See, traditionally, in full-court basketball, when you get a rebound, your team now has possession and you can advance the ball going the other way to try to score. Certain half-court games like 1-on-1, 3-on-3 or even 21 may have different rules where you have to clear the ball past the foul line or even the three-point line before you can try to score, but most — if not all — full-court, 5-on-5 games are set up so that you are only required to take the ball out of bounds after a made basketball. The NBA, in particular, is very clear about this fact. They have like a Mopey Dick-length book explaining it and everything.
Yet, here’s JR Smith, catching an airball and then stepping out-of-bounds to inbound the ball anyway.
How do the kids say it these days? “You’re doing it wrong.” Yeah. That. Whatever.
And in actual basketball news (I swear we will start doing that around these parts before too much longer), here’s Tyreke’s game winner from later in the very same evening. Great shot. Even greater pit stains on whichever Maloof brother that is cheering. (h/t @jose3030)
Kevin Arnovitz of ESPN’s TrueHoop and ClipperBlog talks Western Conference NBA with us today for the long-awaited Talking About Practice: Episode 4.
Kevin just saw his Clippers get smacked around by the Rockets on Wednesday night, so we start with Houston and that inevitably leads into some talk about efficiency and advanced stats. But we get back to talking about more general Western Conference stuff before long, focusing on the Lakers, Nuggets, Mavs and, of course, the Clippers. The stylistic reconstruction that has revived Al Thornton’s career is discussed and we analyze this as something that may fit into the ad-hoc termed “Josh Smith Corollary” that centers around a player forgoing the things on the court that he doesn’t do well and, instead, increasing his utility and efficiency to the team by concentrating on the things he does do well. Josh Smith has famously sworn off of three-point shots this season, and Kevin has seen a similar change in Thornton. We speculate as to whether other guys like Carlos Boozer are or can benefit from such self-realization.
We also chat about ESPN’s TrueHoop Network. Given my involvement in that whole thing via Eight Points, Nine Seconds, I’m admittedly not the best person to be asking Kevin about this stuff. But it is a big topic and an intriguing development in not just NBA circles but in the evolution of the sports blogosphere at large, as anyone who attended either of the Blogs With Balls sports blogging conferences this year can attest to.
And for all you 80s sitcom fans, we also talk for a solid 10 minutes about Benson. Not sure how that happened, but we were able to come to at least one thrilling revelation. I’m not going to spoil the amazing payoff that will surely be sweeping the collective mind of America come this afternoon, but let’s just say that one of the world’s great mysteries has been solved.
I would also be remiss if I failed to give a shout out to our boy AI. (That’s what it’s called in “radio,” right? A “shout out”?) There would be no Talking About Practice without you, Mr. Answer, and, frankly, I wasn’t ready for an NBA without you either.
I was rather impressed by Portland on Friday night. They looked really, really good.
Brandon Roy is just an absolute surgeon. We already knew this, but it bears repeating over and over and over again. Moreover, if you combined LaMarcus Aldridge and Greg Oden’s skill sets together into a single player, that guy might be First Team All-NBA. Ok, that’s probably an exaggeration, but Oden’s defense is already that for real and, actually, even his post moves/jump hooks looked pretty impressive the other night. (I wrote a little more about that while giving Oden a Lion Face over at Hardwood Paroxysm yesterday. I’m biased, but I’m a big fan of both that Lion Face/Lemon Face series as well as Trey Kerby’s Morning Bells over at HP. Good place to check out every morning — after stopping by BTPH, obviously.)
Yet, more so than having an amazing “Big 3″ or whatever other shallow distinction people want to dub the star-studded rosters of teams like the Celtics and Lakers, the Blazers just have a whole corral full of thoroughbreds. I’m not positive that the numbers bear this out, but, qualitatively, there seems to be almost no drop off when they go to the bench. They remain just as potent offensively and, in some ways, get better. It’s like a hockey team that just keeps running out quality guys. After Brandon, Greg and LaMarcus, it doesn’t really matter whether the other guys are Miller, Pryzbilla, Outlaw, Blake, Rudy, Martell or Bayless (and, remember, Nic Batum isn’t even playing until after the All-Star break). They lose very little, if anything.
And because all their wings are fairly similar stylistically, and because Oden and Pryzbilla are fairly interchangeable, the only real difference is that they lose a post threat when LaMarcus is out, and they lose a PG who can hit threes when Miller replaces Blake. Obviously, having different looks to throw at other teams is a good thing though, so the advantages gained by going with a lineup of something like Miller/Rudy/Roy/Outlaw/Aldridge is a great thing to have, too.
Ultimately, Portland just has a whole roster full of ballers. I really enjoy watching them. And they’re gonna be a problem in the West all year, perhaps even giving the recently-terrible-playing Nuggets a run for the Northwest Division title.
On the other hand, I was also really impressed with the Jazz on Thursday — and they’re the same team that then lost to the Sacramento Kings (without Kevin Martin, no less) at home on Saturday night.
So, perhaps, the Spurs just aren’t that good right now? I’m not yet ready to say anything is really wrong at their core, obviously, and I will always maintain that the only thing more pointless than preseason results are November results. But they certainly aren’t playing well. And seeing Tony Parker hurt his ankle on Friday — fresh off his ankle issues last season — starts to make me think “Oh, no. So it’s not just Manu and Duncan’s health we have to worry about this season but Frenchie, too?”
They have way too much talent to not be a factor out West, of course, but when looking at their front court in particular, it’s hard to believe they have the size to bang in the Playoffs with the likes of Pau/Bynum or Nene/Kenyon — and, perhaps, even Oden/Aldridge. In the last five years, Timmy has usually had a Rasho Nesterovic or Nazr Mohammed-type guy alongside him to help absorb the sizable defensive burdens of playing high-level post defense. Sure, no one is ever going to single out Rasho or Nazr as major difference-makers on those Spurs teams, but they were both high-level defenders for Coach Popovich, and there is no one on the current roster, with the possible exception of an in-my-eyes-completely-washed-up Theo Ratliff, that can even fill that “secondary big body banger” role beside an increasingly aged-looking Tim Duncan. I really think they need that guy and, no, Matt Bonner is not that guy. And as much as I like the Antonio McDyess pick up, he is not that guy anymore either, if he ever was.
It doesn’t need to be anyone high-profile. Just someone to bang with Nene for 15 minutes a night and battle with Bynum on the block. Timmy can’t be expected to do that for 30 minutes per night anymore — at least not if you still expect him to have the energy to hit his patented, back-breaking bank shots in the final three minutes of close Playoff games. I’ll always remember a great quote from Charles Barkley after Nazr Mohammed, who was having a pretty damn good year at the time in New York, was traded from the Knicks to the Spurs: “Isiah is building a championship team — too bad it’s in San Antonio.” I think they need to make a similar, under-the-radar, spackling-up-the-holes-in-the-roster move this year.
(We’ll explore that “spackle” concept more down the road. A lot of teams are too slow to identify that one little thing they need to fix their weakness. Often, it’s just a small thing, but, more often, teams make some big, unnecessarily radical move that fixes some things but creates new issues. Look for that spackle, GMs.)
Anyway, I’ll be watching the Spurs closely to see how this plays out, and all this is something I had the pleasure of discussing with my 8th Seed brethren Jeff Garcia and Michael De Leon on Friday night after the Spurs loss to Portland. Check the video below from their live post-game SpursCast where I joined them to offer my two cents.
I come on at the 23:30 mark. Some minor technical difficulties pop up right as I’m coming on, but we fight through it and chat for 20 minutes or so.
* Alright. I’ve had just about enough of this. Brandon Roy needs a nickname. Neither his first nor last name work on their own and I’m done writing out the whole thing. I’ve waited and waited, internets, but you’ve given me nothing to work with here. You’ve offered no good options. So he’s now “Daggers.” Me and Capital_T were unsuccessfully looking for a guy to call this anyway, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seem many bigger daggers than that one he hit against the Rockets last year. I mean, the purity with which that ball went through the net was just like someone getting stabbed. It’s official. Done and done. Put it on the board.
Been caught up in a few things that you’ll hear more about soon, so that’s the delay in the postcard stuff. I’ll be back on that in a minute, even if they’ll be more “team outlooks” at this point than previews. Same difference. Plus, they will still be free to look at.
Might get something else up here today or might not.
In the meantime, here’s where else you can find me:
Basketball is adversarial. One team’s success necessarily comes at the expense of another’s.
The inescapable reality that one team will win and another will lose might naturally compel a team to select an identity well suited for regular conflict. Raptors that will eviscerate you. Grizzlies that will gouge out your eyes and rip off your limbs. Warriors that will, uh, be good at war on you. Bullets that will be shot into you. Wizards that will cast spells and speak with British accents. (Don’t front: Merlin and Gandalf are kind of badass, even if Harry Potter sucks.) Hornets that sting. Bulls that stampede. Rockets that explode.
Some teams get it. Other teams don’t. Denver is one of them.
Nuggets, after all, are supposed to be like nuggets of gold. (I think.) That’s not scaring anyone — unless the team plans on throwing gold at its opponents, which would be colossally stupid and exorbitantly expensive. Rather than girding for battle, the Nuggets might prefer running for the hills. Literally. Just look at that logo. Sure, the colors are cool, especially when the team rocks those not-quite-navy, third-color joints with the gold lettering and the baby-blue trim. And yes, that light blue nicely sets in relief all of the crazy tattoos. But that said, Denver’s logo conveys the message, “We’d rather be panning for gold in the Rockies, whether or not that’s even possible at this point.” In effect, these are the people whom the Nuggets consider peers. Not so intimidating. And, to be frank, the franchise has a history of this.
The Denver logo seems like more of a tourism ad or an attempt at lifestyle branding than a basketball crest. The Denver lifestyle: Enjoy the snow, live all glossy and flossy, and maybe shoot some hoops. Just don’t harsh the mellow.
If there were ever another Die Hard movie, it could likely be set among the cartoonishly inviting peaks of the Nuggets’ logo. There would surely be a moment when John McClane, imperiled by terrorists and a devastating avalanche, found time to complain, “Come out to the slopes, we’ll get together, have a few laughs….”
That’s good for a movie, but not for basketball. The Nuggets logo really fails a utilitarian analysis. It is pretty, though. I don’t even ski, and it makes me want to be out there, in the crisp air with the beautiful people and their overpriced outdoorsman gear.
Welcome to Colorado: We have mountains. They sure are … mountainous. Gold? No, we no longer have any gold. Wait. Where are you going? Have you heard about the snow?
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