in these, the waning days of stern: 2013-2014 NBA regular season thread (part 1)

people like to tell themselves all sorts of stories about how things work

including athletes and coaches and sportswriters, athletes and coaches like to tell sportswriters things sportswriters like to hear too, and sportswriters like to tell us things we like to hear

... please don't stop, I'm enjoying and learning a lot from your good-faith, charitable, chill discussion / masterclass on how none of this stuff exists and how dumb someone could be to actually spend time considering it.

There are a lot of athletes out there who believe in intangible, meaningless things and by believing them they give them meaning and tangibility. Pete Maravich wore the same two socks in every game he played in for more than a decade, because they were his lucky socks. You can bet that if a teammate of his had burned those socks, it would have fucked up the team's chemistry pretty badly.

... please don't stop, I'm enjoying and learning a lot from your good-faith, charitable, chill discussion / masterclass on how none of this stuff exists and how dumb someone could be to actually spend time considering it.

― Call me Shitmael (CompuPost), Monday, December 23, 2013 2:12 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"stuff"

and thank you for bring so much to the table and only engaging more fully than "stuff" when sarcastically accusing someone of being mean, very fitting for a student of the religious intangibles

Two hours later and you've finally bothered to read me clearly lag∞n, I take it all back, you do care.

well it was about time for a new thread anyways

Is it really that hard to define chemistry?

nba's possible solution for tanking -- good-bye to lottery; hello to the wheel.

Is it really that hard to define chemistry?

― tsrobodo, Monday, December 23, 2013 7:03 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont think its that hard, people mean lots of different things by it and some of those things are purposely vague

like why compupost doesnt want to define it is because the whole point of chemistry in his argument is to exist in this this nebulous region called intangibles where he can be all this stuff is more important than you stats guys think

even tho if defined a lot of of the stuff would turn out to be either tangible or things that everyone agrees are important like hard work

nba's possible solution for tanking -- good-bye to lottery; hello to the wheel.

― Daniel, Esq 2, Monday, December 23, 2013 10:07 AM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah idk it obvs a pretty tuff question, this proposal has a high danger of constructing super teams, the other one described in there about using a three year average of record for the lottery maybe also does too im not sure or maybe it just prolongs teams awfulness and then gives them quicker growth, i liked the idea of having a cut off date for lottery positioning so that the last ~third of the season doesnt count for lottery purposes and teams finish strong

the worst possible solution http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/12/23/nba_draft_is_absurd_end_tanking_by_ending_drafting.html

at least the knicks would be good again i guess

there's always gonna be a faction of advanced stats inclined types who say the draft should be abolished (in any sport) because so many of them have economics backgrounds

oh cool great let the market solve it, just let the market solve everything

the problem w/ eliminating the draft is that the presence of the salary cap would essentially eliminate the free market ideals behind it

like it's great that the knicks could drop $75 million on andrew wiggins next year but they've already maxed out their cap so how would that even work. would teams be trying to get down to the salary floor just to blow 75% of their cap on a rookie?

yeah i just assumed from a quick scan that he was proposing eliminating the cap too, if he's not then that's just dumb.

i feel like in baseball it could make sense because there's already the international market and the nature of baseball prospects is so much different than basketball or even football

yeah assume youd have to eliminate the cap and max individual player salary limits too

xp yes--it is really silly that the int'l and domestic processes are completely different in baseball

there's always gonna be a faction of advanced stats inclined types who say the draft should be abolished (in any sport) because so many of them have economics backgrounds

― le goon (J0rdan S.), Monday, December 23, 2013 11:20 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it works so good in soccer where there are like 5 dominant teams across two leagues thats what we want right

they recently changed the rules in baseball to make it more like basketball and less like an open market which is good i think, big name rookies used to bully teams into not picking them by saying theyd only sign for big money and theyd drop in the draft to big spending teams, now they have a rookie wage scale like basketball and teams can pick whoevers best

also i think for football a no draft could be cool

basketball is really the one sport where i think it would be really harmful because one player is so important

yeah football especially since they have a hard salary cap and no one can figure out how to project good quarterbacks could be interesting

no salary cap and no draft is a recipe for big market domination in any sport tho

so much of football is about building up depth that i think a no draft free market system would actually exacerbate the issues of the teams like the cowboys & the http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG who are run by egomaniacs willing to spend a bunch of money on the starry superstars while neglecting things like nickel corner and right tackle

like if there was no draft this year the http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG would probably spend $80 million on jadeveon clowney and sammy watkins and still go 7-9 next year

a free market of.... 32 buyers

http://i.imgur.com/MsyYMy0.gif

me irl

lance has been wildin this year

lance in his zone

Will probably just start another thread about this "stuff" so fun rolling reg season threads don't get bogged down with sad Debate Club vibe. Succinctly, I guess I'd say that team chemistry is an amalgam of interpersonal intelligence of the players and coaching staff and their ability to interact with each other in an effective manner that supplements whatever other talents they bring to the table.

In the context of Lance and the great start he's been off to this season, I'd say that "good chemistry" is what gives Vogel the confidence to leave Lance in the game after back-to-back turnovers and let him play through Bad Lance stretches when you'd expect a coach to pull him instead. Or that Lance's passing game has blossomed this year in part due to passing up decent looks in order to give other players better looks and maybe understanding that he's more valuable to the team with 10pts/10asts rather than 16pts/6asts. Not to mention he looks 100X more jazzed on the court this season when he's dropping a few crazy dimes each game.

But like, "this nebulous region called intangibles" is nebulous because they're mostly non-quantifiable, and, even if you believe they're real and not just "people telling themselves all sorts of stories about how things work," they still coexist with really obvious stuff like shooting, handle, XOs, etc. That's what I mean by a bad-faith reading-- if your counter-argument is lol kobe/shaq won and hated each other / Jordan won and he's psychotic / etc., then you're just massively missing the point. ie, even if this stuff exists, there are a bunch of other factors at play that might be way more important.

yes all counter arguments are bad faith readings and missing the point sure ok because other factors that might be more important

fwiw you are conflating the concepts quantifiable and definable

Damn xps, How to Cock Up the Draft Even More, by Matthew Yglesias.

Both draft ideas are so fucking bad wtf

In the context of Lance and the great start he's been off to this season, I'd say that "good chemistry" is what gives Vogel the confidence to leave Lance in the game after back-to-back turnovers and let him play through Bad Lance stretches when you'd expect a coach to pull him instead. Or that Lance's passing game has blossomed this year in part due to passing up decent looks in order to give other players better looks and maybe understanding that he's more valuable to the team with 10pts/10asts rather than 16pts/6asts. Not to mention he looks 100X more jazzed on the court this season when he's dropping a few crazy dimes each game.

― Call me Shitmael (CompuPost), Monday, December 23, 2013 12:50 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so chemistry is substitution patterns and ball movement, btw this tamed bad lance narrative is really paternalistic and weird

teams often attribute it to liking each other, except when they dont, see kobe/shaq, bird/mchale

Bird and Mchale didn't really have any problems until '88 IIRC

w/e rondo and ray allen then

there's always gonna be a faction of advanced stats inclined types who say the draft should be abolished (in any sport) because so many of them have economics backgrounds

― le goon (J0rdan S.), Monday, December 23, 2013 11:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, although I kinda feel them since the whole concept of drafting from a business industry standpoint is weird.

But so is almost every hallmark of sport. There's no championship for CEO's to win,

Oh totally

anyway compupost i think what you see is when you have to actually flesh out a little what these treasured intangibles are and how they relate to the like actual game of basketball is your analytical/intangibles binary starts to crumble, do you think everyone else itt thinks that ball movement is bad that you should have selfish chuckers or that substitution patterns or developing players is unimportant, or to take it a step further up the intangibles latter that personal relationships on a team dont matter

when you choose to just call that stuff intangibles its very handwavy and lazy, and then to claim that others are really underrating you are only left with the question underrating what

the other reason intangibles are suspect is that you actually have very little to no access to the information necessary to judge them, youre not in the lockerroom, youre just left to read bs articles about leadership and speeches and judge on court body language and listen to teams promotional claims that they really care a lot about character, there incentive for all parties involved to tell the stories that the fans want to hear

its funny cause when you actually do see behind the scenes stuff with teams 99% of it is basketball stuff, practicing watching film w/e looking at diagrams, theyre just professionals going about their business, then occasionally theres a coach yelling about winning while the players who have heard this speech thousands of times over their lives catch their breath

it's not that intangibles aren't important but that it's pretty hard for people on the outside to evaluate w/ any real level of significance that it's kind of pointless to discuss as it pertains to an individual or even really a team

im much more open to the team dynamic chemistry type of arguments about intangibles, especially on court chemistry, then i think once youre winning its pretty easy to like each other and be happy, winning feels really good, but again its pretty hard to get good information past the on court level where you can observe team basketball chemistry with good ball movement and whatnot

im much more suspicious of the whole enterprise at the individual level, like the idea that some players are great leaders, they might be great leaders with the right group of players and coaches where on another team theyre just a blowhard malcontent, eg kg presided over some pretty dysfunctional teams in minny, then once he got to boston the story was that everyone played hard because he did, obvs you had a group of players who were open to the idea of playing hard which is the important part

xp yes, and also intangibles are always used to support some kind of narrative that someone wanted to exist in the first place

then occasionally theres a coach yelling about winning while the players who have heard this speech thousands of times over their lives catch their breath

― lag∞n, Monday, December 23, 2013 1:22 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my wife who doesn't pay attention to sports at all always perks up and gets irritated at mic'd up huddles because she thinks these speeches make coaches seem so dumb

yea theyre totally rote, no one cares