is being overseen by a writer many argue is the best currently in the business, Brian Michael Bendis. Aside from a central mini-series the "House of M" story line is also being touched upon in some of the regular titles and covered to a larger degree in several special miniseries that relate the tales of this alternative reality. It's been selling great and it all seems interesting on the surface. Except for anyone who's been a fan of Marvel comics for more than ten years, this all seems oddly familiar. To paraphrase David Spade's Hollywood Minute, "I liked 'House of M'. I liked it even more when they called it 'Age of Apocalypse'." That's right. Marvel has traveled this road before. They got a major sales boost and a lot of buzz out of it, but this is still old hat. Repeating a tale of the universe being drastically altered because of some change in the timeline that brings a major X-Men villain to power wouldn't even be so bad, if Marvel weren't still CELEBRATING THE LAST TIME THEY DID IT! Because this year marks the tenth anniversary of the "Age of Apocalypse" event Marvel has been releasing ample amounts of comics that revisit the old territory. We might have forgotten the old story long enough to enjoy the new one if Marvel could have just let the past be the past instead of digging it up in the hopes of a little sales boost. Worse still the hype the company generated for this book is undermining their credibility. The publicity keeps saying this will "change the Marvel universe forever". How? The whole story takes place in some other reality, where everything is different anyway. So they can try any stunt they want to pull, and then just wipe the slate clean whenever they return the timeline to normal. I ask you, who cares? At least during "Age of Apocalypse" the company had the guts to replace the regular titles with new ones that only existed in the alternative world. With "House of M" all the regular titles still continue with the alternative world shunted into various mini-series. If the reader can choose to ignore an entire storyline, then how much impact can it really have on whichever series it is she's reading.
Let me tell you where this really hurts Marvel as a company. Let's say an uninitiated potential customer enters a comic book shop. She thinks "I liked that X-Men movie, maybe I'll try those comic books." She then finds the comic rack so stuffed with comics with X in the title that she begins to suspect, she may have mistakenly entered a porn store (while we're on that topic, I'm worried the number of comic shops that also vend pornography of some kind or another, is doing very little to help improve the image of the industry in the mind of the public). Looking over to the store's employee she see's an all too real example of that Comic Book Guy stereotype from the Simpsons, he's probably too involved in a conversation about the comparative merits of both the old and the new Battlestar Galactica shows to notice her, or just too nervous to talk to girls. Trust me if you were in the avergae comic book shop you would feel uncomfortable talking to the man behind the register too. She then does the only thing she can do, which is randomly select four comic books about the X-Men. If any thought goes into these selections it is limited to price, cover art, and how quickly she can grab them and run. When she gets home to read them she finds she's grabbed four books that occur in four different timelines (regular, Ultimate, "House of M", and "Age of Apocalypse" redux). She can't make sense of anything and decides to never try comic books again. Well done, Marvel. You've scared away another one due to a poor corporate policy of printing whatever seems most likely to sell to the same fans you've had for the last fifteen years.
DC on the other hand is taking the smart approach to their company's major event. They have been building up to it with a number of smaller events. There's a good reason for this. It's because the story they want to tell is so big it needs this kind of buildup. They can't just arbitrarily release a flashy mini-series over the summer to spike the sales. Instead they're trying something more natural. If you want to follow the story, there are many titles that are tied into it. If you don't want to get involved, you don't have to, there are many titles still telling stand alone stories. Of course DC plans for this event to be so grand and encompass so much, that you may well have to get involved at some point. They're just providing the oppurtunity for you to have as much lead in time as possible.
The major event from DC is called "Infinite Crisis" and it has been created by a company wide conference of writers, artists, and editors, who are all trying to tell one big story using all of the DC universe. It draws its name and at least some of its inspiration from the 1980's opus "Crisis on Infinite Earths", wherein DC spent twelve issues telling a story of the most epic scope to streamline and simplify a universe of stories and characters that had become overcrowded over the preceding 50 or so years. That series delivered action and drama on both the highest levels of operatic granduer and the most human stories of personal triumph and tragedy. I find the current effort by DC to recreate such a work totally engaging. They promise that the stakes will be as high as ever, and that the series will show "the worst day in the history of the DC Universe". I am in high anticipation of the event, and believe that so far DC has done a much better job of creating a readable story than Marvel has.
I say so far, because I am now hearing of their plans for the follow up, and I'm a little concerned. Apparently after this one really,really, really, bad day for all the DC superheroes, the company plans to take every title and jump the story ahead one year into the future. I guess they kind of have to make up some ground for how much time they're devoting to this one event, so I could almost see this working. Then I heard about how they plan to recount that year, releasing a new comic title that will come out once a week for the 52 weeks of the following year. This is an ambitious idea sure, but no artist, and no writer currently in the biz could keep up that pace to any standard of quality. So you have to deal with a constantly shifting creative team, which is always a risky proposition. On top of that since this title will be released concurrently with stories coming one year after it's completion, you run into the problem of fan confusion. Which is to say nothing of the potential reader who walks into a comic shop, picks up an issue of Batman, asks the man behind the counter what's going on in Batman's world, hears "we don't know, they haven't explained that yet", puts the comic back down and walks out on the street, never to return again.
I just worry that the two major faces of the comic industry aren't doing the best job they can to expand the market. I'm part of the problem since I still buy the books, and what's worse, the superhero books. I know. I know. I'm hurting comics. But so are Marvel and DC. It's like the trench warfare of WWI, the two sides are dug into their little positions and trying so deseperately to knock out the other guy, that they don't realize the damage they are doing to the general landscape.
All righty then. Now that I have my bad mouthing of the industry I love so much out of the way. (I know. I am such a "blame America first" liberal, when it comes to stuff like this. Why can't I just shut my mouth and appreciate what I have? I don't know, but I can't.) I would now like to share what comic books I'm reading and why I would recommend them to others.
In alphabetical order:
Astonishing X-Men- Written by Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this title does a wonderful job of allowing the intimate soap opera of the X-Men to play on a huge action movie stage. This is the first X-Men title I have every bought on a serious month to month basis. Art chores are doen by the incomperable John Cassady
Astro City: The Dark Age (Book One)- The writer of this title, Kurt Busiek, has long been one of my favorites. The world of Astor City is his own private superhero universe, through which he retells stories we've seen before, but from new and intersting perspectives. He turns hokey old cliches and stereotypes into compelling human drama. This new saga tells how superheroes got to be so grim and gritty over the course of the 1970's and 80's.
Batman/Superman- this book combines the two best known superheroes in the world for a massive slam bang adventure that does everything you want the capes and tights crowd to do.
Conan- Another one written by Kurt Busiek. Since, most are familiar with this famous barbarian, I don't need to explain much. Really, I just had to show one example that I'm not all about superheroes.
Daredevil- The above mentioned Brian Michael Bendis has been writing this title for years now and I worry about what will happen when his run on this title is over. Forget everything you might have seen in that dumb Ben Afleck movie. Bendis reinvisions this character as a gritty and realistic street level crime drama. Mixing the rich background of New York City's Hell's Kitchen with a hard-knock hero who has recently had his secret identity revealed to the public. The costume appears so rarely and is of so little consequence, that I don't really think of this as a superhero comic book anymore. Think HBO's The Wire meets The Fugitive, with only occasional glimpes of red tights.
DC All-Stars: Batman & Robin- Written by comic legend Frank Miller, who may have done more for Batman than any other creator, I buy this book for the art. Jim Lee may be the best artist to hit comics in the last twenty years.
Fantastic Four- Again another title that while traditionally thought of as a superhero title it really isn't. The Fantastic Four are first and foremost a family trying to make a living in New York City, something we've all seen time and time before. The fantastic element comes from the fact that their day jobs center around exploring the wildest limits of their universe. Imagine a TV show that took the characters from Arrested Development and put them into Stargate's world. The stories by J. Michae Straczynski (Has it become obvious I pick my books, by the writers?) combine the two elements so well that this series is only limited by his imagination and his heart.
JLA:Classified- An ongoing series that features a rotating set of creative teams who each spend a few issues telling a stand alone story about the characters of the Justice League of America, DC's greatest heroes, including Superman, Batman, The Flash, and Green Latern. You can pick it up whenever a new story comes along and never feel left out. If you like traditional superheo fare this may be the pick of the litter.
Planetary- Written by Warren Ellis and drawn by the great John Cassady -how he carries the art chores for two titles and maintains his quality is completely beyond my ability to comprehend- this title is the flip side of Astro City. It takes a new look at the old superhero stories too, but from a different perspective. Told through the eyes of a team of mystery archaeologists, the series recasts classic comic standards in world of weird science fiction, that makes the stories seem simultaneously more bizzare than the original tales, and more realisticly conceivable to occur in our world. It's a great intellectual read for anyone who enjoys the heady buzz of reading science magazines that are way over your head. It seems that the novel The Historian tells a similar story about a horror classic, so I recommend any fan of one try the other.
The Ultimates 2- Don't let the number at the end worry you. It doesn't indicate that this title is a sequel as much as the second season, of the biggest, baddest, widescreen action on the planet. Every superhero movie should look like The Ultimates as rendered beautifully, by artist Bryan Hitch. (See I can follow artists too). Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, and many others are turned into the larger than life action stars you always knew they were. I don't even buy the DVD's of the latest comic book movies, because I have The Ultimates instead. It's an aderenaline rush every time I read it.
In case none of these titles suit your tastes, I recommend you be patient and keep looking around. I myself am far too fical to stay true to one title for to long, which is why I have never had a pull list with any comic shop. So I'm bound to have new recommendations in the near future. Until then I hope you are appeased with more of my ramblings about education and basketball.
I have read comic books since I was a small child, and have always had a place in my heart for the cape and tights crowd. Superheroes are often criticized for being overly broad or simplistic. While at the same time many complain that it's hard to read comic books because there's too much history involved. I trace this apparent paradox back to the basic nature of the genre. Superheroes are in my mind the descendant of ancient mythologies. This naturally results in archetypical characters engaged in epic quests. Every culture at all points in history has had a use for this kind of story told through one kind of art form or another. Still, some detract from comic books in general because they feel the fail to achieve the greatness appropriate of Art. I take great offense at such judgments. We've created figures of unreal dimensions and characteristics not as a failure to achieve some higher art, but as an exact expression of certain needs the human mind and spirit can't find elsewhere.
I am obligated by my union rules (Comic Book Fans, Trekkies and Role Playing Gamers Amalgamated Local Chapter #513) to remind everyone that there is great diversity at the comic racks. Any decent comic book vendor will point you to any number of genres, art styles, and formats that might please your particular artistic aesthetics. As I have grown and matured as a reader my tastes and interests in comic books have also become more sophisticated and diversified -though I have been missing out on certain genres since, Crossgen Comics went under, but that's nothing you really care about. I urge everyone to buy some comic books RIGHT FREAKIN' NOW! All you have to do is think of your favorite movie of the last five years or so, and then go into a comic book shop and ask them to recommend something like that. I say all of this because I will now go on to discuss superhero comics at great length. If anyone wants to check out of this column now feel free to do so. I'll write something soon about drum and bugle corps, which come to think of it I'm pretty sure the general audience care slightly more about comic books than drum corps (or as my brothers call it dork corps) But I will be writing some more about basketball in a few days and that should appease you lot.
I've recently been forced to find a new comic shop. Not only has this made me reconsider my choices for what I purchase on a month to month basis, but has also introduced me to some new characters and got me started thinking about a few major events going on in comic books right now. I have begun to think about events in comic books less in terms of how the relate to the artists who work on the titles, or the characters, or even the plots, and much more about how they reflect corporate policy.
At this point you'll need a little information about the current state of the comic industry, so you can either skip ahead or be patient with me. To summarize recent history in comic books for the uninformed (or as you apparently prefer to be called "normal") in the early 1990's comic books became a hot speculative item for investors with more money then brains who were waiting for Reaganomics to finally start paying out (funny how they never did until there was a Democrat in office). This meant the market for comics jumped tremendously. The problem with that was that the market didn't really want good comic books. No, it wanted comics that had that sheen of being $HIGHLY COLLECTIBLE$. Naturally the capitalist system forced the comic companies to pursue these profits by doing things like launching "events" or redundant title just to produce more issues with that supposedly collectible #1 on their cover. They also tended to put more thought into creating new "special edition features" like foil-embossed covers, holograms, and other gimmicks than they did thinking about how to tell good stories and use the artform of comics effectively. Then tech stocks got hot, so everyone sold back their comic books and the industry went through its own private recession. Over several years the major comic companies started focusing on quality again, and there has been something of a creative renaissance across all comic books, thankfully including superhero titles. Now the major comics companies Marvel (think Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four) and DC (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) are finally healthy again, and they are both out to make some serious mullah as their readership begins to grow, which has them positioning to try duking it out.
Now, I was talking to an employee at my new comic shop and he was pointing out that Crossgen Comics recent rise and fall was due to the company ownership's certainty that what they had to do to succeed was claim as much market share as possible. This lead to them releasing many, many titles in a brief span of time. They also tried to add a special incentive to readers to buy all their titles, by making them connected in a larger story. This story was so large that each title could effectively exist alone beneath it as a stand alone story in itself, but it was also so involved that after more than four years it only began to crack the surface when the whole company collapsed. Their idea was daring and it certainly shook up the landscape of comics, but it ultimately failed. Meanwhile DC and Marvel were fattening themselves back up by cutting down on the number of titles and focusing on self-contained stories under the eyes of focused artists. There was an undeniable nugget of truth in what he said with which I had to agree. Yet, something in the back of my mind bothered me about this. Then a few days ago it dawned on me. Marvel and DC have slipped back into the dangerous habit of title proliferation, big events, and intra-company crossovers.
At Marvel the story line is called "House of M" and it essentially transports the Marvel heroes to a world where Magneto, the X-Men villain, has risen to global domination. It has a lot of interesting takes on how the lives of our beloved heroes would be different. It is being overseen by a writer many argue is the best currently in the business, Brian Michael Bendis. Aside from a central mini-series the "House of M" story line is also being touched upon in some of the regular titles and covered to a larger degree in several special miniseries that relate the tales of this alternative reality. It's been selling great and it all seems interesting on the surface. Except for anyone who's been a fan of Marvel comics for more than ten years, this all seems oddly familiar. To paraphrase David Spade's Hollywood Minute, "I liked 'House of M'. I liked it even more when they called it 'Age of Apocalypse'." That's right. Marvel has traveled this road before. They got a major sales boost and a lot of buzz out of it, but this is still old hat. Repeating a tale of the universe being drastically altered because of some change in the timeline that brings a major X-Men villain to power wouldn't even be so bad, if Marvel weren't still CELEBRATING THE LAST TIME THEY DID IT! Because this year marks the tenth anniversary of the "Age of Apocalypse" event Marvel has been releasing ample amounts of comics that revisit the old territory. We might have forgotten the old story long enough to enjoy the new one if Marvel could have just let the past be the past instead of digging it up in the hopes of a little sales boost. Worse still the hype the company generated for this book is undermining their credibility. The publicity keeps saying this will "change the Marvel universe forever". How? The whole story takes place in some other reality, where everything is different anyway. So they can try any stunt they want to pull, and then just wipe the slate clean whenever they return the timeline to normal. I ask you, who cares? At least during "Age of Apocalypse" the company had the guts to replace the regular titles with new ones that only existed in the alternative world. With "House of M" all the regular titles still continue with the alternative world shunted into various mini-series. If the reader can choose to ignore an entire storyline, then how much impact can it really have on whichever series it is she's reading.
Let me tell you where this really hurts Marvel as a company. Let's say an uninitiated potential customer enters a comic book shop. She thinks "I liked that X-Men movie, maybe I'll try those comic books." She then finds the comic rack so stuffed with comics with X in the title that she begins to suspect, she may have mistakenly entered a porn store (while we're on that topic, I'm worried the number of comic shops that also vend pornography of some kind or another, is doing very little to help improve the image of the industry in the mind of the public). Looking over to the store's employee she see's an all too real example of that Comic Book Guy stereotype from the Simpsons, he's probably too involved in a conversation about the comparative merits of both the old and the new Battlestar Galactica shows to notice her, or just too nervous to talk to girls. Trust me if you were in the avergae comic book shop you would feel uncomfortable talking to the man behind the register too. She then does the only thing she can do, which is randomly select four comic books about the X-Men. If any thought goes into these selections it is limited to price, cover art, and how quickly she can grab them and run. When she gets home to read them she finds she's grabbed four books that occur in four different timelines (regular, Ultimate, "House of M", and "Age of Apocalypse" redux). She can't make sense of anything and decides to never try comic books again. Well done, Marvel. You've scared away another one due to a poor corporate policy of printing whatever seems most likely to sell to the same fans you've had for the last fifteen years.
DC on the other hand is taking the smart approach to their company's major event. They have been building up to it with a number of smaller events. There's a good reason for this. It's because the story they want to tell is so big it needs this kind of buildup. They can't just arbitrarily release a flashy mini-series over the summer to spike the sales. Instead they're trying something more natural. If you want to follow the story, there are many titles that are tied into it. If you don't want to get involved, you don't have to, there are many titles still telling stand alone stories. Of course DC plans for this event to be so grand and encompass so much, that you may well have to get involved at some point. They're just providing the oppurtunity for you to have as much lead in time as possible.
The major event from DC is called "Infinite Crisis" and it has been created by a company wide conference of writers, artists, and editors, who are all trying to tell one big story using all of the DC universe. It draws its name and at least some of its inspiration from the 1980's opus "Crisis on Infinite Earths", wherein DC spent twelve issues telling a story of the most epic scope to streamline and simplify a universe of stories and characters that had become overcrowded over the preceding 50 or so years. That series delivered action and drama on both the highest levels of operatic granduer and the most human stories of personal triumph and tragedy. I find the current effort by DC to recreate such a work totally engaging. They promise that the stakes will be as high as ever, and that the series will show "the worst day in the history of the DC Universe". I am in high anticipation of the event, and believe that so far DC has done a much better job of creating a readable story than Marvel has.
I say so far, because I am now hearing of their plans for the follow up, and I'm a little concerned. Apparently after this one really,really, really, bad day for all the DC superheroes, the company plans to take every title and jump the story ahead one year into the future. I guess they kind of have to make up some ground for how much time they're devoting to this one event, so I could almost see this working. Then I heard about how they plan to recount that year, releasing a new comic title that will come out once a week for the 52 weeks of the following year. This is an ambitious idea sure, but no artist, and no writer currently in the biz could keep up that pace to any standard of quality. So you have to deal with a constantly shifting creative team, which is always a risky proposition. On top of that since this title will be released concurrently with stories coming one year after it's completion, you run into the problem of fan confusion. Which is to say nothing of the potential reader who walks into a comic shop, picks up an issue of Batman, asks the man behind the counter what's going on in Batman's world, hears "we don't know, they haven't explained that yet", puts the comic back down and walks out on the street, never to return again.
I just worry that the two major faces of the comic industry aren't doing the best job they can to expand the market. I'm part of the problem since I still buy the books, and what's worse, the superhero books. I know. I know. I'm hurting comics. But so are Marvel and DC. It's like the trench warfare of WWI, the two sides are dug into their little positions and trying so deseperately to knock out the other guy, that they don't realize the damage they are doing to the general landscape.
All righty then. Now that I have my bad mouthing of the industry I love so much out of the way. (I know. I am such a "blame America first" liberal, when it comes to stuff like this. Why can't I just shut my mouth and appreciate what I have? I don't know, but I can't.) I would now like to share what comic books I'm reading and why I would recommend them to others.
In alphabetical order:
Astonishing X-Men- Written by Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this title does a wonderful job of allowing the intimate soap opera of the X-Men to play on a huge action movie stage. This is the first X-Men title I have every bought on a serious month to month basis. Art chores are doen by the incomperable John Cassady
Astro City: The Dark Age (Book One)- The writer of this title, Kurt Busiek, has long been one of my favorites. The world of Astor City is his own private superhero universe, through which he retells stories we've seen before, but from new and intersting perspectives. He turns hokey old cliches and stereotypes into compelling human drama. This new saga tells how superheroes got to be so grim and gritty over the course of the 1970's and 80's.
Batman/Superman- this book combines the two best known superheroes in the world for a massive slam bang adventure that does everything you want the capes and tights crowd to do.
Conan- Another one written by Kurt Busiek. Since, most are familiar with this famous barbarian, I don't need to explain much. Really, I just had to show one example that I'm not all about superheroes.
Daredevil- The above mentioned Brian Michael Bendis has been writing this title for years now and I worry about what will happen when his run on this title is over. Forget everything you might have seen in that dumb Ben Afleck movie. Bendis reinvisions this character as a gritty and realistic street level crime drama. Mixing the rich background of New York City's Hell's Kitchen with a hard-knock hero who has recently had his secret identity revealed to the public. The costume appears so rarely and is of so little consequence, that I don't really think of this as a superhero comic book anymore. Think HBO's The Wire meets The Fugitive, with only occasional glimpes of red tights.
DC All-Stars: Batman & Robin- Written by comic legend Frank Miller, who may have done more for Batman than any other creator, I buy this book for the art. Jim Lee may be the best artist to hit comics in the last twenty years.
Fantastic Four- Again another title that while traditionally thought of as a superhero title it really isn't. The Fantastic Four are first and foremost a family trying to make a living in New York City, something we've all seen time and time before. The fantastic element comes from the fact that their day jobs center around exploring the wildest limits of their universe. Imagine a TV show that took the characters from Arrested Development and put them into Stargate's world. The stories by J. Michae Straczynski (Has it become obvious I pick my books, by the writers?) combine the two elements so well that this series is only limited by his imagination and his heart.
JLA:Classified- An ongoing series that features a rotating set of creative teams who each spend a few issues telling a stand alone story about the characters of the Justice League of America, DC's greatest heroes, including Superman, Batman, The Flash, and Green Latern. You can pick it up whenever a new story comes along and never feel left out. If you like traditional superheo fare this may be the pick of the litter.
Planetary- Written by Warren Ellis and drawn by the great John Cassady -how he carries the art chores for two titles and maintains his quality is completely beyond my ability to comprehend- this title is the flip side of Astro City. It takes a new look at the old superhero stories too, but from a different perspective. Told through the eyes of a team of mystery archaeologists, the series recasts classic comic standards in world of weird science fiction, that makes the stories seem simultaneously more bizzare than the original tales, and more realisticly conceivable to occur in our world. It's a great intellectual read for anyone who enjoys the heady buzz of reading science magazines that are way over your head. It seems that the novel The Historian tells a similar story about a horror classic, so I recommend any fan of one try the other.
The Ultimates 2- Don't let the number at the end worry you. It doesn't indicate that this title is a sequel as much as the second season, of the biggest, baddest, widescreen action on the planet. Every superhero movie should look like The Ultimates as rendered beautifully, by artist Bryan Hitch. (See I can follow artists too). Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, and many others are turned into the larger than life action stars you always knew they were. I don't even buy the DVD's of the latest comic book movies, because I have The Ultimates instead. It's an aderenaline rush every time I read it.
In case none of these titles suit your tastes, I recommend you be patient and keep looking around. I myself am far too fical to stay true to one title for to long, which is why I have never had a pull list with any comic shop. So I'm bound to have new recommendations in the near future. Until then I hope you are appeased with more of my ramblings about education and basketball.
Friday, July 29, 2005
The Wiki Witch of the Web
I have done some research into wikis in general and wikipedia in specific these last few days. From some of the literature I have attained it seems that there's an awful lot of talk that wiki's are either an incredible revolution or the worst resource on the web. I am more than a little befuddled by all of the apparent polemic effect of such a simple concept for a web application.
Years ago, when the internet was just rising into the public concsience, and I had only a dim understanding of what could be done when you let computers talk to each other, I sort of envisioned the web as a collection of wiki-type sites. I just assumed that the most useful thing someone could do with web communication was to set up a commonly held and maintained source of information and entertainment. Later when I found out how websites really worked, I was a little disappointed, then I heard of the idea of a "killer application". I guessed that meant that people were trying to tap the secret of how to create the kind of internet I envisioned. A while later the whole idea of the internet became a little mundane for me (that's kind of sad now that I reflect on it, it's a little like taking the stars for granted) and I learned from an urban geography professor that e-mail remains the best example of a killer ap and I guess I agreed at the time. So dim had my hopes for the web become that when some one told me about wikipedia, I thought "Oh, somebody wants to make the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." That thought alone should have sent me leaping into the air except I only conceived of the site as a sad rip-off instead of the full blown realization of a dream that now exists. (Sidebar: For those of you unfamiliar with the science-fiction/comedy writings of Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galxy is a ficticious book created by aliens to accumulate all knowledge in the universe including facts, cultures, trivia, and the bizarre. The Guide is compiled by many independent reporters who can add to it or access it via a shared network. This is obvious to us now but when the book first came out in 1979 it still qualified as science fiction. By the way I recommend everyone read the novel for themselves.)
It took me a while to realize just how fantastic a resource wikipedia could be, and , as some of the research I've done shows, a fantastic object for future study itself. The way the website develops, what kind of information can you find there, and how are conflicts over the entries resolve, are all questions worthy of deep study by a whole variety of social scientists. I have found some enteries that discuss how teachers can form whole entire lesson plans on wikipedia, not the information in the enteries, but the website itself. I contend that historians, anthropologists, sociologists, behavorial psychologists, and many more could benefit greatly from researching wikis. They create microcosms of human activity that serve as perfectly sized samples for detailed and reliable investigation. I was reminded of another idea by Douglas Adams, when he explained his fascination with computers. He contended that what made computers great wasn't so much anything we already used them for, but what they represented, which was the means to model anything. A computer can model a typewriter, a calculator, a television, the Sears catalouge, an ecosystem, a beating heart, anything. While so far computers have been models for either basic tools or advanced scientific concepts, I have been giving thought to how they could model something of use to social sciences and the humanities. I believe wikis are just computer models of cultures, total cultures worthy of study, with their own rules, traditions, beliefs, conflicts, and historical record, all of it constantly shifting exactly as any real world culture would. Thoughts like this have made me terribly excited about the possible uses of wikis. I know realize a wiki isn't a killer ap. It's so much better than that; it's a living application.
Years ago, when the internet was just rising into the public concsience, and I had only a dim understanding of what could be done when you let computers talk to each other, I sort of envisioned the web as a collection of wiki-type sites. I just assumed that the most useful thing someone could do with web communication was to set up a commonly held and maintained source of information and entertainment. Later when I found out how websites really worked, I was a little disappointed, then I heard of the idea of a "killer application". I guessed that meant that people were trying to tap the secret of how to create the kind of internet I envisioned. A while later the whole idea of the internet became a little mundane for me (that's kind of sad now that I reflect on it, it's a little like taking the stars for granted) and I learned from an urban geography professor that e-mail remains the best example of a killer ap and I guess I agreed at the time. So dim had my hopes for the web become that when some one told me about wikipedia, I thought "Oh, somebody wants to make the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." That thought alone should have sent me leaping into the air except I only conceived of the site as a sad rip-off instead of the full blown realization of a dream that now exists. (Sidebar: For those of you unfamiliar with the science-fiction/comedy writings of Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galxy is a ficticious book created by aliens to accumulate all knowledge in the universe including facts, cultures, trivia, and the bizarre. The Guide is compiled by many independent reporters who can add to it or access it via a shared network. This is obvious to us now but when the book first came out in 1979 it still qualified as science fiction. By the way I recommend everyone read the novel for themselves.)
It took me a while to realize just how fantastic a resource wikipedia could be, and , as some of the research I've done shows, a fantastic object for future study itself. The way the website develops, what kind of information can you find there, and how are conflicts over the entries resolve, are all questions worthy of deep study by a whole variety of social scientists. I have found some enteries that discuss how teachers can form whole entire lesson plans on wikipedia, not the information in the enteries, but the website itself. I contend that historians, anthropologists, sociologists, behavorial psychologists, and many more could benefit greatly from researching wikis. They create microcosms of human activity that serve as perfectly sized samples for detailed and reliable investigation. I was reminded of another idea by Douglas Adams, when he explained his fascination with computers. He contended that what made computers great wasn't so much anything we already used them for, but what they represented, which was the means to model anything. A computer can model a typewriter, a calculator, a television, the Sears catalouge, an ecosystem, a beating heart, anything. While so far computers have been models for either basic tools or advanced scientific concepts, I have been giving thought to how they could model something of use to social sciences and the humanities. I believe wikis are just computer models of cultures, total cultures worthy of study, with their own rules, traditions, beliefs, conflicts, and historical record, all of it constantly shifting exactly as any real world culture would. Thoughts like this have made me terribly excited about the possible uses of wikis. I know realize a wiki isn't a killer ap. It's so much better than that; it's a living application.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Even more teacher resources
I have recently come under a veritable bombardment of information concerning how information technology can be utilized in a classroom. Last week I heard from several people who each had found websites full of educational content, well packaged for the use of either teachers or students. All of these websites had distinguishing features and aspects that made them irreplacable for certain uses. The individuals had also come up with rather detailed plans as to how specific lesson plans could be drawn from their respective websites. I was especially fortunate in that the people I heard from shared an interest in social studies, something I clearly value. This made me think that perhaps the web's greatest asset t teachers is it's vitality. Their is a unique stigma associated with text books commonly used in school. No matter what one's background or use for the material, text books are declared dull, dry, cumbersome, and often outdated for classroom needs by almost universal agreement. While one must be discerning when scanning the web for reliable information, the simple fact is that no shortage of great ideas exist online. More are being added everyday, so no teacher can claim not to have fresh material from which to draw lessons. I believe the web could greatly accelerate the rate at which new ideas and new methods are introduced into classrooms, reducing the chances of children becoming bored with their classroom experience.
I also had the honor of hearing from one of the leaders of the Internet Public Library. This resource offers an banquet of reliable, helpful informatin for anyone intersted in learning. They are also responsive to public input, so they can best adapt the services they provide. I saw many examples of great work, however, the skop of a project like, just seems like more than I could every handle.
In thinking about all of this I was again reminded of the stunning speed with which our youth are adapting to the information age. It brought to mind some questions I have had over whether a teacher can truly hope to stay as technologically adept as her students, especially given her other responsibilities. If I have the oppurtunity to speak to a young teacher who has found uses for technology in the classroom, I'd ask if they'd yet encountered a situation where the students were teaching them, and if they have thoughts on how to deal with such an event.
I also had the honor of hearing from one of the leaders of the Internet Public Library. This resource offers an banquet of reliable, helpful informatin for anyone intersted in learning. They are also responsive to public input, so they can best adapt the services they provide. I saw many examples of great work, however, the skop of a project like, just seems like more than I could every handle.
In thinking about all of this I was again reminded of the stunning speed with which our youth are adapting to the information age. It brought to mind some questions I have had over whether a teacher can truly hope to stay as technologically adept as her students, especially given her other responsibilities. If I have the oppurtunity to speak to a young teacher who has found uses for technology in the classroom, I'd ask if they'd yet encountered a situation where the students were teaching them, and if they have thoughts on how to deal with such an event.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
The Wide World of Education Online
Having examined a few websites on my own, and witnessesed a wonderful presentation, -plus of course, I have been inspecting the blogs of others to hear about some resources they've found- I am beginning to take the Internet seriously as resource for education. I especially like all of the websites that provide a means to extend the classroom community outside of the school building and our already to limited class hours . I have been giving some thought lately to the issue of classroom time, and how limited a chance a teacher has to truly make an impact in the lives of her students. Thus I believe that the more a teacher can do to extend the learning outside her classroom walls and free up time for actual instruction in the class, then the more students will benefit from this use of technology. I also appreciate the sites that offer teachers either tools to ease the daily routines, such as those that help you create rubrics, or that can provide them with ideas for lesson plans or methods. I realize how taxing teaching can be, and any time a teacher can spend just preparing for class. Any tool that allows for more thought on education and less on dull routine is worthy to me.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Internet Education Resource
While exploring the web for resources that teachers can utilize, I began looking for web sites that could be useful to both teachers and students. Since, I focus on teaching social studies, and as the name of this blog would indicate, I decided to look for historical resources online. One site that has really attracted my attention is the University of Evansville's website on ancient world cultures, found at http://eawc.evansville.edu/. After exploring this site a little I believe it could have many positive uses in a lesson plan, but it does have several problems. The site seems to have been assembled by academics, which means that some of the material offered could seem dull or confusing to high school students. The internal navigation is not immediately understandable. Some of the links are not labled clearly, and many times it is unclear exactly what information a given link wil direct you towards. Many other links are dead, and I don't know how often such problems are corrected. Though since I have been visiting the site over several days, it would seem unlikely that the web site is updated often. Additionally, the website lacks much decor or interactivity, which may bore some students. Having said all that, I found the website contained an abundance of helpful historical information. They have stored many documents of historical significance, which students might not otherwise be able to find. I feel many lessons could incorporate these documents. The sight itself also has some helpful passages and quizzes that teachers could consider when designing lessons, though as mentioned earlier these might be a turn off for students. The website also presents examples of ancient artwork, and other cultural artifacts, to help students gain an appreciation of ancient cultures. Lastly, the website compiles essays of historical thought and research, which seem much more academic and instructor oriented in nature. I would suggest that a teacher, might what to only expose the student's to these, in easily to digest selections of the most compelling material. I will continue to explore this website and others to determine tha best use of this resource for an educator
Sunday, July 10, 2005
The Cap'n is a basketball fan
This post is clearly a degenerative imitation of Bill Simmons "The Sports Guy", who writes an annual column about the trade values of NBA players. I began writing this before he published his on Espn.com's Page 2. I recommend anyone truly interested in the NBA go ahead and read that. It will be helpful for comparison's sake, and you'll also get to see how much I copied everything about his rankings even the writing style
NBA Trade Values- 2005 Off-season
Now that the NBA has crowned its most recent champions – Congratulations to the Spurs and all of San Antonio by the way- it’s time to start thinking about the basketball hot stove. Judging from the potential free agent market it looks as though this off-season will be substantially quieter than last year. If you are looking ahead to the next year for your franchise (and there’s always a next year for every team, yes, even the Clippers) don’t expect to make a Suns or Bulls type leap based on signing major talent alone. So if we’re playing fantasy GM with the whole NBA you have to get some judgment of how all the players stack up against each other. So in the absence of anyone else’s authoritative opinion I have created my own list of the top 50 players based on their comparative trade value.
Before we go into the ratings we have to cover the rules. First, since I haven’t the time or the finesse to sort out just those players currently in contract from those who will enter the free agent market, I will simply treat them all as potential trades. Imagine that when Commissioner Stern walked out of the effective bargaining agreement he said “All teams’ rosters are frozen as of this date and from here on out, any two teams can swap one player for another straight-up with no cap ramifications.” Second, degrees matter. Some teams would never surrender the players at the top of this list even if the offer is for someone who could be better. Example, if someone proposed Kobe Bryant for Kevin Garnett straight up neither team would actually take that offer, but Minnesota would have to say “Dang as much as we want to we’ll have to pass on Kobe” while the Lakers will say “Kobe for KG, we’d be insane to accept that.” See, little degrees like that mean a lot for separating out the top of the list. Conversely some of the players are so close to each other on the bottom and middle of the list that they could be traded for each other in our imaginary league, but one of the teams could still feel a little happier for the change. Example, the proposed swap between Detroit and Philadelphia goes through, Rip Hamilton and Chris Webber trade places. The difference was that it took Philly all of five minutes thought to part with C-Dub while Detroit probably spent a few days shopping Rip around to see if they could get a better offer. Third, in instances where a player is well known to be underpriced or overpriced in his current contract, that will raise or lower his value respectively, but that tends to be a tie breaker rather than a major issue. Fourth, you have to consider the age of the player. Do you want Jason Kidd for five years, or Ben Gordon for ten. Finally and most importantly, this is not about who’s the better player, or who’s more dominant, or who an organization is loyal to. In my mind all front office decisions boil down to two points 1) Who’s going to win us the most games and titles? and equally important is 2) Who’s going to earn us the most money? So I made those my standards and followed the trades wherever logic took me.
And now the ratings in descending order (i.e. the player wouldn’t be traded for each player listed before him but would be traded for each player listed after him)…
Category F: Either way the phone’s not ringing
50. Grant Hill- Back in 1998 you would have said he had fallen significantly to reach this point, so it’s sad to note that this is actually quite a leap for him. He’s still a real asset to the Magic in term of revenue, and he did prove to have a positive impact on the team’s record when he played. So they wouldn’t trade Grant for just any old journeyman, bench stiff, or Atlanta Hawk. That having been said, I can see them giving up Hill for any player who has promise and some record for living up to that promise, which everyone below on this list has.
49. Jamal Magloire- I know he hasn’t been very productive, and it’s hard to believe that anyone would value him, but he is honestly New Orleans’ best player anymore. If they give him up they become the Bobcats minus the excuses. Essentially the Hornets will hold on to him unless another GM partakes of a little too much Bourbon Street action and offers them a solid player. Just like Hill, no one who currently has him wants to give him away, but no one who doesn’t have him is really interested.
Category E: Building blocks
48. Kirk Hinrich- On the Baby Bulls, he’s the leading scorer and a real on-court leader, on a contending team he’s a solid seventh man and good fourth option. Not exactly a glowing recommendation, but it has done enough to earn the attention of some. He may have officially supplanted Eddy Curry as “the closets thing the Bulls have to a veteran”, I’m still checking into that. In any case he can’t be any higher on this list when every other player is at worst a good sixth man or reliable third option.
47. Pau Gasol- I suppose you could credit the coaching, but the Memphis players have to be a least a little responsible for making the playoffs two years in a row while seated in the toughest division in basketball. Still he’s a defensive weak spot until he orders those “Dirk Nowitiski: How to Become a Tough European Player” instructional tapes.
46. Reggie Evans- Somewhere beneath Ray Allen’s career year, someone noticed that this guy was a key component of Seattle’s expectation defying season.
45. Jeff Foster- I may be overrating this guy, just because I love the nickname “Bananas Foster.” But c’mon doesn’t the Pacers’ entire season post-brawl prove that the every team member except Artest and O’Neal were underrated?
44. Chris Bosh- I have long been of the opinion that his value has been underappreciated, in the same rookie class as Wade, ‘Melo, and LBJ. I realize that hurts him on the market, but he’s a commodity to be watched if only because some clever team could clear a ton of cap and useless contracts on the Raptors in exchange for this promising sophmore.
While we’re on the subject of the sorry state of Toronto, and I won’t directly revisit it at any other point on this list, I just had to take a shot at Bob Babcock. I can’t help but think of him as the Elmer Fudd of the NBA and every other GM as Bugs Bunny. He must have made a bet with the Clippers ownership that he could put together a worse team than they could. He has to be doing this stuff on purpose.
43. Andre Kirilenko- He should be a franchise player for the Jazz, instead it looks like he’ll just become the next designated defender for somebody. Still, as Bruce Bowen proved you can get a lot out of a player with combination clampdown defense and robo-rebounding skills, especially if he’s a reliable scorer too. Of course Bowen has proven it and AK-47 only promises it so, he stays a building block for now.
42. Brad Miller- Yeah, sure it looks like the post-Webber Kings aren’t going to be nearly the title contenders they used to be, but aside from durability issues, Miller is a reliable big man who really stepped it up at the end of the season. I can think of about 13 teams in the Eastern Conference who would love to have that.
41. Richard Jefferson- Theoretically he could be much higher, but I have to deduct points for 1) playing his whole career with the best “makes his teammates better" player of the post-MJ era, and 2) his major injury clearly affected his mental toughness, and his ability to recover from this may be a serious question for GM’s. I do think his dedication to come back and get swept in the playoff does bode well. Also factor in that since his rookie season he has played more games and more minutes in each season than someone like, oh, let’s say, Shaq has played in any season since ’94. I’m not calling him an iron man, I’m just saying he may disprove that “Pac-10 players are soft” superstition.
40. Lamar Odom- The Lakers must realize that he is their only weapon after Kobe. So depending if they’re seriously in the “let’s rebuild for a championship” mode or the “we’ve decided to self-destruct for half a decade a la the Bulls after Jordan” mode, they can either treat him right and groom him for success, or dump him on the Trailblazers for more useless draft picks. Either way he can get them something they want.
39. Chris Webber- I know he lives his life under a cloud and he threw his latest franchise leader under a bus, like five minutes after getting eliminated in the playoffs, but hear me out. Philly will want to hold on to Webber unless they get a sweet deal. In the regular season his is good enough to draw some of the pressure away from the always overburdened and overgaurded AI, and Iverson’s health is essential to playoff success. The only problem is that only a few teams would be desperate enough to give up anything of value for this albatross.
P.S. In honor of Iverson being the Answer, I think Webber should officially be dubbed the Problem. For as much as the first is able to overcome staggering odds to achieve inspiring success, the second is capable of wrenching a heartbreaking loss from the clutches of victory.
P.S.S. Why hasn’t anyone ever tried offering Webber a contract where he earns all his cash and incentives in the regular season, then have a loophole saying they can cut him from their playoff roster and not lose the option to renew? I’m not kidding I think this is a sure way to secure home court for the playoffs, and then ensuring you only lose to better teams instead of whatever grudge some higher power seems to have with C-Dub.
38. Rip Hamilton- He’s a great scorer, and a solid team player, and a major element of the Piston’s two runs at a title, yes, that is all true. However, do you really think Detroit couldn’t find someone just as reliable from within twelve feet, who doesn’t go on headache inducing draughts in big games? Besides, he’s already one Dikembe Mutombo elbow away from the end of his career. The Pistons like him, but they won’t bet the farm on him.
37. Antoine Walker- I think he’ll keep NBA statisticians awake long into the night for years after he retires. I read a piece showing how his shooting woes should, in theory, kill his team. Somehow when he’s in green and white he’s just a solid winner. I say the Celtics are too scared of the Curse of the ‘Toine to just give him up again.
36. Peja Stojakovic- I doubt if he’ll ever create his own shot or improve the play of his teammates, but the Kings do love their Diet Kobe, and plenty of others want a taste.
35. Elton Brand- I almost want to label him as a full fledged franchise guy, simply because he’s talented and entertaining enough to sell tickets, and also complacent enough to play for the worst run franchise in basketball. His stats are good, and those who watch him play say he’s up there in terms of talent and ability. The two things dragging him down to this point are that no other franchise would seriously put their future on his shoulders, and no one can be called a franchise player for the Clippers. It’s one of those catch-22’s. The more valuable you are to the Clipps the more likely they are to trade you.
34. Baron Davis- After what he did to close out the season the Warriors desperately want to retain him, and other teams are giving him some serious thought. Which probably means one way or another, he doesn’t play more that 35 games next season.
33. Bruce Bowen- He’s become a desirable commodity on the market. I can see any other team dealing him away for oh, I don’t know, a high-schooler with “upside”, or whatever else passes for a common sense move in the current NBA. The Spurs are different though. With, their style of play they don’t win a title this year without some one who could shut down the Ray Allens and Rip Hamiltons of the league; they know that. Also can you see anyone at the Spurs really splitting up their 7-man rotation?
32. Tony Parker- You could switch him with B2, because I think they have equal market value and value to the Spurs. I give the Frenchman the nod, because there’s more demand for quality point guards. He would rank much higher on the list if he wasn’t less famous than his girlfriend, and hadn’t been tilting on the edge of premature career collapse for the second half of the season.
Category D: Borderline Franchise Guys
31. Emeka Okafor- I actually was surprised to rank him this low. In theory he’s the ultimate untouchable franchise guy, since he lead his team in scoring, is so far the face of the franchise, and has already won Rookie of the Year to give the Bobcats a little street cred. He has proven championship credentials, and was the locker room leader on a team that seriously defied expectations. Despite all that I ultimately come back to the fact that the Bobcats are so new that they could find a much more attractive franchise guy either in the next draft, or in a good trade. Carolina just has too many options to label any player as untouchable, but Okafor’s probably the closest thing they have.
30. Kenyon Martin- If I had to choose one power forward for the next ten years, I think K-Mart is a close second choice behind the obvious top dawg. He showed the same toughness with the Nuggets, that he made his name with in New Jersey, but his contract is way overpriced for anyone to want him that bad.
29. Michael Redd- What does it mean that the second most valuable free agent this year isn’t even in the top 25 most valuable players in the league? He’s good sure, and anyone who gets him will hold on tight, but I don’t know if he’s a for sure franchise player.
28. Steve Francis- The Magic can’t afford to lose him, and no other team could build a team around him alone. I think some of his rep is unearned, I mean he hasn’t killed a coach’s career the last few months, and he shows up every game, and he has true All-Star level game.
27. Joe Johnson- He gets seriously bumped up this list for halo effect from the other Suns, I know everyone else was impressed with his impact in the post-season, but I never saw the kind of production in his regular season numbers you expect in a must have guy.
26. Paul Pierce- He’ll be lucky if he makes this list next year, or maybe not since the only way he’ll still be some team’s franchise player is if he gets traded to a bad team.
25. Rasheed Wallace- His presence bumped the Pistons up from contenders to favorites in the title chase for the next few years. During the playoffs you just knew if he came to life on the offensive end the other team didn’t have a prayer. It’s just Detroit’s good fortune that he’s only their third most valuable player (which by the way is a sure sign Joe Dumars will inevitably capsize the franchise when he reaches to get value by trading ‘Sheed). I could even see him ranked a little higher if I didn’t still have that lingering doubt that someday somehow he was going to pull off a stunt that would go right onto NBA TV’s “Stupidest On Court Moments” gag reel.
24. Jason Kidd- It’s easy to say that the Nets want to dump his contract, but they would still have two other players with max money on their roster, and neither have had nearly the impact of Kidd. You just don’t lose with him on your court. If he can put together two more healthy years, than I think New Jersey will remain a threat in the East. But he’s already on the downside of his career.
23. Ben Wallace- I don’t know how you define dominance, but for me it’s the quality of a player to alter the dynamics of the game simply by his presence. That’s why I think Big Ben could be the most dominant player right now. Not every game, but sometimes, when he’s motivated and when he gets his head on straight. Its important to note that I don’t mean just defensively. If he can turn on his offense, then he puts the fear of Stern into his opponents, and everything opens up for his team. If someone had treated him seriously from the beginning of his career he could have been the next Bill Russell. Now I think he has to settle with being the next Walt Bellamy.
22. Ray Allen- The Ray Gun is most definitely the most desirable free agent, but he’s also the hardest to rate. He can have a huge impact on any game in which he plays, but he seems to be a little one dimensional. While every team wants a go-to point maker, he probably isn’t worth whatever money he’ll draw. Then again he does come with Dean Oliver’s seal of approval. I tell you what, if he has another year like this, I’ll bump him up to the top ten on next year’s list.
21. Steve Nash- I would value any defending MVP at a much higher level than the leagues GM’s will value Nash. His skills may be irreplaceable, but everyone will value other skill sets above his, which is sad because this league needs to encourage more exciting playmakers like our lovable Canadian.
Group C: Franchise Players
20. Robert Horry- Big Game Rob has played himself into the pages of NBA history, and the high end of this list. He’s actually the exception, in that I label him as having the same value as a player on which a franchise could plan its future, even though he’s too late in his career and not a strong enough overall player to be The Man on any team. The simple fact is he plays the most valuable role in basketball, and he is the best there is at the game right now. Consider the following items:
1) Of the four factors Dean Oliver identifies as critcal to the success of a basketball team, the most important is reliable shooting, especially in close games or in leagues with a high level of parity.
2) Since American basketball has become increasingly focused on “athletes” who focus most of their talent on “to the basket” type skills, specialist shooters are becoming an increasing rarity in the NBA. Something we saw demonstrated with sad certainty in the 2004 Olympics.
3) In the last twelve years (also known as a full 20% of NBA history) 11 of the twelve NBA champions have had either famed and now retired shooting specialist Steve Kerr or Robert Horry on their roster. Horry alone played on half of the teams over that stretch. Can you name any other player who’s presence on your roster says you have a 50% chance of winning the championship.
4) As of the end of this season, with Reggie Miller’s retirement and Horry adding his Finals Game 5 heroics to his resume. No one is a better clutch player in the league. NO ONE.
5) Aside from age, I cannot think of one disadvantage Horry has. He has had great chemistry on all sorts of teams, including the Soap Oprah Shaq and Kobe Lakers. He plays hurt. He’s rarely seriously injured. He has a calming presence in pressure moments on big games. He should be the single most desirable player, outside of the super stars.
6) He will never cost you the top dollars a super star will, but he will get you comparable results. If the GM’s of the league held a all inclusive draft, he would definitely go in the top ten.
Add all those up, and it says to me he’s a must have player. If only for one or two years, any team with a solid starting line-up would die to have him, and the shot at a title he brings.
An interesting debate started during the Finals about whether or not Horry belonged in the Hall of Fame. I think the evidence is clearly in Horry’s favor, but the debate was complicated, by a couple of wrinkles. First, there is no NBA hall of fame, or even a professional basketball hall of fame, The Basketball Hall of Fame is an all inclusive hall honoring player of both genders from around the world of both pro and amateur levels. This leads to the meaning of being a Hall of Famer so diluted, that no basketball fan can clearly define it any more. I don’t even think that the selection committees have a firm idea, which would explain why it seems easier for women’s college coaches to get in than memorable NBA stars. Second, in discussing the all-time greats of the NBA the arguments rarely recognize role players. Baseball and football and even hockey have much more differentiation between the demands of different players. Football fans seem to appreciate why a great lineman is as hall worthy as a great quarterback. Baseball’s hall honors the defensive specialist and relief aces right there with the great hitters. But, since all basketball players have the same basic purpose, they all get judged by the same standards, which isn’t always fair. It seems as if most basketball fans think you have to be an MVP type player to be enshrined. I like to reference the great Bill James’ proposed standards for the baseball hall of fame, where he creates different definitions for what makes a Hall of Fame player. With Horry, he qualifies on two counts. First, you could argue he is among the greatest clutch shooters of all time and during his career was only ever overshadowed by super stars. Second, he was a vital element on multiple championship teams. To me the Hall of Fame was meant to honor the players who made important contributions to their team or their league, but who may not have been an MVP, or flashy all-star. We don’t need a plaque in Cooperstown to remember who Babe Ruth was, but we might not remember Hank Greenberg without the Hall. In my opinion Robert Horry is a dead lock for the Hall of Fame. He’s the kind of player that should be honored in posterity. I just hope the voters agree.
19. Manu Ginobli- I know he’s older than you’d like your central star to be, but just look at how he can energize his teams. He is undeniably the kind of player that can turn lesser talent into a serious contender. So, the Spurs may get some team to give up one of the players listed below, just to get at the Argentinean’s intangibles.
18. Carmelo Anthony- Some people think he’s a disappointment already, because he didn’t have an instant Bird and Magic type impact. The thing is, I think he has. He has gotten to the playoffs two more times than LeBron James has, and has had better success against the West powerhouses than D-Wade. He may have some questions about his mental toughness, and off-court stability, but I think Coach Karl came into his life early enough, that, if those two stay together for a while, ‘Melo can still get on the right track. Any team with him on their roster will hold on to him for the sake of their future, even if he may not have the proven success of Dwayne, or the piggy bank quality of King James.
17. Jermaine O’Neal- He turned himself into a model player this season. When you combine the way he carried himself post brawl with his amazing on-court leadership and dedication and his already substantial talent and prowess, you have exactly the kind of player the Pacers will lean on to build their post-Reggie franchise into greatness.
16. Gilbert Arenas- He could easily bottom out in a big hurry and turn into just another head case with untapped potential, which is a shame, because he was finally learning how to really play basketball. The Wizards need him to be their future in a big way, but they have to watch out that an established team that can afford the risk, doesn’t outbid them the next time his contract is up.
15. Mike Bibby- He leads all other point guard’s in the league because he’s proven he can carry a team and he still has enough time and flexibility in him that he could still develop a multi-year project team like the Grizzlies into the real deal.
14. Ben Gordon- Oh man, once he learns how to play that way for thirty or more minutes, he’s going to become the most feared assassin in the NBA. There is no way his career doesn’t become something great.
Category B: Nearly Untouchables
13. Chauncy Billups- In case there was any doubt about who the Most Valuable Piston was, I think the NBA Finals proved it. No one else on Detroit’s roster seems able to control the tempo, create their own shot, change the momentum of a game, or make a big play without him on the court. Joe Dumars knows if he lets go of Billups he lets go of any chance of building a Pistons dynasty with the pieces he has left. I would rate him higher, but I’m a little worried, that like all the other Pistons he wouldn’t work in any other team’s chemistry.
12. Amare Stoudemire- I’m a little tired of the pundits going crazy about him. Sure he looks like he could be the most devastating offensive force in the NBA today. But come on, where was this dominance before Steve Nash shows up. I don’t believe he can make that kind of difference without a good supporting cast. The Suns are going to keep designing the offense to feed into his talents and his market value is going to keep rising, until all some other team makes some ridiculous offer for a player that will totally implode the second the world stops pampering him. Still, this list is more about perceived value than actual impact, so he has to be high up. I just want to warn whoever signs him after the Suns. You were probably promised the second coming of Wilt Chamberlain or something, but what you really got was a load of “upside” who’ value does a nose dive once he goes more than three feet from the basket. (I was considering going into a huge rant about “upside” here, but I’ve decided to let it rest at this: did anyone ever need to be reminded of MJ, Magic, or Bird’s upside? So then how can it mean so much?)
11. Allen Iverson- Even if I accept that his career is nearly over and he never delivered, he still ranks this high. Philly has nothing, without him. No wins, no ticket sales, nothing.
10. Vince Carter- Obviously his trade value shot through the roof with his performance after coming to New Jersey. I don’t attribute that to his level of play as much as the terrible passive aggressive mean streak he showed. His productivity number wise was great, but remember he was playing with Mr. I-Make-My-Teammates-Look-Way-Better-Than-They-Actually-Are, Jason Kidd. Not only was Kidd naturally going to do more for Vince than any of his old Raptor teammates, but he also was coming back from injury himself and desperate to make the playoffs. Nothing was going to stop Carter from playing monster ball after the All-Star break.
Sidebar- What’s Vince Carter’s new nickname? I might have been one of the few people south of the 49th parallel to like Air Canada, so I doubt Air Jersey will work out. If anyone has suggestions, I want to hear them.
The level of effort that Vince displayed once he was in a Nets jersey was freakish. I just assumed he lacked mental toughness, competitiveness, and ambition. In other words, I thought he was destined for the Clippers. It turns out he actually did lack motivation. I don’t know what it was he needed to get him going. It could have been he needed to live in the States, or he needed a competent front office, or another All-Star to relieve the pressure off his back. In any case I think this might have been one of the best acts of passive aggressive revenge in sports history (it still lags well behind the top pick Curse of the Bambino). He not only proved to the Toronto fans and front office that he really was a great player, and embarrassed them for ever buying a ticket to watch him play at half speed. He also set up a horrible situation for Toronto. When the last spot in the playoffs came down to the Nets and Cavaliers, it meant that the only way the Raptors could try to keep him out of the playoffs was to lie down to the Cavs on the last game of the season after they had finally gotten some sense of their identity back. That was a real gut blow to the city, which he made worse by getting into the playoffs anyway. I figure this has to rate at least 3.5 on Bill Simmons Vengeance Skill (which can be found on Espn.com’s Page 2).
9. Tracy McGrady- Kobe will have a real rival in the West from here on out. I realize he did more for the Rockets this year than Yao, which has earned him such a high spot. I give the edge to Yao though, because he has the better image (especially internationall) and has a few more years in him. If you want to flip their positions on this list you can go ahead. I just like someone who hasn’t developed yet, over someone who still has to overcome a reputation of underachievement.
8. Dirk Nowitski- Tough European + Mad Shooting Skills + Terrific Marketability + Consistent Contender = A must have for any team without a true untouchable
7. Yao Ming- As the NBA becomes an increasingly international entity, you can bet that Commissioner Stern will start transforming Yao into the biggest media sensation since Jordan. I really mean it. If Vegas offered odds on who the next Jordan would be (at least in terms of being the face of the NBA) I would make a ton of money off this. I have no doubt that Yao can carry a team on his back, I’m watching out to see if he can carry this whole misbegotten league into the Global Basketball Era.
Category A: The Untouchables
6. Dwayne Wade- The Heat would never give up D-Wade, never, ever, ever. But they wouldn’t give up Shaq either. In terms of impact on the game they’re pretty much equal, with Shaq being more dominant in the regular season, and Wade taking over as the impact guy in the playoffs. Future value is also a wash. While Shaq is definitely on the rather steep downside of his career, he’s got many more years in him before he becomes less valuable than the average center. Dwayne theoretically has many years in front of him, but shouldn’t we all be more cautious about him with the long term effects of his rib injury still unclear. So in the best debate on this list I have to rate Shaq higher simply because he’ll sell more tickets and merchandise.
5. Kevin Garnett- He has yet to disprove the widely reported theory that he can never be the best player on a great team. If his presence alone can’t guarantee you a place in the playoffs then he’s only ever going to be about as valuable as Charles Barkley. Still the opinion of anyone who ever has to play against him is that by himself he can destroy a team on any given night. I guess that just means that Sir Charles could have owned this league if he played today.
4. Kobe Bryant- I propose a two point test as to his trade value 1) Can you name three players in the league with more proven talent? 2) Can you name three players in the league who are better known? I think the answer for both of those questions is a solid no. In addition you have to put him pretty high up, because from the second Shaq left, L.A. was pretty much stuck with Kobe. Jerry Buss would become the laughingstock of the league and tick off half his fan base the instant he admitted he picked the wrong pony. Sink or swim, the Lakers have to entrust their future to Kobe. I do have to deduct some points for being a serious threat to ruin any franchise he lands on, and for his still unresolved image problems. I don’t think that actually changed his placement, because he’s still more valuable than those listed above him, and he doesn’t have much of a chance of topping out those listed below.
3. LeBron James- I’m a little tired of excuses. LeBron, you should be the number one player on this list from here until you retire no matter where you play. Get into the playoffs or the honeymoon is over.
2. Shaquille O’Neal- This is an official warning: from here on out anyone who calls Shaq the most dominating anything, will receive a punch in the kidneys from me. Shaq’s reign is over. He may still be highly valuable and the most marketable player in the league. For that I honor him with the number two rating. The most dominant title belongs to the number one player . . .
The Man
1. Tim Duncan- I could get really picky that Manu deserved to be the Finals MVP, but the fact remains that Timmy has won three titles and three finals MVP’s to match. That’s as many as Shaq and Magic, and more than everyone else save Jordan. Tim’s won championships before and after Shaq and Kobe’s three-peat. He was great before they took over, and he’s since out performed and outlasted that Lakers min-dynasty. It’ starting to look to me like Shaq took advantage of a narrow window of opportunity and some special circumstances to claim his success, while Tim Duncan is an absolute championship player. Throw in the fact that Duncan may be smarter than any other player, a better leader, and never disrupts the team’s chemistry, and I have to declare that Tim Duncan has been the best player of the post-MJ era. Whatever mojo San Antonio has keeping him there, they better pray it never wears out. It’s Duncan’s league, we’re just watching it.
NBA Trade Values- 2005 Off-season
Now that the NBA has crowned its most recent champions – Congratulations to the Spurs and all of San Antonio by the way- it’s time to start thinking about the basketball hot stove. Judging from the potential free agent market it looks as though this off-season will be substantially quieter than last year. If you are looking ahead to the next year for your franchise (and there’s always a next year for every team, yes, even the Clippers) don’t expect to make a Suns or Bulls type leap based on signing major talent alone. So if we’re playing fantasy GM with the whole NBA you have to get some judgment of how all the players stack up against each other. So in the absence of anyone else’s authoritative opinion I have created my own list of the top 50 players based on their comparative trade value.
Before we go into the ratings we have to cover the rules. First, since I haven’t the time or the finesse to sort out just those players currently in contract from those who will enter the free agent market, I will simply treat them all as potential trades. Imagine that when Commissioner Stern walked out of the effective bargaining agreement he said “All teams’ rosters are frozen as of this date and from here on out, any two teams can swap one player for another straight-up with no cap ramifications.” Second, degrees matter. Some teams would never surrender the players at the top of this list even if the offer is for someone who could be better. Example, if someone proposed Kobe Bryant for Kevin Garnett straight up neither team would actually take that offer, but Minnesota would have to say “Dang as much as we want to we’ll have to pass on Kobe” while the Lakers will say “Kobe for KG, we’d be insane to accept that.” See, little degrees like that mean a lot for separating out the top of the list. Conversely some of the players are so close to each other on the bottom and middle of the list that they could be traded for each other in our imaginary league, but one of the teams could still feel a little happier for the change. Example, the proposed swap between Detroit and Philadelphia goes through, Rip Hamilton and Chris Webber trade places. The difference was that it took Philly all of five minutes thought to part with C-Dub while Detroit probably spent a few days shopping Rip around to see if they could get a better offer. Third, in instances where a player is well known to be underpriced or overpriced in his current contract, that will raise or lower his value respectively, but that tends to be a tie breaker rather than a major issue. Fourth, you have to consider the age of the player. Do you want Jason Kidd for five years, or Ben Gordon for ten. Finally and most importantly, this is not about who’s the better player, or who’s more dominant, or who an organization is loyal to. In my mind all front office decisions boil down to two points 1) Who’s going to win us the most games and titles? and equally important is 2) Who’s going to earn us the most money? So I made those my standards and followed the trades wherever logic took me.
And now the ratings in descending order (i.e. the player wouldn’t be traded for each player listed before him but would be traded for each player listed after him)…
Category F: Either way the phone’s not ringing
50. Grant Hill- Back in 1998 you would have said he had fallen significantly to reach this point, so it’s sad to note that this is actually quite a leap for him. He’s still a real asset to the Magic in term of revenue, and he did prove to have a positive impact on the team’s record when he played. So they wouldn’t trade Grant for just any old journeyman, bench stiff, or Atlanta Hawk. That having been said, I can see them giving up Hill for any player who has promise and some record for living up to that promise, which everyone below on this list has.
49. Jamal Magloire- I know he hasn’t been very productive, and it’s hard to believe that anyone would value him, but he is honestly New Orleans’ best player anymore. If they give him up they become the Bobcats minus the excuses. Essentially the Hornets will hold on to him unless another GM partakes of a little too much Bourbon Street action and offers them a solid player. Just like Hill, no one who currently has him wants to give him away, but no one who doesn’t have him is really interested.
Category E: Building blocks
48. Kirk Hinrich- On the Baby Bulls, he’s the leading scorer and a real on-court leader, on a contending team he’s a solid seventh man and good fourth option. Not exactly a glowing recommendation, but it has done enough to earn the attention of some. He may have officially supplanted Eddy Curry as “the closets thing the Bulls have to a veteran”, I’m still checking into that. In any case he can’t be any higher on this list when every other player is at worst a good sixth man or reliable third option.
47. Pau Gasol- I suppose you could credit the coaching, but the Memphis players have to be a least a little responsible for making the playoffs two years in a row while seated in the toughest division in basketball. Still he’s a defensive weak spot until he orders those “Dirk Nowitiski: How to Become a Tough European Player” instructional tapes.
46. Reggie Evans- Somewhere beneath Ray Allen’s career year, someone noticed that this guy was a key component of Seattle’s expectation defying season.
45. Jeff Foster- I may be overrating this guy, just because I love the nickname “Bananas Foster.” But c’mon doesn’t the Pacers’ entire season post-brawl prove that the every team member except Artest and O’Neal were underrated?
44. Chris Bosh- I have long been of the opinion that his value has been underappreciated, in the same rookie class as Wade, ‘Melo, and LBJ. I realize that hurts him on the market, but he’s a commodity to be watched if only because some clever team could clear a ton of cap and useless contracts on the Raptors in exchange for this promising sophmore.
While we’re on the subject of the sorry state of Toronto, and I won’t directly revisit it at any other point on this list, I just had to take a shot at Bob Babcock. I can’t help but think of him as the Elmer Fudd of the NBA and every other GM as Bugs Bunny. He must have made a bet with the Clippers ownership that he could put together a worse team than they could. He has to be doing this stuff on purpose.
43. Andre Kirilenko- He should be a franchise player for the Jazz, instead it looks like he’ll just become the next designated defender for somebody. Still, as Bruce Bowen proved you can get a lot out of a player with combination clampdown defense and robo-rebounding skills, especially if he’s a reliable scorer too. Of course Bowen has proven it and AK-47 only promises it so, he stays a building block for now.
42. Brad Miller- Yeah, sure it looks like the post-Webber Kings aren’t going to be nearly the title contenders they used to be, but aside from durability issues, Miller is a reliable big man who really stepped it up at the end of the season. I can think of about 13 teams in the Eastern Conference who would love to have that.
41. Richard Jefferson- Theoretically he could be much higher, but I have to deduct points for 1) playing his whole career with the best “makes his teammates better" player of the post-MJ era, and 2) his major injury clearly affected his mental toughness, and his ability to recover from this may be a serious question for GM’s. I do think his dedication to come back and get swept in the playoff does bode well. Also factor in that since his rookie season he has played more games and more minutes in each season than someone like, oh, let’s say, Shaq has played in any season since ’94. I’m not calling him an iron man, I’m just saying he may disprove that “Pac-10 players are soft” superstition.
40. Lamar Odom- The Lakers must realize that he is their only weapon after Kobe. So depending if they’re seriously in the “let’s rebuild for a championship” mode or the “we’ve decided to self-destruct for half a decade a la the Bulls after Jordan” mode, they can either treat him right and groom him for success, or dump him on the Trailblazers for more useless draft picks. Either way he can get them something they want.
39. Chris Webber- I know he lives his life under a cloud and he threw his latest franchise leader under a bus, like five minutes after getting eliminated in the playoffs, but hear me out. Philly will want to hold on to Webber unless they get a sweet deal. In the regular season his is good enough to draw some of the pressure away from the always overburdened and overgaurded AI, and Iverson’s health is essential to playoff success. The only problem is that only a few teams would be desperate enough to give up anything of value for this albatross.
P.S. In honor of Iverson being the Answer, I think Webber should officially be dubbed the Problem. For as much as the first is able to overcome staggering odds to achieve inspiring success, the second is capable of wrenching a heartbreaking loss from the clutches of victory.
P.S.S. Why hasn’t anyone ever tried offering Webber a contract where he earns all his cash and incentives in the regular season, then have a loophole saying they can cut him from their playoff roster and not lose the option to renew? I’m not kidding I think this is a sure way to secure home court for the playoffs, and then ensuring you only lose to better teams instead of whatever grudge some higher power seems to have with C-Dub.
38. Rip Hamilton- He’s a great scorer, and a solid team player, and a major element of the Piston’s two runs at a title, yes, that is all true. However, do you really think Detroit couldn’t find someone just as reliable from within twelve feet, who doesn’t go on headache inducing draughts in big games? Besides, he’s already one Dikembe Mutombo elbow away from the end of his career. The Pistons like him, but they won’t bet the farm on him.
37. Antoine Walker- I think he’ll keep NBA statisticians awake long into the night for years after he retires. I read a piece showing how his shooting woes should, in theory, kill his team. Somehow when he’s in green and white he’s just a solid winner. I say the Celtics are too scared of the Curse of the ‘Toine to just give him up again.
36. Peja Stojakovic- I doubt if he’ll ever create his own shot or improve the play of his teammates, but the Kings do love their Diet Kobe, and plenty of others want a taste.
35. Elton Brand- I almost want to label him as a full fledged franchise guy, simply because he’s talented and entertaining enough to sell tickets, and also complacent enough to play for the worst run franchise in basketball. His stats are good, and those who watch him play say he’s up there in terms of talent and ability. The two things dragging him down to this point are that no other franchise would seriously put their future on his shoulders, and no one can be called a franchise player for the Clippers. It’s one of those catch-22’s. The more valuable you are to the Clipps the more likely they are to trade you.
34. Baron Davis- After what he did to close out the season the Warriors desperately want to retain him, and other teams are giving him some serious thought. Which probably means one way or another, he doesn’t play more that 35 games next season.
33. Bruce Bowen- He’s become a desirable commodity on the market. I can see any other team dealing him away for oh, I don’t know, a high-schooler with “upside”, or whatever else passes for a common sense move in the current NBA. The Spurs are different though. With, their style of play they don’t win a title this year without some one who could shut down the Ray Allens and Rip Hamiltons of the league; they know that. Also can you see anyone at the Spurs really splitting up their 7-man rotation?
32. Tony Parker- You could switch him with B2, because I think they have equal market value and value to the Spurs. I give the Frenchman the nod, because there’s more demand for quality point guards. He would rank much higher on the list if he wasn’t less famous than his girlfriend, and hadn’t been tilting on the edge of premature career collapse for the second half of the season.
Category D: Borderline Franchise Guys
31. Emeka Okafor- I actually was surprised to rank him this low. In theory he’s the ultimate untouchable franchise guy, since he lead his team in scoring, is so far the face of the franchise, and has already won Rookie of the Year to give the Bobcats a little street cred. He has proven championship credentials, and was the locker room leader on a team that seriously defied expectations. Despite all that I ultimately come back to the fact that the Bobcats are so new that they could find a much more attractive franchise guy either in the next draft, or in a good trade. Carolina just has too many options to label any player as untouchable, but Okafor’s probably the closest thing they have.
30. Kenyon Martin- If I had to choose one power forward for the next ten years, I think K-Mart is a close second choice behind the obvious top dawg. He showed the same toughness with the Nuggets, that he made his name with in New Jersey, but his contract is way overpriced for anyone to want him that bad.
29. Michael Redd- What does it mean that the second most valuable free agent this year isn’t even in the top 25 most valuable players in the league? He’s good sure, and anyone who gets him will hold on tight, but I don’t know if he’s a for sure franchise player.
28. Steve Francis- The Magic can’t afford to lose him, and no other team could build a team around him alone. I think some of his rep is unearned, I mean he hasn’t killed a coach’s career the last few months, and he shows up every game, and he has true All-Star level game.
27. Joe Johnson- He gets seriously bumped up this list for halo effect from the other Suns, I know everyone else was impressed with his impact in the post-season, but I never saw the kind of production in his regular season numbers you expect in a must have guy.
26. Paul Pierce- He’ll be lucky if he makes this list next year, or maybe not since the only way he’ll still be some team’s franchise player is if he gets traded to a bad team.
25. Rasheed Wallace- His presence bumped the Pistons up from contenders to favorites in the title chase for the next few years. During the playoffs you just knew if he came to life on the offensive end the other team didn’t have a prayer. It’s just Detroit’s good fortune that he’s only their third most valuable player (which by the way is a sure sign Joe Dumars will inevitably capsize the franchise when he reaches to get value by trading ‘Sheed). I could even see him ranked a little higher if I didn’t still have that lingering doubt that someday somehow he was going to pull off a stunt that would go right onto NBA TV’s “Stupidest On Court Moments” gag reel.
24. Jason Kidd- It’s easy to say that the Nets want to dump his contract, but they would still have two other players with max money on their roster, and neither have had nearly the impact of Kidd. You just don’t lose with him on your court. If he can put together two more healthy years, than I think New Jersey will remain a threat in the East. But he’s already on the downside of his career.
23. Ben Wallace- I don’t know how you define dominance, but for me it’s the quality of a player to alter the dynamics of the game simply by his presence. That’s why I think Big Ben could be the most dominant player right now. Not every game, but sometimes, when he’s motivated and when he gets his head on straight. Its important to note that I don’t mean just defensively. If he can turn on his offense, then he puts the fear of Stern into his opponents, and everything opens up for his team. If someone had treated him seriously from the beginning of his career he could have been the next Bill Russell. Now I think he has to settle with being the next Walt Bellamy.
22. Ray Allen- The Ray Gun is most definitely the most desirable free agent, but he’s also the hardest to rate. He can have a huge impact on any game in which he plays, but he seems to be a little one dimensional. While every team wants a go-to point maker, he probably isn’t worth whatever money he’ll draw. Then again he does come with Dean Oliver’s seal of approval. I tell you what, if he has another year like this, I’ll bump him up to the top ten on next year’s list.
21. Steve Nash- I would value any defending MVP at a much higher level than the leagues GM’s will value Nash. His skills may be irreplaceable, but everyone will value other skill sets above his, which is sad because this league needs to encourage more exciting playmakers like our lovable Canadian.
Group C: Franchise Players
20. Robert Horry- Big Game Rob has played himself into the pages of NBA history, and the high end of this list. He’s actually the exception, in that I label him as having the same value as a player on which a franchise could plan its future, even though he’s too late in his career and not a strong enough overall player to be The Man on any team. The simple fact is he plays the most valuable role in basketball, and he is the best there is at the game right now. Consider the following items:
1) Of the four factors Dean Oliver identifies as critcal to the success of a basketball team, the most important is reliable shooting, especially in close games or in leagues with a high level of parity.
2) Since American basketball has become increasingly focused on “athletes” who focus most of their talent on “to the basket” type skills, specialist shooters are becoming an increasing rarity in the NBA. Something we saw demonstrated with sad certainty in the 2004 Olympics.
3) In the last twelve years (also known as a full 20% of NBA history) 11 of the twelve NBA champions have had either famed and now retired shooting specialist Steve Kerr or Robert Horry on their roster. Horry alone played on half of the teams over that stretch. Can you name any other player who’s presence on your roster says you have a 50% chance of winning the championship.
4) As of the end of this season, with Reggie Miller’s retirement and Horry adding his Finals Game 5 heroics to his resume. No one is a better clutch player in the league. NO ONE.
5) Aside from age, I cannot think of one disadvantage Horry has. He has had great chemistry on all sorts of teams, including the Soap Oprah Shaq and Kobe Lakers. He plays hurt. He’s rarely seriously injured. He has a calming presence in pressure moments on big games. He should be the single most desirable player, outside of the super stars.
6) He will never cost you the top dollars a super star will, but he will get you comparable results. If the GM’s of the league held a all inclusive draft, he would definitely go in the top ten.
Add all those up, and it says to me he’s a must have player. If only for one or two years, any team with a solid starting line-up would die to have him, and the shot at a title he brings.
An interesting debate started during the Finals about whether or not Horry belonged in the Hall of Fame. I think the evidence is clearly in Horry’s favor, but the debate was complicated, by a couple of wrinkles. First, there is no NBA hall of fame, or even a professional basketball hall of fame, The Basketball Hall of Fame is an all inclusive hall honoring player of both genders from around the world of both pro and amateur levels. This leads to the meaning of being a Hall of Famer so diluted, that no basketball fan can clearly define it any more. I don’t even think that the selection committees have a firm idea, which would explain why it seems easier for women’s college coaches to get in than memorable NBA stars. Second, in discussing the all-time greats of the NBA the arguments rarely recognize role players. Baseball and football and even hockey have much more differentiation between the demands of different players. Football fans seem to appreciate why a great lineman is as hall worthy as a great quarterback. Baseball’s hall honors the defensive specialist and relief aces right there with the great hitters. But, since all basketball players have the same basic purpose, they all get judged by the same standards, which isn’t always fair. It seems as if most basketball fans think you have to be an MVP type player to be enshrined. I like to reference the great Bill James’ proposed standards for the baseball hall of fame, where he creates different definitions for what makes a Hall of Fame player. With Horry, he qualifies on two counts. First, you could argue he is among the greatest clutch shooters of all time and during his career was only ever overshadowed by super stars. Second, he was a vital element on multiple championship teams. To me the Hall of Fame was meant to honor the players who made important contributions to their team or their league, but who may not have been an MVP, or flashy all-star. We don’t need a plaque in Cooperstown to remember who Babe Ruth was, but we might not remember Hank Greenberg without the Hall. In my opinion Robert Horry is a dead lock for the Hall of Fame. He’s the kind of player that should be honored in posterity. I just hope the voters agree.
19. Manu Ginobli- I know he’s older than you’d like your central star to be, but just look at how he can energize his teams. He is undeniably the kind of player that can turn lesser talent into a serious contender. So, the Spurs may get some team to give up one of the players listed below, just to get at the Argentinean’s intangibles.
18. Carmelo Anthony- Some people think he’s a disappointment already, because he didn’t have an instant Bird and Magic type impact. The thing is, I think he has. He has gotten to the playoffs two more times than LeBron James has, and has had better success against the West powerhouses than D-Wade. He may have some questions about his mental toughness, and off-court stability, but I think Coach Karl came into his life early enough, that, if those two stay together for a while, ‘Melo can still get on the right track. Any team with him on their roster will hold on to him for the sake of their future, even if he may not have the proven success of Dwayne, or the piggy bank quality of King James.
17. Jermaine O’Neal- He turned himself into a model player this season. When you combine the way he carried himself post brawl with his amazing on-court leadership and dedication and his already substantial talent and prowess, you have exactly the kind of player the Pacers will lean on to build their post-Reggie franchise into greatness.
16. Gilbert Arenas- He could easily bottom out in a big hurry and turn into just another head case with untapped potential, which is a shame, because he was finally learning how to really play basketball. The Wizards need him to be their future in a big way, but they have to watch out that an established team that can afford the risk, doesn’t outbid them the next time his contract is up.
15. Mike Bibby- He leads all other point guard’s in the league because he’s proven he can carry a team and he still has enough time and flexibility in him that he could still develop a multi-year project team like the Grizzlies into the real deal.
14. Ben Gordon- Oh man, once he learns how to play that way for thirty or more minutes, he’s going to become the most feared assassin in the NBA. There is no way his career doesn’t become something great.
Category B: Nearly Untouchables
13. Chauncy Billups- In case there was any doubt about who the Most Valuable Piston was, I think the NBA Finals proved it. No one else on Detroit’s roster seems able to control the tempo, create their own shot, change the momentum of a game, or make a big play without him on the court. Joe Dumars knows if he lets go of Billups he lets go of any chance of building a Pistons dynasty with the pieces he has left. I would rate him higher, but I’m a little worried, that like all the other Pistons he wouldn’t work in any other team’s chemistry.
12. Amare Stoudemire- I’m a little tired of the pundits going crazy about him. Sure he looks like he could be the most devastating offensive force in the NBA today. But come on, where was this dominance before Steve Nash shows up. I don’t believe he can make that kind of difference without a good supporting cast. The Suns are going to keep designing the offense to feed into his talents and his market value is going to keep rising, until all some other team makes some ridiculous offer for a player that will totally implode the second the world stops pampering him. Still, this list is more about perceived value than actual impact, so he has to be high up. I just want to warn whoever signs him after the Suns. You were probably promised the second coming of Wilt Chamberlain or something, but what you really got was a load of “upside” who’ value does a nose dive once he goes more than three feet from the basket. (I was considering going into a huge rant about “upside” here, but I’ve decided to let it rest at this: did anyone ever need to be reminded of MJ, Magic, or Bird’s upside? So then how can it mean so much?)
11. Allen Iverson- Even if I accept that his career is nearly over and he never delivered, he still ranks this high. Philly has nothing, without him. No wins, no ticket sales, nothing.
10. Vince Carter- Obviously his trade value shot through the roof with his performance after coming to New Jersey. I don’t attribute that to his level of play as much as the terrible passive aggressive mean streak he showed. His productivity number wise was great, but remember he was playing with Mr. I-Make-My-Teammates-Look-Way-Better-Than-They-Actually-Are, Jason Kidd. Not only was Kidd naturally going to do more for Vince than any of his old Raptor teammates, but he also was coming back from injury himself and desperate to make the playoffs. Nothing was going to stop Carter from playing monster ball after the All-Star break.
Sidebar- What’s Vince Carter’s new nickname? I might have been one of the few people south of the 49th parallel to like Air Canada, so I doubt Air Jersey will work out. If anyone has suggestions, I want to hear them.
The level of effort that Vince displayed once he was in a Nets jersey was freakish. I just assumed he lacked mental toughness, competitiveness, and ambition. In other words, I thought he was destined for the Clippers. It turns out he actually did lack motivation. I don’t know what it was he needed to get him going. It could have been he needed to live in the States, or he needed a competent front office, or another All-Star to relieve the pressure off his back. In any case I think this might have been one of the best acts of passive aggressive revenge in sports history (it still lags well behind the top pick Curse of the Bambino). He not only proved to the Toronto fans and front office that he really was a great player, and embarrassed them for ever buying a ticket to watch him play at half speed. He also set up a horrible situation for Toronto. When the last spot in the playoffs came down to the Nets and Cavaliers, it meant that the only way the Raptors could try to keep him out of the playoffs was to lie down to the Cavs on the last game of the season after they had finally gotten some sense of their identity back. That was a real gut blow to the city, which he made worse by getting into the playoffs anyway. I figure this has to rate at least 3.5 on Bill Simmons Vengeance Skill (which can be found on Espn.com’s Page 2).
9. Tracy McGrady- Kobe will have a real rival in the West from here on out. I realize he did more for the Rockets this year than Yao, which has earned him such a high spot. I give the edge to Yao though, because he has the better image (especially internationall) and has a few more years in him. If you want to flip their positions on this list you can go ahead. I just like someone who hasn’t developed yet, over someone who still has to overcome a reputation of underachievement.
8. Dirk Nowitski- Tough European + Mad Shooting Skills + Terrific Marketability + Consistent Contender = A must have for any team without a true untouchable
7. Yao Ming- As the NBA becomes an increasingly international entity, you can bet that Commissioner Stern will start transforming Yao into the biggest media sensation since Jordan. I really mean it. If Vegas offered odds on who the next Jordan would be (at least in terms of being the face of the NBA) I would make a ton of money off this. I have no doubt that Yao can carry a team on his back, I’m watching out to see if he can carry this whole misbegotten league into the Global Basketball Era.
Category A: The Untouchables
6. Dwayne Wade- The Heat would never give up D-Wade, never, ever, ever. But they wouldn’t give up Shaq either. In terms of impact on the game they’re pretty much equal, with Shaq being more dominant in the regular season, and Wade taking over as the impact guy in the playoffs. Future value is also a wash. While Shaq is definitely on the rather steep downside of his career, he’s got many more years in him before he becomes less valuable than the average center. Dwayne theoretically has many years in front of him, but shouldn’t we all be more cautious about him with the long term effects of his rib injury still unclear. So in the best debate on this list I have to rate Shaq higher simply because he’ll sell more tickets and merchandise.
5. Kevin Garnett- He has yet to disprove the widely reported theory that he can never be the best player on a great team. If his presence alone can’t guarantee you a place in the playoffs then he’s only ever going to be about as valuable as Charles Barkley. Still the opinion of anyone who ever has to play against him is that by himself he can destroy a team on any given night. I guess that just means that Sir Charles could have owned this league if he played today.
4. Kobe Bryant- I propose a two point test as to his trade value 1) Can you name three players in the league with more proven talent? 2) Can you name three players in the league who are better known? I think the answer for both of those questions is a solid no. In addition you have to put him pretty high up, because from the second Shaq left, L.A. was pretty much stuck with Kobe. Jerry Buss would become the laughingstock of the league and tick off half his fan base the instant he admitted he picked the wrong pony. Sink or swim, the Lakers have to entrust their future to Kobe. I do have to deduct some points for being a serious threat to ruin any franchise he lands on, and for his still unresolved image problems. I don’t think that actually changed his placement, because he’s still more valuable than those listed above him, and he doesn’t have much of a chance of topping out those listed below.
3. LeBron James- I’m a little tired of excuses. LeBron, you should be the number one player on this list from here until you retire no matter where you play. Get into the playoffs or the honeymoon is over.
2. Shaquille O’Neal- This is an official warning: from here on out anyone who calls Shaq the most dominating anything, will receive a punch in the kidneys from me. Shaq’s reign is over. He may still be highly valuable and the most marketable player in the league. For that I honor him with the number two rating. The most dominant title belongs to the number one player . . .
The Man
1. Tim Duncan- I could get really picky that Manu deserved to be the Finals MVP, but the fact remains that Timmy has won three titles and three finals MVP’s to match. That’s as many as Shaq and Magic, and more than everyone else save Jordan. Tim’s won championships before and after Shaq and Kobe’s three-peat. He was great before they took over, and he’s since out performed and outlasted that Lakers min-dynasty. It’ starting to look to me like Shaq took advantage of a narrow window of opportunity and some special circumstances to claim his success, while Tim Duncan is an absolute championship player. Throw in the fact that Duncan may be smarter than any other player, a better leader, and never disrupts the team’s chemistry, and I have to declare that Tim Duncan has been the best player of the post-MJ era. Whatever mojo San Antonio has keeping him there, they better pray it never wears out. It’s Duncan’s league, we’re just watching it.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Copyright v. Teachers
In considering the many weighty legal issues with which teachers must contend, I'll admit I'm at something of a loss. I had never realized the many different ways that one could violate laws invovling intellectual properity. It seems to me, that I have never had a teacher who did not violate these rules in some way. I realize that not all these violation would necessarily result in the teacher's dismissal or a law suit for the school. Yet, I also wonder if the problem has gotten so large, especially with the Internet, that the various companies and publisher who produce material to suport teachers are actually in financial jeopardy. I certainly would want to be as informed as possible, not only for my own leagal protection, but because I feel teachers have a moral obligation to serve as model citizens for their students. I believe I should do everything possible to incorporate my students into the information age. I fear that in pursuing that goal and opening up as many resources to my students as possible I am bound to run afoul of some copywrite issue. The articles we read noted that only a trained expert could really contend with all the complexities of intellectual properity laws, and I worry what might happen if I don't have such aresource available. I also feel that I will never be as informed as I should be because I am more likely to focus on complying with those laws that are meant to protect the children. I will be mindful of laws like CIPA, because as much as I value protecting copywrite, I'm goint to focus more on protecting my students from possible threats. I guess the best you can do is to stay as informed as possible, do your job, and plead ignorance in the case of any violations
The most important definite article I know
As a graduate of The Ohio State University, I am often called upon to explain why there's a "the" in the title. After all most institutions don't seem to need it to distinguish themselves, even from those with similar names. Some associate it with an aura of arrogance. It appears that OSU is overcompensating for something -in the opinion of some I have spoken to, they think the problem is that Ohio State is a lowly state school with aspirations of being among the academic elite, like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, or the University of Michigan. I can offer two explanations for why Buckeyes include the "the", but first I'll add a qualifier.
I don't think the "the" itself is really that important to anyone associated with Ohio State. We just know it's part of our official title and want to be sure no one forgets it. I have known some Ohio State students and alumni to be especially defensive about it. I have known many more ousiders to attack it. The university doesn't put it in it's acronym ( for instance their website is www.osu.edu, not www.tosu.edu) . Really, I think it's more of a target for outside criticism that source of internal pride. I can think of plenty of reasons to dislike the university and its student, familiarity breeds contempt afterall. But, are you honestly going to tell me that you HATE Ohio State and everyone attached to it, because they use an additional word in the school's title that in your opinion shouldn't be there? You're going to get bent out of shape over that? You're being so picky as to complain about something as sensible as "Those cocky Buckeyes, their motto is in Latin! Why can't they speak English like the rest of us?" So, please, don't tell me Ohio State is arrogant or out of line to use it. It's just a minor part of the school title, that sounds cool. What's so bad about that?
As far as explaining its purpose, I think there could be a historical or a cultural rationale for the annoying articles presence. The historical reason is that The Ohio State University is actually not the first state university in Ohio. It was preceded by Ohio University and Miami University (not to be confused with the University of Miami in Florida, or "The U"). So even by the time they built a college in Columbus, Ohioans had multiple places they could refer to as "the state school" Additionally, Ohio State wasn't always Ohio State, it was originally Ohio A & M. So when it got around to going by Ohio State, there really was some confusion about which state university in Ohio you were referring to. Some people don't understand this story, and, like all who suffer from a lack of historical education, assume things have always been they way they currently are. "Ohio State is really big and really famous. It's stupid that they would need a 'the' to distinguish themselves from dumb little Ohio U." Well. actually they kind of needed it back before they had the largest student population in the world, or won national championships in multiple sports. So the school's administration decided to add an extra word into the legal name and title. It doesn't do any harm, and over time the state of Ohio has come to appreciate and defend it.
This leads into the cultural explanation, which really is one of pride.Not that anyone has any pride in the word "the". It's the same pride people have in their names being pronounced correctly. Regardless of whether it was a dumb idea to place the offending word in the title in the first place, it's there now. Those of us with a stake in Ohio State would appreciate if you respected our choice to include it. We'd be just as defensive if we had decided to make our legal name "An Ohio State University", or "Ohio State University- Columbus".
When people mock the crown jewel of our state college system for having a "the" where they don't think one should be, it just feels like they're talking down to us. The word "Ohio" has taken place of the word "okie" as a handy descriptor for everything rural, redneck, and rubish in our country. I distinctly remember a Baywatch episode, where David Hasselhoff had to comfort a poor California boy heart broken that his parents were moving him to Ohio. Oh my god Ohio! Is there a worse hell imaginable for someone from New York or Los Angeles? We resent that. The "the" isn't there to represent the importance of the university. It's there to represent the importance of the state. That's right it's "The Ohio"'s State University and you better respect it. I just find it offensive that so many people would assume we don't deserve a "the" in our title. Why not? Does our ability to produce more college graduates than any other institution of the face of the Earth not merit it? Didn't we earn at least some of it in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl? Tell me one good reason why Ohio State doesn't deserve to be The Ohio State University, and I'll tell you three good reasons why we do. Anytime someone asks me, "What's with that 'the'?", I feel like there saying, "Who do you think you are?" I think I'm from Ohio and damned proud of it. If I want a "the", then by golly you are going to acknowledge the "the". Afterall as Heather Graham's character observed in the movie Bowfinger, "Just because I'm from Ohio, doesn't mean I'm 'from Ohio'."
I don't think the "the" itself is really that important to anyone associated with Ohio State. We just know it's part of our official title and want to be sure no one forgets it. I have known some Ohio State students and alumni to be especially defensive about it. I have known many more ousiders to attack it. The university doesn't put it in it's acronym ( for instance their website is www.osu.edu, not www.tosu.edu) . Really, I think it's more of a target for outside criticism that source of internal pride. I can think of plenty of reasons to dislike the university and its student, familiarity breeds contempt afterall. But, are you honestly going to tell me that you HATE Ohio State and everyone attached to it, because they use an additional word in the school's title that in your opinion shouldn't be there? You're going to get bent out of shape over that? You're being so picky as to complain about something as sensible as "Those cocky Buckeyes, their motto is in Latin! Why can't they speak English like the rest of us?" So, please, don't tell me Ohio State is arrogant or out of line to use it. It's just a minor part of the school title, that sounds cool. What's so bad about that?
As far as explaining its purpose, I think there could be a historical or a cultural rationale for the annoying articles presence. The historical reason is that The Ohio State University is actually not the first state university in Ohio. It was preceded by Ohio University and Miami University (not to be confused with the University of Miami in Florida, or "The U"). So even by the time they built a college in Columbus, Ohioans had multiple places they could refer to as "the state school" Additionally, Ohio State wasn't always Ohio State, it was originally Ohio A & M. So when it got around to going by Ohio State, there really was some confusion about which state university in Ohio you were referring to. Some people don't understand this story, and, like all who suffer from a lack of historical education, assume things have always been they way they currently are. "Ohio State is really big and really famous. It's stupid that they would need a 'the' to distinguish themselves from dumb little Ohio U." Well. actually they kind of needed it back before they had the largest student population in the world, or won national championships in multiple sports. So the school's administration decided to add an extra word into the legal name and title. It doesn't do any harm, and over time the state of Ohio has come to appreciate and defend it.
This leads into the cultural explanation, which really is one of pride.Not that anyone has any pride in the word "the". It's the same pride people have in their names being pronounced correctly. Regardless of whether it was a dumb idea to place the offending word in the title in the first place, it's there now. Those of us with a stake in Ohio State would appreciate if you respected our choice to include it. We'd be just as defensive if we had decided to make our legal name "An Ohio State University", or "Ohio State University- Columbus".
When people mock the crown jewel of our state college system for having a "the" where they don't think one should be, it just feels like they're talking down to us. The word "Ohio" has taken place of the word "okie" as a handy descriptor for everything rural, redneck, and rubish in our country. I distinctly remember a Baywatch episode, where David Hasselhoff had to comfort a poor California boy heart broken that his parents were moving him to Ohio. Oh my god Ohio! Is there a worse hell imaginable for someone from New York or Los Angeles? We resent that. The "the" isn't there to represent the importance of the university. It's there to represent the importance of the state. That's right it's "The Ohio"'s State University and you better respect it. I just find it offensive that so many people would assume we don't deserve a "the" in our title. Why not? Does our ability to produce more college graduates than any other institution of the face of the Earth not merit it? Didn't we earn at least some of it in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl? Tell me one good reason why Ohio State doesn't deserve to be The Ohio State University, and I'll tell you three good reasons why we do. Anytime someone asks me, "What's with that 'the'?", I feel like there saying, "Who do you think you are?" I think I'm from Ohio and damned proud of it. If I want a "the", then by golly you are going to acknowledge the "the". Afterall as Heather Graham's character observed in the movie Bowfinger, "Just because I'm from Ohio, doesn't mean I'm 'from Ohio'."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)