The Global Hook

2011-07-28T14:04:00.001-07:00

...with uncanny accuracy. How Arkansas native Marcus Brown took over Europe http://bit.ly/pLy9OH

2011-07-12T13:11:00.001-07:00

http://sync.arkansasonline.com/news/2011/jul/12/soccers-long-term-goals/

Soccer, long the sport of choice among immigrants to the United States, has developed into the game through which the American masses can feel most unapologetically nationalistic. Other sports used to serve this function.

Soccer, long the sport of choice among immigrants to the United States, has developed into the game through which the American masses can feel most unapologetically nationalistic. Other sports used to serve this function.

In 1936, America kicked the world’s ass through Jesse Owens, the great track and field star who won multiple golds at the Berlin Olympics. Around the same time, tens of millions followed every punch heavyweight boxer Joe Louis landed on the German Max Schmeling to solidify his world champion standing.

In 1980, it was the “Miracle on Ice,” in which amateur Americans defeated the mighty Soviet professionals to make the Winter Olympics title match. http://bit.ly/oe3o4l

2011-06-23T06:21:00.001-07:00

Known to teammates as the "Flea," Lionel Messi has grown into the world's biggest soccer star http://bit.ly/jfZadp

Christian Laettner talks Pelphrey, Anderson, new LR pro team

2011-05-10T08:59:00.001-07:00

I caught up with him at Sidney Moncrief's alma mater

Amplify’d from www.arkansasonline.com

LITTLE ROCK — No other Dream Teamer ran the court with Christian Laettner on Saturday morning at Little Rock’s Hall High School.

No Michael Jordan, no Larry Bird or Magic Johnson from the U.S. national team that bedazzled the world while steamrolling to a gold medal in the 1992 Olympic basketball tournament.

No one near that good.

Instead, Laettner, the youngest player on that iconic collection of talent, served as a hoops sage this weekend for a group of basketball players - and a general manager - with dreams all their own.

For the past year, Laettner has run his own basketball academy business - a return to the game after stepping away following his 2005 retirement from a 13-year NBA career. The academy is based near his home in Jacksonville, Fla., where he recently met Bernard Brown, president of a new minor league pro basketball team in Little Rock.
Read more at www.arkansasonline.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/iKbyVo

Calcium deposit in Right Calf 1, Allen Iverson 0

2011-02-22T18:56:00.001-08:00

URL: http://nba.fanhouse.com/2011/02/01/turkish-team-signs-d...

Future Hall-of-Famer's spot on Turkish team taken by D-Leaguer who no longer reps "Mad Ants" franchise

See this Amp at http://aol.it/gVVKgA

The Most Interesting Man in the NBA

2011-01-28T21:49:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T28HTBb3EOk&feature=play...

Rudy Gay once missed a dunk, just to find out what it felt like.

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hgeIQS

Sister’s keepers

2011-01-26T16:42:00.001-08:00

http://sync.arkansasonline.com/news/2011/jan/25/sisters-keepers/

Lone woman in North Little Rock men’s basketball league banks on family support.

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hADENC

Attention Turns to the Dangers of Distracted Pedestrians - NYTimes.com

2011-01-26T16:39:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26runners.html?_r=...

See this Amp at http://nyti.ms/gVb4Pa

SIX Arkansas-born NBA players in NBA now, actually. Most since in the mid-80s..

2011-01-15T17:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.basketball-reference.com/friv/high_schools.cgi?coun...

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hkIi9L

Arkansas' most obscure NBA player

2011-01-15T15:38:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700070774/Utah-Jazz-...

Turns out there's five Arkansans currently in the League. Ya'll know about Joe, D-Fish and Ronnie. Maybe James Anderson too. But likely not this guy -

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/dZfOsq

Blake Griffin posterized formerly anonymous collection of hard consonants

2011-01-09T22:20:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-blake-griffin-20110...

Love this piece b/c it:

1) shows how much higher Blake can jump off one leg than two (a head's worth)

2) describes Timofey Mozgov as "a formerly anonymous collection of hard consonants who plays for New York"

3) sifts gold from Ron Artest's mouth: "I hope he dunks on me. Would you buy that poster? I'd buy it and tell him to sign it."

See this Amp at http://lat.ms/f3oiX0,0,7072038.story?page=3&utm_medium=feed&track=rss&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20latimes%2Fsports%20%28L.A.%20Times%20-%20Sports%29&utm_source=feedburner

Is Arkansas "stroke belt"'s buckle?

2010-12-23T21:26:00.001-08:00

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40795126/ns/health-diet_and...

Lord please don't let that phrase prosper...

See this Amp at http://on.msnbc.com/hwIUX4

Range from the Bench

2010-12-16T08:44:00.003-08:00

http://sync.arkansasonline.com/news/2010/dec/14/back-fight/

Scotty Thurman helps steer UA program in new gig:

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hYo3bd

Range from the Bench

2010-12-16T08:44:00.001-08:00

http://sync.arkansasonline.com/news/2010/dec/14/back-fight/

Scotty Thurman helps steer UA program in new gig:

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/hYo3bd

Why Arkansas should beat LSU on Saturday

2010-11-24T09:38:00.001-08:00

http://sync.arkansasonline.com/news/2010/nov/23/big-game-break...

Stats breakdown from games in which Hogs and Tigers played common foes this season

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/gCZ8Qj

Most spectacular first two points in NBA history?

2010-10-28T11:18:00.001-07:00

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq0i6Qr11iw&feature=play...

I wish to Mose Malone there was a way to verify it was, but until then I must be content seeing a player who's been described as a "dump truck on a trampoline" make his long-awaited NBA splash.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/e59l

New World (basketball) Order Draws Nearer

2010-10-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

Word from SLAM.com today is that the D-League will soon implement FIBA goaltending rules, meaning players will be able to swat the ball off the rim any time after it's touched the rim.

Previously the league operated under NBA rules, where players had to avoid the ball if it was in an "invisible cylinder" over the rim whenever the ball was directly over the basket.

NBDL brass made the move ostensibly to juice up the game with more jumping sequences showing off the players' world-class athleticism. The league will crunch reams of data to determine how the rule change affects game tempo - and whether fans like it. That information, in turn, should determine whether the NBA decides to adopt the rule down the line.

On the surface, this is one more step toward a global game. FIBA, for its part, is reaching out, too. The world's governing body for basketball is this season abandoning the trapezoid lane in favor of an NBA-sized rectangular lane, and moving the 3-point line back by a half-meter (19½ inches) from its current distance of 20 feet, 6.1 inches.

But this change could also help the U.S. team in future FIBA international tournaments if some season down the line NBA players were to go own strike as they did in 1998-99. In the preceding summer, the labor disputes forced Team USA had to cobble together a team of CBA, college and international players for the 1998 FIBA World Championship.

They did surprisingly well by going 7-2 and capturing the bronze medal, but it's safe to assume that such a squad wouldn't have fared quite as well today given the increased strength of world competition.

If such a labor dispute were to again afflict Team USA - whether it be during the Worlds, Olympics or FIBA Americas - it would likely cobble together international players and NBDL stars, who will soon be more accustomed to international rules.

2010-09-25T07:55:00.001-07:00

Turns out there's a veritable tent city a-bornin' outside the UA-Fayetteville's stadium for the big Arkansas-Alabama game. My sister-in-law just told me those suckers extend to Bud Walton, which has to set some kind of local record for third-world nation emulation spurred by a decidedly first world nation past time. http://bit.ly/ahf5xc http://bit.ly/axUaT0

The Global Hook: "Like Cameron Indoor Stadium Times Five"

2010-09-12T13:28:00.001-07:00

URL: http://theglobalhook.blogspot.com/2010/09/like-cameron-...

Tonight would not be a golden one for Turkey, but argentine ain't bad. Here's a photo of last night, when anything seemed possible in this cauldron of red and white partison fireworks known as Sinan Erdem Dome.

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bjh9WP

"Like Cameron Indoor Stadium Times 5"

2010-09-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

That's how ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla described the Sinan Erdem Dome here in Istanbul.

And that was how it felt last night during one of the memorable games I've ever experienced. Fortune smiled on Turkey to allow it to escape with an 83-82 win against Serbia and head to the gold medal game against U.S.

This picture, taken about three minutes after the buzzer, is from the top of press row and captures the Turkish team in mid-embrace below.

Turkey beats Serbia 83-82 to reach world final - NBA- nbcsports.msnbc.com

2010-09-11T18:48:00.001-07:00

URL: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/39121294/ns/sports-nba/

This was the most emotional game I've ever attended and/or written about

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/92emmy

At Team USA's practices, did I peer into the untarnished soul of the anti-Lebron?

2010-09-07T02:01:00.001-07:00

Here's an interesting take by Slate's Tommy Craggs posing Kevin Durant as LeBron's antithesis.

It's easy to be drawn into this comparison.

I spoke to Durant for about 10 minutes a couple of days ago at practice and he came across as an easy-going kid. He seems to have no problems playing in a small market like OKC, and hadn't yet even walked down Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul's main entertainment street - where he could see an image of himself on the front window of a Nike store. Hell, dude's mom has even come over to visit.

It doesn't matter to me whether he's an anti-LeBron or not. What matters to me is that he plays beautiful basketball, and he seems to be a good enough guy not to give the sport a bad name. Sure, this Anakin still has time to go Darth Vader on us, but that will be harder in OKC.

The reader reaction below is also interesting b/c in a perfect world journalists would have time to talk to a myriad sources for each piece. But that's not Slate's role. Its writers take snapshots of how American culture on the whole is reacting to a certain subject at a certain time - they don't spend time talking directly to sources. It's commentary, not reporting.

And talking to these Team USA athlete takes more time than a simple phone call.

My colleagues and I spent about 2.5-3 hours round trip sitting in a taxi going to their practices in a club team gym across the Euro side of Istanbul. From that, we had time for about 20-30 minutes of conversation. Part of that delay was due to the political rallies noted in the previous post.

Amplify’d from www.slate.com

Durant has sold himself well, or at least has given of himself so little that the very idea of his reticence could be fashioned into a cudgel against the Very Bad Thing of the day—ego run amok. More than anything, Durant offers the moralists a clean bank shot at LeBron and his cohort. He will remain useful in this role for a time, and then one day he'll go and do some Very Bad Thing and shatter all our precious illusions.

Here's an idea for Mr. Craggs: talk to the person you're writing about. Spend some time with him. Failing that, read stuff by people who have. Many of those sports journalists who are fawning over Kevin Durant and his humility are ones who have met and interviewed him. Some have even gone to his home in Oklahoma City and seen how he interacts with his neighbors and teammates. Invariably they come away from that experience talking about how great a guy he is. Read more at www.slate.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/b9tnkM

Turkish political rally; No such rally for France

2010-09-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

The bottom two photos show just how vibrant Turkish democracy is. They were taken of a political rally held by proponents of changes to Turkey's constitution to voted on in an upcoming referendum. Hence, the signs reading "evet," which means "yes" in Turkish.

The top photos are of the first Turkish national team's first basketball game ever held at the new 15,500-person Sinan Erdem Dome in Istanbul. This arena is where all the coming Worlds elimination games will be held, and is considered the crown jewel of Turkish basketball.

It got pretty loud, but could get louder. I imagine the place could have fit about 1,000 more people. I got chills during the pregame, but I haven't attended these games as long as ESPN's Chris Sheridan.

He told me at the pool today that the last time he'd gotten the chills at an international basketball game was the U.S.'s victory over Spain in the gold medal game of the 2008 Olympics.

Turkey controlled the game from start to finish, winning 95-77.

Back in Istanbul again: This Time for FIBA Worlds

2010-09-03T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here's my home for the next week - Ibis Hotel in Istanbul. As you can see from the window photo, I can just barely make out the Bosphorous Strait. Still, I can open my window up and breath some of that fresh air in - which more than makes up for the obstructed view.

This hotel's sweet, but cut off from the rest of the world by a six-lane highway in front of it, and a lake behind it. And there are no sidewalks around it to walk on.

Good for taxi business; bad for budget-conscious, ambulophilic freelancers.

Team USA's foes fielding B teams too?

2010-09-03T08:02:00.001-07:00

Here's a nice list of the major international players missing out on the FIBA Worlds. I like how Rosen threw New Zealander Sean Marks into the bunch. Despite his NBA pedigree, I don't think the older, slower guy would help out the Kiwis that much. They already have a veteran sharpshooting big in Pero Cameron, and besides the shooting of Kirk Penney (the tournament's second-leading scorer) I've found the bouncy, scrappy play of undersized bigs Thomas Abercrombie, Mika Vukona and Casey Frank (all in the 6-6 to 6-8 range) to be the major reason why the Kiwis have advanced to the knockout rounds.

Amplify’d from msn.foxsports.com

Still, besides their awesome upside, Team USA also has several other reasons why they are likely to win the last game of the tournament. Just consider the respective absences of Yao Ming, Dirk Nowitzki, Manu Ginobili, Andres Nocioni, Tony Parker, Andrew Bogut, Sean Marks, Jose Calderon, Pau Gasol, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Chris Kaman, Andrei Kirilenko, Nene, Steve Nash, Rasho Nesterovic, Mehmet Okur, Mickael Pietrus, Darius Songalia, Beno Udrih, Sasha Vujacic, and Rodrigue Beaubois.

In other words, if Team USA is deemed to be the NBA’s B (or even C) team, then most of the other countries still in the mix are similarly short-handed.
Read more at msn.foxsports.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bw41Cy

Izmir's Goup D Press Room, Tall Blacks really have some open hips

2010-09-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

Above is the press room in Izmir, site of Group D at these basketball world championships. It's the cauldron that froths with the activity journalists from Spain, Lithuania, France, New Zealand and Canada every night. In the foreground, three of my Canadian reporter friends powwow.

Joseph Campbell would have a field day with this.

It's a scene from press row before New Zealand's match against Canada yesterday. The Kiwi players, known as the Tall Blacks, are performing a a traditional Haka dance.

The cheery chorus begins:

"'Tis Death

'Tis Death

'Tis Life, 'Tis Life

'Tis Death, 'Tis Death

'Tis Life, 'Tis Life

"This is the man, the fierce powerful man."

No kidding, aboriginal anthem.

The fierce powerful men chanting your words knocked Canada out of the tournament that night.

Untitled

2010-09-01T15:16:00.001-07:00

I had fun writing this one. You would, too, if you had to sit among thousands of Lithuanian fans night after night:

Amplify’d from sports.yahoo.com

continued

At times, it seemed as if all the basketball-crazed Baltic country’s
faithful made it to Halkapinar Arena for this one. They hung at least 20 flags
from the rafters, and brought out about 10 more to wave during the breaks.
Behind one basket, a section of the fans periodically unfurled a giant
rectangular swathe of green, yellow and red-colored cloth that blocked the sight
of at least 80 people.

Kleiza took a half-court pass on a fast break to dunk with 4:42 left in the
quarter, giving Lithuania a 44-35 lead and sending a group of fans wearing
yellow wigs and green smiley-face T-shirts to their feet.
Read more at sports.yahoo.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/coFQs1

2010-08-27T15:39:00.001-07:00

IZMIR - The bottom two pics show the Spanish team getting some rock star treatment from Spaniard media and Turkish onlookers during practice. The top pic is Team Spain's practice-ending ritual in which players fires up three-point attempts from half-court. A Spanish radio reporter told me they often put money on it. I don't doubt that; After missing, Ricky Rubio booted one ball nearly to the ceiling and into the bleachers. Maybe he'd lost a wager on the right to endorse McDonalds' .

Team Canada looking better

2010-08-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

Miss Jamaica

Try these random factoid pants on for size: Turns out Tonya Phillipps, Team Canada's manager and spokesperson, is the first cousin of Miss Jamaica - who (yawn) happens to have JUST PLACED SECOND IN THE MISS UNIVERSE CONTEST.

Why Do the British Not Care About Basketball?

2010-08-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

Why Do the British Stink at Basketball? - WSJ.com

This article brings up an interesting reason why basketball hasn't gained more traction in the UK: "the country's surplus of outdoor greenspace. Even in densely populated London there are enough open patches of ground to throw down a couple of sweatshirts as goalposts and get a soccer game going. The outdoor basketball courts that are common in American cityscapes and suburbs are, in this country, seen as an extravagance."

BTW, Jarrett Hart, the British national team member I've written about in previous posts, isn't playing for UK this summer. He recently got married.

Strong Mandibles

2010-08-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

Carter, Weis, 2000: I still don't understand how most of the spectators in the background of this photo keep their mandibles from dropping.

2000 Summer Olympics - Gold Medal - Team USA Since 1992 - Photos - SI.com

International Smorgasbord between Thunder and Grizz

2010-02-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm still alive. Things have been - shall we say - busy.
Now a married man, and a full-time freelancer to boot, I'm once again looking to get back into the bloggin' swing of things.
Still, I've written a few apropos articles in recent months, but wasn't able to post them ....... until now.

I went to a Thunder-Grizz game in December and wrote about some of the young foreign players permeating that scene in an article for SLAM. So, here's the courtside low-down on Thabeet, Thabo, Serge Ibaka, M. Gasol et al.
Drink it in.

More Jarrett Hart

2009-10-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

I was able to publish this article in SLAM Online about Hart's exploits in the EuroCup.

Here's another article I wrote for Sync about Joe Johnson's prep teammate.

Interview with Jarrett Hart of British National Team

2009-09-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the infrequent postings as of late. I've been helping with a weekly Arkansas sports column and haven't had the time for many posts. My most recent column, however, dovetails perfectly with both Arkansas sports and Euro basketball. Jarrett Hart, a classmate of mine from LR Central, is a pro basketball player playing for a team in Cyprus and for the British National Team....

With 4:58 left in a EuroBasket tournament game last week against the mighty Spanish national basketball team, Great Britain's Jarrett Hart received a pass at the top of the arc and let fly a three-point attempt.

The Little Rock native drained it, the crowd erupted, and for a second the tides of fate seemed ready to sweep the British onto the unlikeliest of shores. Leading 73-69, Great Britain, a neophyte to the world basketball scene, was about to eliminate Spain, the reigning FIBA world champion, from the European Championships' first round in what an enthused ESPN commentator declared would be "the greatest upset in international basketball history."

Not bad for a team that didn't even exist four years ago.

Hart, a dual citizen who teamed with Joe Johnson to lead Little Rock Central High to a 1999 state championship, is a guard for Great Britain's national team, which in 2006 was formed from three countries in preparation of the 2012 London Olympics.

Check out more here.

The Commish Does Harlem

2009-08-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

NBA Commissioner David Stern knows how to schmooze. That's no pejorative either - the man's just super business saavy and people smart. I remember meeting him in Istanbul at a preseason game where, with that ever-present smirk, he created instant banter with jokes about how bad my Turkish was, though he knew none himself. And, man oh man, can he offer a warm hand to shake.

Stern goes at it again in the video below, this time at Mosaic Cuts Unisex barbershop in the heart of Harlem. Watch him deftly deal with all questions flung his way. Despite youtube comments, I don't think the questions were prepared - queries on the dress code, age limit and court brawls should be pretty commonplace to him by now.

One of the more interesting sidebars - and apropos to the article I wrote in the previous post - deals with the possibility of talented players leaving to Europe, never to return/or enter the NBA. Stern responds that 1) With more than $2 billion shunted to players' pockets last year, the NBA is too efficient a money-making machine to worry about about mass defections to Europe and 2) With the likes of superstar imports Yao, Nowitzki, Parker, Gasol etc., foreign leagues are worrying more about the NBA siphoning their talent than the other way around.

Fair points, Stern, that may hold up well enough in the short term. But two emergent forces may turn, or at least stem, the tide: 1) the accelerated growth of GDP and basketball interest in China, and to a lesser extent south Mediterranean nations, will generate higher salaries to lure NBA players for longer and 2) More mid-tier NBA players (like Josh Childress or Fred Jones) may begin steering their careers to the Olde World because they, unlike superstars or marginal players, can lock multi-year, multi-million contracts eclipsing anything they could make stateside.

Going Global

2009-08-20T05:56:00.000-07:00

Going global

At what price do you give up your youth, or your child’s youth? Well, the answer is: millions . . . and counting

By Evin Demirel

Sunday, August 9, 2009

LITTLE ROCK — At first, it seems like every Arkansas sports fan’s dream of a basketball player: a homegrown 6-foot-9, 230-pound omnipositional juggernaut.

At only 16, Arkansas’ very own LeBron James is tearing up hardwood from Texarkana to Jonesboro, Pine Bluff to Bentonville, topping 30 points, 10 rebounds and 5 assists a game. He owns the summer circuit.

College recruiters flock to the Natural State to glimpse this sophomore gem, who snares accolades as easily as rebounds. In chorus, coaches and talent scouts from ESPN to Rivals.com praise the kid as the best in state history, hailing him as a No. 1 NBA draft pick one day.

Hog fans hope that young Johnnie Baller, like state prep legends Sidney Moncrief,Corliss Williamson and Joe Johnson before him, will soon choose the state’s ne plus ultra Arkansas Razorbacks over the North Carolinas, Connecticuts and Kentuckys.

Then the others come, from across the oceans, and the zoom lens suddenly expands.

The bidding begins with the Greeks, who feature a Euroleague championship team owned by the cavernously pocketed Angelopolous brothers. They’re joined by the Italians, then the Spaniards, who claim the world’s second-best domestic league. The Chinese, whose estimated 300 million basketball fans nearly surpasses the U.S.’s population, make an offer, too.

The foreigners’ siren songs are sweet: a three-year contract for $5 million, a subsidized car and apartment, agent’s fees paid, accommodations for two relatives, and the cosmopolitan charms of Athens, Rome, Barcelona or Shanghai. Razorback Nation grits its teeth. Those high Hog hopes are beginning to dim.

This scenario isn’t so far-fetched.

A vanguard of talented players are leaving high school earlier and earlier to make their living, and sharpen their game, playing basketball overseas. How did this trend develop, and how could it affect secondary education inthis country as more prep players sign on?

Will parents of precocious ballplayers start grooming their children to begin their pro careers even before high school graduation?In late July, Latavious Williams, a Mississippi native who starred at a suburban high school in Houston, withdrew his commitment to the University of Memphis to play overseas, possibly in Italy or China.

In California, ever the trend-setter, two of that state’s finest prep players, Brandon Jennings and Jeremy Tyler, decided to bypass college and play professional basketball abroad. Jennings, a quicksilver point guard, played off the bench last season for an Italian team in the top-notch Euroleague, against NBA veterans and Olympic champions.

The Milwaukee Bucks chose him with the 10th pick in the recent NBA draft. “I think more kids should do it, just to step out of their comfort zone,” the Los Angeles native told the New York Times.

“We didn’t have no driers, so we had to hang our clothes for about two days,” he said.

“The food was different.”

Tyler seeks a similar experience. At 6-foot-10, he exerted such dominance in high school in San Diego that he feared his game had stagnated.

In late April, Tyler and his family decided to pull him out of high school so that he can hone his game abroad in preparationfor the 2011 NBA Draft.

“If you’re really focused on getting better, you go play pro somewhere,” Tyler, then 17, told the Times. “Pro guys will get you way better than playing against college guys.” He will likely play in Israel, which has a Euroleague team.

Tyler made his decision before a planned trip to Little Rock to the play with his amateur youth team in the Real Deal in the Rock, one of the nation’s largest tournaments for high-school players. But Tyler, who soon started individual workouts after his decision, didn’t show up at the 400-team, 48-venue tournament.

European scouts did, however. According to the tournament’s founder, Bill Ingram, scouts arrived from Spain, Russia, Belgium and Italy. They watched seniors like Harrison Barnes, Joe Jackson, Jared Sullinger and Terrence Jones, and junior LaQuinton Ross. Jackson and Ross are Razorback recruits.

The likelihood of these players heading overseas will be determined by Tyler’s success. “Jeremy is really the measuring stick,” says Ingram.

Whereas Jennings was the Parade Player of the Year his senior season at Oak Hill Academy in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, Tyler likely isn’t prep basketball’s top talent, Ingram said.

Sullinger, Ross and Jones are among those who eclipse him, he said, adding that if such superior players see Tyler hone his game abroad, making hundreds of thousands of dollars while elevating his NBA draft status even higher, high school players will start flocking to Europe.

Jarrett Hart, who teamed with Joe Johnson to lead the Little Rock Central Tigers to a state championship a decade ago, also believes more players will choose that route.

“Now that it’s been publicized, and talked about more, people know that they can do it,” says Hart, who plays in Cyprus. Latavious Williams, not even considered to be a Top 10 talent in his class, has said that Jennings’ high draft selection influenced him to make the jump.

To quote Ingram, “I can see the trend continuing.”

So then, how did it begin?

PREPS TO PROS

The foundation for the emergent preps-to-overseas movement was laid in 1995, when the Minnesota Timberwolves drafted Kevin Garnett, the first high school player drafted into the NBA since 1975. Twenty-seven players followed Garnett, according to ESPN. Among them were future stars like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Dwight Howard. Others, like Jonathan Bender, Ndudi Ebi, and Korleone Young, flamed out.

Three years ago, the NBA mandated its draftees be at least 19 years old and one year removed from high school. The rule was to give scouts “another year to watch a kid so that you’re not drafting high school kids who turn out to be busts and cost their owners millions and millions of bucks,” said Joe Kleine, a 15-year NBA veteran who attended the University of Arkansas and now works as an assistant basketball coach at UALR.

The result is that, since 2006, a cache of players, including headliners Derrick Rose, Greg Oden, Kevin Durant and Michael Beasley, who might never have stepped foot on campus, have dominated college ball for one season before turning pro.

Many college coaches have come to lament the carousel-style stays of these “one-and-done” players.

“The kid coming in for one year thing is a farce,” says Kleine, pointing out that freshmen talented enough to pull it off need only pass six first semester hours to play a second semester. Then, those not intending to play sophomore year don’t have to worry about passing the 24 credit hours requiredof a first-year student. Such a player, notes Kleine, “doesn’t even have to go to class second semester, if he’s going pro.”

Players like Jennings, Tyler and Williams are questioning the merit of even one year in college. Besides lucre, the promise of extra practice time entices them abroad.

Steve Shields, the head basketball coach at UALR, explains why.

In September and October, he notes, Division I college coaches in the United States are allowed two hours per week of individual instruction.

Kleine added: During the season, coaches must cap their time with athletes at 20 hours per week, including watching film and training with weights, while in summers they can only supervise conditioning programs. Professional leagues impose no such limits.

It’s the difference between a paid pro and a supposed student-athlete, an amateur. Those lines are blurring at younger ages, as amateur youth sports culture becomes increasingly commercialized.

Take thirteen-year-old basketball phenom Allonzo Trier, a Seattlite ranked as the nation’s best sixth-grader by some scouts, who has his own line of clothing emblazoned with his signature and personal motto. He makes 450 shots every day in preparation for college and beyond. Or 16-year-old baseball prodigy Bryce Harper, who in June announced his intention to skip his final two years of high school, earn a GED and enroll in a Nevada community college as a fast track to 2010 MLB Draft eligibility. These students’ parents-like others who raise elite athletes-help push their sons toward their professional sports dreams. It’s a focus that too often depreciates the child’s academic achievement, said Scotty Thurman, a former Razorback star who now coaches his son’s 14-U Little Rock-based amateur youth team.

Today’s summer league scene “is all about who’s got the best uniforms, who’s got the best shoes, who’s sending kids to the pros out of the program,” he said. Thurman, 34, recalled coaches used to emphasizegaining college scholarships-whether through basketball or academics-when he played summer basketball. “It needs to get back to that.”

Still, what about students who don’t gain eligibility into the Division I school of their choice? Neither Williams, Tyler nor Jennings had qualified to take college classes when they made their decisions to play abroad.

China and Europe provide an alternate route for players who don’t reach the minimum academic standards required by the NCAA for a scholarship. For example, Jennings struggled to pass the tests required to enter the University of Arizona.

In the past, Jennings’ options would have been simple, and non-lucrative: prep school or junior college. “But then you have a team from London that comes in and says ‘Hey, we’ll pay you a million dollars a year and pay all of your expenses.’ I mean, duh, it’s not rocket science,” says Kleine. “A kid in a situation like that would be a fool to not strongly consider that.”

PROS AND CONS

Critics point out a spate of potential problems with the idea of a teenager cutting short his high school career to play abroad.

Consider this standard denunciation from a columnist at the Detroit Free Press: “No friends, culture shock, no teenagers to hang with; no command of a new language; plenty of free time, no high school diploma, no senior prom, no sensational senior season of basketball, no recruiting trips, no freshman year of college.”

Proponents, like Tyler himself, argue that education can be attained through online courses, and by simply living outside the United States. “I’m going to learn a new language,” he told USA Today. “It will be like international studies.” Thurman, who played professionally in the Middle East and Europe, proposed American teenagers playing abroad professionally could complete their high school educations at the international schools found in major cities.

Corruption of youth is another bugaboo. “Tyler is setting a dangerous precedent by making this move,” said ESPN’s Doug Gottlieb, a former college basketball player himself. “What about a sophomore or a freshman making a similar decision?”

“Why even have high school at all?”

Still others counter that exceptional athletes have played for money as teenagers before, and have thrived. Example: A Spanish wunderkind named Ricky Rubio, who began his professional career at 14 and completed courses online while on the road. The Minnesota Timberwolves chose Rubio, now 18, with the fifth pick in June’s NBA draft.

Many entertainers, too, have started earning paychecks early on. Like Arkansan Louis Jordan, a world-renowned bandleader and jazz musician who, at 15, made his professional debut at Hot Springs’ Green Gables Club. Or Art Porter Jr., a jazz saxophonist who played in bars and clubs in Arkansas during his teen years. By the time Little Rock’s Lil’ JJ was 15, he was performing at comedy clubs around the country, acting on cable shows, and had moved to Hollywood.

But none plied a trade abroad. “I do think we need to make sure these young men are educated and well-advised and have money-managers who they can trust,” says Shields, “[which are] the most obvious concerns for anyone in this profession.”

Jennings brought his mother and little brother to live in his apartment in Rome; Tyler’s older brother will move with him, and a rotation of other relatives will visit.

OUTLOOK

Shields, Kleine and Thurman don’t expect a rush of high school players heading to Europe. Charles Ripley, a former coach and fixture in central Arkansas basketball circles, agrees: “It could build into something through the years, but right now I don’t see it happening, especially in the state of Arkansas.”

Still, interest persists, said Sonny Vaccaro, a former shoe marketing executive who arranged Jennings’ trip overseas and is advising Tyler. While asserting there’s “never going to be a migration,” Vacarro told the Times he was “in discussions with more than a dozen families of elite players about those players going overseas instead of to college.”

For now, NBA brass say they don’t mind that high school and college players yearning for their league are going abroad to sharpen skills and burnish resumes. “Whether it’s in high school, in the D-League, in college or in Europe, we’re neutral on how that gets done,” NBA Commissioner David Stern told the Times in April.

NCAA officials may come to feel differently. Successful early careers from Tyler, Williams and Jennings will likely influence more to follow in their footsteps, just as more followed Garnett, Bryant and Jermaine O’Neal in jumping from high school to the NBA. No more than eight ever made that jump into the NBA in one year, but many more could leave high school ranks to play abroad. More leagues mean more potential suitors. And all the suitors aren’t demanding the same level of play. A 17-year-old not quite ready for the best leagues-like in Spain and Greece-could still earn hundreds of thousands while cutting his teeth in lesser leagues-like in China. The pool of high schoolers able to make the jump abroad would be larger than it was for those able to jump directly to the NBA. Candidates would include not only the best of the best, or most freakishly athletic, from the high school ranks, but merely the best-those good enough to start at major Division 1 programs.

Why wouldn’t a single mother mired in poverty encourage her 15- or 16-year-old-a budding star already recruited by major colleges-to prepare for a career that could bring riches, not four years down the line, but as soon as next year? Especially if the foreign team offers to pay for the kid’s college if he ever wants to go?

Young stars see the money others earn off their play-from advertising on recruiting web sites to sales generated by the logos they wear. Thurman said: “The kid begins to think ‘Why shouldn’t I tap into my talents and get compensated for it?’ ”

A Shower of Glass

2009-08-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

This doesn't exactly qualify as breaking news, but what M.J. did 23 years ago was certainly shattering:

This happened in Trieste (Italy) August 25 of 1986, in a Nike exhibition game featuring Stefanel Trieste vs Juve Caserta. Michael Jordan scored 30 points. The priceless music was inserted afterward. It's interesting to note in those days of early international marketing, evidentally star NBA players would sometimes play with foreign teams.

Here's a parting shot from Youtube's Monsieur AceMasterBeanSkin:
"somewhere in the world today there is a 22 year old, half-Jordan half-Italian walking around, cause you know when you break a backboard, you get laid."

Preps-to-Overseas Trend Continues

2009-07-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Before choosing to play at Memphis in late May, Latavious Williams, an athletic 6-8 forward in the class of 2009, took recruiting visits to Georgetown and Florida International.

It looks like he kept the urge to travel - internationally.

Yesterday, Williams, who is ranked as the 17th best talent in his class by Rivals, announced that he will be playing abroad next year, the latest in a trend of prep players who've decided they'd rather not enter the college ranks - paychecks abroad will suffice just fine, thank you.

Like with Brandon Jennings, it appeared that Williams' might not have been able to academically qualify for a scholarship. Playing overseas is a vastly more lucrative option to playing for a junior college while gaining eligibility.

Williams has already mentioned China as a possible destination.

NBA sees ebb of international talent?

2009-07-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

NBA teams drafted eight international players into their ranks in the first round of the 2003 draft.
Since then, not as many. The NY Times examines why, and brings up an interesting stat:

Teams appear to be straying from the recent trend of drafting overseas players because many of them have not lived up to expectations. Of the 39 international players selected in the first round since 2002 with no prior experience playing in the United States, only Yao Ming has surfaced as an All-Star. In that same time, 14 of 171 American players drafted in the first round made at least one All-Star team.

There are international players who have been productive (Boris Diaw and Leandro Barbosa), quality role players for playoff teams (Nene and Mickael Pietrus) and full of untapped potential (Rudy Fernandez and Danilo Gallinari).

Is Sonny Vaccaro Basketball's Version of Rasputin?

2009-07-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

Visionary, schmoozer, crusader, master manipulator - the 69-year-old former basketball tournament organizer and shoe marketing executive with been called them all.
His creations are legion, his vast influence undeniable: Vaccaro formed the first national all-star game in 1965, first paid college basketball coaches for exclusive apparel deals and signed Michael Jordan to Nike in the early 80s. As a trusted adviser to nearly every high schooler that successfully jumped to the NBA, Vaccaro has helped Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James amass droves of wealth by securing endorsement deals and lucrative contacts. He claims he never took a cut. The NBA barred such jumps in 2005, saying it needed more mature entrees. Vaccaro has called the rule a sham, accusing the league of funneling players into the "The Machine," or N.C.A.A, to exploit them. Instead, the money should go to the players directly, he told ESPN Magazine in 2002. "Amateurism lost its virginity a long time ago," he told USA Today in May. Vaccaro today rails against the entities that made his career - the NCAA and NBA - on a college lecture circuit including the likes of Harvard, Yale, Columbia. As he works toward his ultimate goal of destroying the NBA's age-limit legislation, basketball's arch-influencer has cast his eye toward a new horizon. In Europe, he sees a destination for America's top-flight prep talent, now for the short-term, but one day possibly for much longer.

P.S. The above was written as a sidebar for an upcoming article I'm writing about how high school basketball players' circumventing college for Europe may affect Arkansas. It's not going in, though - my editor and I have decided to not focus so much on Sonny.

A Small World

2009-06-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

The name popped out on Friday morning when I checked online for the results of the second half of the NBA Draft - aka, the draft dregs, selections nobody outside of a few fanatics care about:

Emir Preldzic, taken with the 57th pick by the Phoenix Suns.

And the past came rushing back.

November, 2007: I was attending a Euroleague game, featuring Preldzic's Fenerbahçe Ülker team, with some friends. Ülker, the eventual Turkish league champion, lost that game, but I remember being impressed by the Slovenian/Bosnian Preldzic's game. A 6'9" point forward, he showed exceptional body control and unspooled a sweet, sweet driving finger roll that would have translated to "I've got game" in any language. The game came easy to him, and you got the sense that he could develop much further.

Afterward, as my friend and I exited the arena, we ran into Emir and another player outside. They were huddling in their warm-up hoodies. We small talked about where they were from, where we were from. I congratulated Emir on his nice game, and the slick finger roll. He was cordial, unassuming, just a 20-year-old kid in a new country, with a job that happened to be played in front of thousands. A few minutes, and our little path-crossing was over.

I have occasionally run across scouting reports about him this last year, and also mused to myself that the player I "discovered" is now known by basketball heads all over. Of course, that's far from accurate - Emir, a former All-Adriatic League member, burst onto the scene in the U-20 World Championships in 2006. The NBA types had tabs on him long before I ever knew I would live in Turkey for a few months.

Emir, who since the draft has been traded to the Cavaliers, may never make an NBA roster due to his lack of athleticism and consistent shooting. Whether he makes the team or stays in Europe, his future seems bright. It's always fun to recall that once I saw a star streaming upward from the darkness.

More than a Trickle? More Ballers Headed to Europe

2009-05-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

Looking for updates about Jeremy Tyler for my side-project, www.jeremytylereurope.com, I learned that two more American basketball players are bound for Europe.

Here are their quick biographical sketches, their prospects and a discussion of whether their decisions indicate an emergent trend.

Nick Calathes - a 6-6, 194-lb. Florida Gators combo guard.

He averaged 17.2 points, 5.3 rebounds and 6.4 assists, while shooting 39% from three-point range as a sophomore, but was not able to return Florida to national prominence since the program won consecutive national championships. The Gators have missed the NCAA tournament the last two years.

A dual citizen of Greek background, he played for the Greek FIBA 20-and-under national team last summer. Interestingly, his older brother, Pat, spent last year playing for the Greek team Maroussi, reportedly one of Jeremy Tyler's possible destinations.

Calathes entered the NBA draft, but wasn't a sure-fire first-round pick. Still, several NBA executives told FOXSports.com that he had a 50-50 chance of getting a guaranteed contract in the $1 million per season range by being picked in the first round of the June 25 NBA Draft.

But could have easily slid into the second round, which would have left him with a non-guaranteed contract.

For him, Europe appeared to be a much stronger option.

According to DraftExpress.com, he has signed a 3-year, 2.1 million with Euroleague champion, Panathanaikos. Jonathon Givony points out that he also has received a "very comfortable buyout" situation that would allow him to return to the states as early as next season.
His NBA draft stock would improve in the next year, meriting him a higher selection in next year's draft.

The fact that Calathes will play for one of the most decorated coaches in the world in Zeljko Obradovic on someone else’s coin and come back a much better player in one year has to look attractive. With Sarunas Jasikevicius reportedly on the way out of Panathinaikos, a decent amount of playing time will be opened up for him.

The Orlando Sentinel broke down the specifics of contract :

around $1.1 million per year, in addition to providing him with a home, car and tax credits, making for a total package commensurate to what the NBA rookie salary scale provides a late-lottery selection. Golden's State forward Anthony Randolph, the final lottery pick of 2008 at No. 14, made $1.424 million as a rookie.

European teams crave Americans sporting dual European citizenship because they generally only have roster spots for two Americans, have a few more for non-American foreigners, and give the rest of the roster spots to natives. Calathes' Greek passport puts no stress on Panathanaikos' roster quotas.

The citizenship, money and likelihood of leavening his NBA prospects make Calathes' decision "sound about as convenient as a weekend jaunt to Cancun," according to Yahoo blogger Eamonn Brennan.

Terrance Oglesby - a 6-2, 190-lb. Clemson Tigers guard

He averaged 13.2 ppg as the third-leading scorer for the Clemson Tigers. He led the team with 92 3-pointers, and frequently flashed far-flung range in shooting 39% on 3-pointers. However, he does not possess the wide suite of skills and size Calathes does, and likewise did not project to land with an NBA squad.

Although he didn't enter the NBA draft, he recently suprised his coach by announcing he'll pursue playing for a Spanish or Italian team for around $500,000 per year.

Like Calathes, he possesses a perimeter-oriented game which portends success in Europe.

Also like Calathes, he possesses dual citizenship which makes him more attractive to European teams with limited roster spots for Americans. Oglesby's father, Tony, played basketball in Europe. Terrence was born in Norway and played for that country in the FIBA under-20 championships in 2008.

Unlike Calathes, and Jennings and Tyler before him, Oglesby doesn't figure to use Europe as a launching pad for the NBA. He says playing professionally had always been a goal - one he was able to attain through his defection.

"Kids dream of playing here when they are dribbling in a playground, not in Italy, Greece, Spain or anywhere else," said Jeff Goodman of Foxsports.com. Oglesby, again, appears to be an exception. One wonders if more top-shelf American basketball players and players find success playing in European leagues, and their Euroleague jerseys come to be marketed to American inner-city youth, will Goodman's statement still be true 5, 10 years down the road?

So what do these two recent defections mean for the future?

No earth-shaking as of yet. Calathes and Oglesby, after all, are exceptional because of their dual citizenship. Still, one wonders if their success will influence more players - dual citizens or not - to consider jumping collegiate ship for European waters. I doubt there are many players like Calathes - dual citizens and borderline 1st-round picks for whom it makes more financial sense to "apprentice" in Europe for a short period. A "one-passport" American collegiate underclassman good enough to take one of the top Euroleague teams' American roster spots would also likely be good enough to warrant selection as an NBA lottery pick, meaning more riches - and comfort - by staying in America.

Still, publicity following decisions to play abroad by Jennings, Tyler, Childress, Calathes and Oglesby have explosed more and more talented high school and collegiate players to consider Europe as a legitimate alternative to the NCAA en route to the NBA, or as a lucrative destination itself.

Each player who chooses Europe chips away at what some see as an NCAA sports industrial-complex churning out millions of dollars for predominanltly older white men swirling around mostly black teenagers handling an orange ball to entertain tens of millions. The ones sweating the most earn the least money (at least officially) .

Recent developments hit this point home.

Investigations of academic fraud of players under former Memphis Coach John Calipari hint at the moral rot beneath the telegenic gleam and shine of big-time basketball, as the NY Times' Pete Thamel recently wrote:

And when stars like Rose project a net worth of more than $100 million while still in high school, should we really expect them to smile and play only for the good of Old State U? This is while the coach is making millions, the universities are dicing up millions from TV deals and the N.C.A.A. is making billions.

The European tours of players like Brandon Jennings, Jeremy Tyler and the recent Florida defector Nick Calathes show that players are tiring of the N.C.A.A. caste system.

Vujacic Immortalized in Parody Music Video

2009-05-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a ridiculous basketball-related music video parody is all we need.
Following is a good one - a spoof done by two L.A. fans of the Lakers' Serbian shooting guard Sasha Vujacic, who a few years ago dubbed himself "The Machine" after a series of intense summer work-out sessions with Kobe Bryant.

Mad props to interbasket.net, where I discovered it, and also to the creaters for including a hilarious scene from "Along Comes Polly" where Philip Seymour Hoffman's horribly unathletic character careens across a blacktop with a basketball, bludgeoning all that is beautiful with the game.

Here is another from the series:

New Web Site

2009-05-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

With all the hubbub about Tyler jetting to Europe, I thought it would be interesting to start a website to track his progress (or lack thereof) and what the blogerati are saying about it. His success or failure will determine how much pull uber-agent Sonny Vaccaro will have in the future in convincing other similarly gifted teenagers to try their hand at Euro ball, and the bling it brings.

So have at it, people: www.jeremytylereurope.com

Would Ron Paul get along famously with Jeremy Tyler?

2009-05-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

Probably - at least when it comes to selling one's basketball skills on the free market.
Basketball stud Tyler, after all, has decided to slap the Establishment across its face by jettisoning not only college to play in Europe, but also his senior year at dear ole' San Diego High.
If Texas congressman Ron Paul isn't twirling his libertarian noodles right about now, then that freshly-minted colloquilism hasn't the slightest meaning.

Jeremy Tyler is, after all, living a centuries-old American ideal - pursuing individual happiness by exercising liberty to go where you will, and do what you want, as long as you don't infringe on others' rights.
Except this young man isn't heading West - he's bolting east, back the Olde World, whisked away by the American dream of self-fulfillment.

With rapt attention, I'm following Tyler's story as he prepares to leave behind one world to embrace another. Hell, I'm creating a website devoted to following his progress (or lack thereof) and the media's commentary on it. In a following post, I'll examine how (and why) most media seem to support his decision.

But I'll postpone such meta-commentary for now to flesh out some of my own thoughts on the matter. I support what he's doing. I've lived in Europe, am half-Turkish and studied Greek and Roman culture in college. I'm a humanities junkie. How can I not like the idea of somebody shedding plastic, reheatable American monoculture for the clinking cafes, salads and wines of history-rich Spain or Italy?

It will be interesting, however, to see if Tyler will try to immerse himself in the culture around him. He and his family have said that he will try to learn a new language, come back with expanded perspective and work on his bachelor's degree abroad after securing his G.E.D.

If he does that, and avoids squirreling away with his laptop and family in an apartment after most practices (as Jennings seems to have), then all power to him. Hell, I wouldn't have been able to fully appreciate another culture at 17 and 18.

The hermetically-sealed apartment living lifestyle brings to mind another entertainer who took his talents overseas to maximize profits from them. I am referring, of course, to the aging movie star Bill Murray played in Lost in Translation who voyaged to Japan to film whiskey commercials. Entertainers in the eve of their careers often make such mercantile jaunts to film commercials or perform in Asian and European countries where they may still be considered cool (think of David Hasselhoff's chest expanding whenever he alights in Germany).

Tyler, like Brandon Jennings before him, are entertainers who have given such financially-motivated ventures a new twist. The youngsters aren't using foreign grounds to break their fall into obscurity but as an anvil to hammer out their game, which they hope translates to even greater monetary gains upon their American homecoming.

The Next Step : Jeremy Tyler

2009-05-04T11:41:00.000-07:00

17-year-old Jeremy Tyler is basketball's newest sensation.
He's 6-10, 240 pounds, and has a suite of inside-out skills you expect from the NBA lottery prospects of his size these days.
He's also decided to follow in the footsteps of Brandon Jennings as second player to leap from American high school to a European professional basketball league.
The high school junior is upping the ante, though, by foregoing his senior year.
The reason is simple: high school competition in San Diego doesn't sharpen like professional competition in the A and B leagues of Spain and Italy.
And preps basketball doesn't pay - at least not legally.
What better way to prepare for a profession than by actually working in that profession?
In the two weeks since Tyler's announced his intentions, a veritable blogstorm of opinion has broken of the cyberscape. I'll chart those perspectives - and what Tyler's decision could presage for the future of amateur basketball.

Villanueva, Ariza Promise to Boost Dominican Basketball to Elite Levels

2009-04-14T06:40:00.000-07:00

Jamba Juice, that fine, fine California-based juice and smoothie chain , offers a health "boost" - protein, fiber, echinecea, etc. - injected into its smoothies, taking the concoctions' flavor from heights of deliciousness to breathtaking healthful perfection.

Well, the Dominican Republic national basketball program could soon receive a life-infusing "boost" of its own - in the form of Milwaukee Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva and L.A. Lakers sixth man of the year candidate Trevor Ariza.

Villanueva, a 6-11, sweet-shooting power forward, was released by USA Basketball, clearing the path to switching sports citizenship, ESPN.com reported.

The island nation of 1.2 million has in the last few years hovered around the top finishers in American tournaments, but not been able to break through to the top, as evidenced in the final standings below:

Centrobasket Championship for Men	2008	3
CBC Championship for Men	2007	2
Centrobasket U17 Championship for Men	2007	3
Central American and Caribbean Games for Men	2006	3

The most recent team had a solid foundation with Hawks power forward Al Horford and Sacramento Kings swingman Francisco Garcia. Both young players have improved during the 2008-09 NBA campaign.

22-year-old Horford's numbers:

Year	Team	G	GS	MPG	FG%	3P%	FT%	OFF	DEF	RPG	APG	SPG	BPG	TO	PF	PPG
07-08	ATL	81	77	31.4	0.499	0.000	0.731	3.1	6.6	9.7	1.5	0.7	0.9	1.69	3.30	10.1
08-09	ATL	67	67	33.5	0.525	0.000	0.727	2.2	7.1	9.3	2.4	0.8	1.4	1.54	2.80	11.5

27-year-old Garcia's numbers:

07-08	SAC	79	20	26.5	0.463	0.391	0.779	0.7	2.7	3.3	1.6	1.2	0.6	1.62	2.90	12.3
08-09	SAC	64	35	30.3	0.447	0.400	0.818	0.9	2.5	3.4	2.3	1.2	1.0	1.73	3.00	12.8

The national team, currently ranked 31st in the FIBA world rankings, would have improved due to the two NBA players' emergence, but Villanueva and Ariza could take the team to unprecedented heights for the upcoming Americas World Championship Qualifying Tournament in Mexico, Aug. 19-30.

Both young veterans are also still improving and in the upside of their careers.

Villanueva, a 24-year-old, has a perimeter game well-suited for international play. Last year, he posted impressive production in limited minutes due to foul trouble:

Year	Team	G	GS	MPG	FG%	3P%	FT%	OFF	DEF	RPG	APG	SPG	BPG	TO	PF	PPG
05-06	TOR	81	36	29.1	0.463	0.327	0.706	2.2	4.2	6.4	1.1	0.7	0.8	1.22	3.00	13.0
06-07	MIL	39	17	25.2	0.470	0.337	0.820	1.6	4.3	5.8	0.9	0.6	0.3	1.38	2.80	11.8
07-08	MIL	76	31	24.1	0.435	0.297	0.783	1.9	4.2	6.1	1.0	0.4	0.5	1.41	2.30	11.7
08-09	MIL	77	47	27.0	0.449	0.348	0.835	2.0	4.7	6.7	1.8	0.6	0.7	1.78	3.30	16.3

23-year-old Ariza, still waiting pending confirmation of Dominican citizenship, would be a perfect fit for a Dominican team brandishing Villanueva and Horford in the front court and Garcia in the back court. He's a 6-8 glue guy who's long, rangy, athletic and defensively-oriented - the kind of player any team aspiring for greatness needs.

In the last year, Ariza has posted the same kind of production he posted two years ago for the Magic, but this time for a championship contender:

Year	Team	G	GS	MPG	FG%	3P%	FT%	OFF	DEF	RPG	APG	SPG	BPG	TO	PF	PPG
04-05	NYK	80	12	17.3	0.442	0.231	0.695	1.1	1.9	3.0	1.1	0.9	0.2	0.91	1.90	5.9
05-06	NYK	36	10	19.7	0.418	0.333	0.545	1.4	2.4	3.8	1.3	1.2	0.2	1.28	2.20	4.6
05-06	ORL	21	0	13.8	0.400	0.000	0.700	1.4	2.5	3.9	0.7	0.7	0.1	0.76	1.00	4.7
06-07	ORL	57	7	22.4	0.539	0.000	0.620	1.7	2.6	4.4	1.1	1.0	0.3	1.47	2.40	8.9
07-08	ORL	11	0	10.5	0.452	0.000	0.533	0.5	1.7	2.2	0.7	0.4	0.3	0.45	0.80	3.3
07-08	LAL	24	3	18.0	0.524	0.333	0.683	1.0	2.5	3.5	1.5	1.1	0.3	0.75	1.50	6.5
08-09	LAL	82	20	24.4	0.460	0.319	0.710	1.4	2.9	4.3	1.8	1.7	0.3	1.06	2.00	8.9

If the Dominican Republic's national program can receive its "Jamba boost," it should be able to contend with Puerto Rico for second-best team status in North America, which would cause a shift in the normal North American representatives at the World Championships and Olympics.

Qualifying for those tournaments would do much for basketball's popularity in the Domincan Republic.

Baseball is now the nation's most popular sport. 22 Dominicans - including Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez and Pedro Martinez, have played in the majors, according to wikipedia.

Excluding Villanueva and Ariza, five Domincans have played in the NBA, according to databaseBasketball.com.

The first - in 1988 - was Al Horford's dad, Tito Horford.

Full disclosure: Freelance basketball reporter Evin Demirel has both Charlie Villanueva and Francisco Garcia on his fantasy basketball team this year. His interest in their improvement this season is in no way unbiased.

European Exodus Age Limit? What Age Limit?

2009-04-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic ran a recent story highlighting a somewhat immature star high school senior considering dipping his toes in college waters for the requisite season or bounding off to Europe for higher pay and tougher comp.

Meet 6-5 Lance Stephenson, Brooklyn Finest's:

Lance Stephenson’s nickname is “Born Ready”—as in, ready for the NBA. But on a winter night in a tiny gym in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the 6-foot-5 high-school senior mostly looked ready for a time-out—of the preschool variety. Stephenson slumped when teammates failed to pass him the ball, shook his head in disgust when they missed shots, jogged back lazily on defense, and whined about fouls. Stephenson’s other nickname is “Sir Lance-a-lot,” but he seldom looked heroic, and seemed to be doing little to lead his team...

For all his pouty shenanigans, though, "Born Ready" racked up 38 points and 14 rebounds to lead his three-time defending New York City public-school champion to another victory.

Uber-agent Sonny Vaccaro, who brokered the deal sending Brandon Jennings to Rome, sees Stephenson - like a handful of other high school players - as another possible Europlayer, if he can handle the adversity of juggling new culture, new playing style, tougher coaches and playing with grizzled-ass professional veterans on the court. All these factors, though, form a crucible that could make Stephenson all the more "Born Ready" come the 2010 NBA draft.

And if a 17-year-old high school senior can't skip college and go pro abroad, why couldn't a 17-year-old junior? For that matter, why not a 16-year-old junior, or younger? It's bound to happen soon, Vaccaro said.

If that seems like one more sign of the basketball apocalypse, consider that many of the Europeans who populate NBA rosters began playing professionally as young as 14. In any case, Vaccaro believes Europe should be a destination only for exceptionally talented and relatively mature players. And Jennings has cautioned that his Italian sojourn hasn’t been one big scoop of gelato: “I don’t want anyone coming over here thinking it’s easy,” he wrote on his Under Armour blog.

Sharpshooter Jannero Pargo en Fuego in Russia, in Greece.

2009-03-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

From his home town of Chicago, to an excellent college career as a Razorback in Fayetteville, AR, and then NBA stops at New Orleans, back in Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto, 6-2 shooting guard Jannero Pargo had plied this trade across America going into the 08-09 season.

He wanted to see more, though.

Leveraging an outstanding 07-08 postseason with the New Orleans Hornets - in which he recorded a 30-point ourburst - last August Pargo signed with one of Russia's elite teams, Moscow Dynamo, for $3.5 million over one year.

Playing in the Russia-A Superleague, with former New Jersey Net Bostjan Nachbar and Lithuanian national team member Robertas Javtokas, Pargo averaged solid statistics in five Eurocup games:

13.2 pts, 1.2 stls, 3.4 asts, 3.2 rebs, 71 FT%, and a steller 56.3 3PT%.

In his 12 Russian League, games Pargo registered:

13.8 pts, .8 stls, 5.4 asts, 3.4 rebs, 88 FT%, and a "drop-off" 42% from trifecta terra.

It seems Pargo skittered to the hoop more times in one game in Russia than he did in his whole perimeter-oriented career in the states, as seen below in his debut abroad:

The team is currently 2nd in the Russia-A Superleague, with a 13-5 record.

The declining petro-dollar during the global recession, however, prompted Pargo to leave Moscow in January for balmier Mediterranean climes with Olympiacos Piraeus, to replace a fellow American - Josh Childress
who was out for nearly a month with a hernia.

While his statistics have dwindled - due to sharing a backcourt with two stars - Lynn Greer and Theodoros Papaloukas - Pargo's championship hopes seem sunnier while playing for the Athens-based Euroleague powerhouse.

In the 17 minutes he has averaged for "the Reds," Pargo has averaged 4.2 pts, .5 stls, 1.3 rebs, 67 FT% and 46 3PT%.

Euroleague competition is certainly an upgrade from Eurocup competition, which is without a doubt an upgrade from this comp:

Pargo's team has won 5 of 6 games since his arrival, earning a spot in the Euroleague playoff's Top 8.

Olympiacos, who will play Spain's Read Madrid in an upcoming Best-of-5 series, has has made its fourth consecutive playoff appearances and will be bolstered by Childress' return. Pargo's Russian League nemesis - CSKA Moscow (who went 20-0 in domestic play) - has reached a record six straight Euroleague Final Fours.

Rudy's Fernanado Martin Tribute

2009-03-02T15:02:00.000-08:00

During the All-Star break, Rudy Fernandez, the first European to compete in the event's slam dunk contest, wore the jersey of the Fernando Martin, the first Spanish player AND first European player to play in the NBA w/o playing in college.

As Stuart from interbasket.net writes, 2/3 of TNT's announcers reacted to the unexpected tribute as if they were blindsided:

“Martin?” questioned Reggle Miller.

“Martin?” followed Kenny Smith.“Who’s Martin?”

“Larue Martin?” guessed Miller referring to the former #1 draft bust of 1972. “Ricky Martin?”

“I don’t know who Martin is.” said Smith, giving up.

“This is for Fernando Martin,” interrupted Kevin Harlan, the third announcer, as TNT broadcast an image of Fernando Martin on the screen.

“He’s wearing number ten in tribute to Fernando Martin… Martin was the first Spanish player in the NBA and briefly played for the Trailblazers he died in a car accident so in tribute… to him.”

“It’s a great tribute,” Smith responded.

I have to say, the first thing I thought was “Huh? Kenyon Martin?“ but quickly realized it was Fernando Martin. I was excited to have been in the small minority of people that actually knew what Rudy’s dedication was referring to.

However, it’s not a surprise that many were unaware of Martin, as the power forward played only 24 games for the Portland Trailblazers during an injury-plagued campaign back in the 1986-87 NBA season, before returning to Spain to play for club team Real Madrid.

For his dedication dunk, Fernandez threw a behind the back pass off the backboard and slammed it in with his right hand.

Despite not knowing who Martin was, the crowd was obviously disappointed with the score the dunk received as evidenced by the groans and boos when his point total was announced. Fernandez was awarded 42 points from the former Phoenix Sun players; Tom Chambers (9), Dan Majerle (9), Kevin Johnson (8), and former slam dunk champions Cedric Ceballos (8), and Larry Nance (8).

And though Fernandez ended the round in last place behind Dwight Howard (50), Nate Robinson (46), and J.R. Smith (43), he made a beautiful and lasting tribute to a great player that met an early demise.

Here are some interesting tidbits about the Martin courtesy of interbasket's profile...

Name: Fernando Martín Espina
Nickname: N/A
Born: 03/25/1962
Status: Deceased, December 03, 1989
Origin: Madrid, Spain
Height: 6-10/2,05m
Weight: 245lbs/108,9kg
Schools: N/A
Drafted: 1985, Second Round, 38th overall pick by the New Jersey Nets
Languages: Spanish
Teams (jersey): Spanish National Team (10), Real Madrid (10), Portland Trailblazers

He is father of Jan Fernando Martín next to the German model Petra Sonneborn. Their parents raised him to love many sports and he exceled in many. Fernando Martin wasn't only a great basketball player, he was also 5 times champion of swimming in Castile and reached a great level in judo, table tennis and handball (he rumored that he was going to file by the Athletic one of Madrid for his inferior categories) until the trainer of basketball of its school, Mariano Bartivas, put to him under a hoop...

.....
The Blazers paid attention to him and he played on 12-10-86, against the Chicago Bulls. However, his path was full of challenge and difficulties: the injuries harassed him and he missed friends, the Spanish food and climate. In addition, his coach, the young Mike Schuler, did not give many options to him to explode. His passage to the NBA is marked by 25 games, 147 minutes, 22 points, 28 rebounds, and 9 assists.
- Mayte Roman of Salamanca, Spain

...n.b. Acccording to Roman, Martin was ready to try out for an NBA team two years before he eventually made the league. In 1984, however, he suffered a car wreck the day before he was set to fly from Spain. That time, he walked away unhurt.

Do Americans Like Ricky Rubio?

2009-02-22T08:26:00.000-08:00

I have been reading some SLAM magazine blog posts lately dealing with the 18-year-old Iberian basketball-playing wunderkind, and I have noticed many blog posts - posted by Americans - tend to be slanted against him.
As most readers of this blog know, Rubio rocketed into the international spotlight as a major cog on the Spanish national team that took silver in last year's Olympics. He then underwent surgery, missed a few months and since returning to play for his hometown DKV Joventut team has averaged 8.2 ppg, 6.2 apg and 1.8 spg in 21 minutes a game for 12 games. Those aren't stellar stats, but they ain't picken' from the suckleberry tree either. His Euroleague stats in 5 games, however, are pretty bad: 2.4 ppg, 2.8 apg and 1.8 spg in 13.4 minutes a game. So, he has yet to get his game on track, but he'll come around. Besides, it doesn't look like Rubio will apply for the 2009 draft anyway, and with stats like that, he'd be wise to season another year anyway.

Evidentally, Senor Rubio and his hermanos didn't get too bored while he convalesced from his surgery: Just look at how much fun they had practicing coin tossing into each other's hoodies/pockets for a McDonald's commercial!

As you can imagine, when SLAM posted the video on its site, many Americans (I assume) did not seem especially get into it. Take "eboy's" opening salvo:

You’ve got to be fu*king kidding me, right? There’s not enough words to describe how incredibly fu*king ghey and asinine this is...

Later, "underdog" enters the fray:

Pathetic. But I’m sure Ricky earned a good amount of money with this ad. So I understand the financial reasons, but c’mon. This sh- looks bad. (I don’t speak Spanish at all, so maybe for Spanish speakers this ad is funny or entertaining, but for some reason I don’t think so.)

Not to say everbody is so reactionary. Here's "RV" as a voice of reason:

i don’t understand the hate towrds the video, it’s a different culture, what’s amusing, funny, or interesting to them may not be the same for Americans. Also, it’s a commercial basically saying u can buy a burger for that much, so i guess they needed a gimmick involving the coin….

But then some Spaniards (I assume) get up in it with their own particular brand of vim:

I hope he never makes the NBA, so I can enjoy him here. U yankees think ur sh*t doesn’t smell. It’s OK with me. Keep on saying bad things about players u haven’t even seen in your life and I’ll keep suporting (good) Spanish players. BTW is great to have Navarro back. Just because he ain’t black he didn’t had a real chance to be the real leader he is in the NBA. World Camps baby. Cheers
and..
Couple of years ago, first European to go nr 1 in the draft. Then first European MVP. And Spain is still the world champion and played well against the redeem team in the olympic finals… Can’t denie that we’re catching up. Go Ricky!
I wonder if anything extraordinary in this online expression of a Spanish-American tiff, or if this all is simply a trans-Atlantic extension of the high school rivalries every Thad and Tyler knows while growing up playing football in Texas. I think there are two main differences, though:

1) While Thad and Tyler may hate each other schools, they can understand why they do so better than people in different cultures. After all, Thad and Tyler share the same god, Wal-Mart, megaplex movie theater, Abercrombie and Fitch store and even cross-date each the girls from each other's school occasionally. Whereas most Americans have never been across the Atlantic for an extended period of time and don't necessarily understand that different cultures have different ways of approaching humor. That can be very hard to wrap your head around until you're immersed in it. Similarly, Spaniards who have never lived in America may have constructed their view of America solely through commercials, MTV, Shia LaBeouf movies and Beyonce songs. Warped views run both ways.

2) Especially nationalistic Americans may view the others" from knocking America from its perch as basketball's superpower. At the head said "others" is Spain, who proved in 2008 that its arsenal of young basketball talent poses the greatest threat to beat the senior Americans in upcoming international basketball tournaments. Rubio is the best of the new generation, and will likely be the guy orchestrating the upset. And once the upset happens, there are no more excuses for America, which now has a coherent, consistent national team program focused on winning FIBA games. The U.S. will have to admit it no longer towers above the others, but is a first among equals. I don't see that as such a bad thing - if future international tournament games look like the end of the thrilling Spanish-U.S. 2008 Olympics final, we'll have entered a golden age of worldwide basketball quality.

Shane Battier: Defensive Maestro, Human Calculator

2009-02-16T08:29:00.000-08:00

The following is an article written by Michael Lewis (a sports statistician) on Feb. 13th for the NY Times. It's a fascinating read that explores the personality of one the best defenders, and least athletic players, in the NBA today - Shane Battier, whose sterling role player status earned him a spot on the 2006 U.S. National Team, but has never been considered for an All-Star game. Lewis intersects this character study with an survey of the way probability theory has transformed professional basketball, and how the cerebral Battier - looking for any advantage possible - has especially especially taken to statistics in his quest to make superstars such as Kobe Bryant less efficient scoring machines....

The No-Stats All-Star

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Dan Winters for The New York Times

Bill Baptiste/NBAE/Getty Images

Revision Quest Daryl Morey was hired by the Houston Rockets as a33-year-old to look at players in new ways.

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Robert Seale for The New York Times

A Coach's Dream Before one game, Shane Battier asked Coach Rick Adelman (right) if he could come off the bench to be able to guard the high-scoring sixth-man Manu Ginóbili. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” says the Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey.

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Robert Seale for The New York Times

Battier Knows Bryant is a Less-Efficient Scorer 1 Off the dribble. 2 Shooting from long range with a hand in his face. 3 Going to his left, not his right.

He had more or less admitted to me that this part of his job left him cold. ‘It’s the same thing every day,’ he said, as he struggled to explain how a man on the receiving end of the raging love of 18,557 people in a darkened arena could feel nothing. “If you had filet mignon every single night, you’d stop tasting it.”

To him the only pleasure in these sounds — the name of his beloved alma mater, the roar of the crowd — was that they marked the end of the worst part of his game day: the 11 minutes between the end of warm-ups and the introductions. Eleven minutes of horsing around and making small talk with players on the other team. All those players making exaggerated gestures of affection toward one another before the game, who don’t actually know one another, or even want to. “I hate being out on the floor wasting that time,” he said. “I used to try to talk to people, but then I figured out no one actually liked me very much.” Instead of engaging in the pretense that these other professional basketball players actually know and like him, he slips away into the locker room.

Shane Battier!

And up Shane Battier popped, to the howl of the largest crowd ever to watch a basketball game at the Toyota Center in Houston, and jumped playfully into Yao Ming (the center “out of China”). Now, finally, came the best part of his day, when he would be, oddly, most scrutinized and least understood.

Seldom are regular-season games in the N.B.A. easy to get worked up for. Yesterday Battier couldn’t tell me whom the team played three days before. (“The Knicks!” he exclaimed a minute later. “We played the Knicks!”) Tonight, though it was a midweek game in the middle of January, was different. Tonight the Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard Kobe Bryant, the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. Both Battier and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. “I’m certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, told me. “Because there’s been story after story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.” Last time was March 16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd game in a row — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history. The game drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his 47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24 points. “A lot of people watched,” Morey said. “Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. And so for the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.

Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense, the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. They think of me as some chump.” He senses that some players actually look forward to being guarded by him. “No one dreads being guarded by me,” he said. Morey confirmed as much: “That’s actually true. But for two reasons: (a) They don’t think anyone can guard them and (b) they really scoff at the notion Shane Battier could guard them. They all think his reputation exceeds his ability.” Even as Battier was being introduced in the arena, Ahmad Rashad was wrapping up his pregame report on NBA TV and saying, “Shane Battier will try to stop Kobe Bryant.” This caused the co-host Gary Payton to laugh and reply, “Ain’t gonna happen,” and the other co-host, Chris Webber, to add, “I think Kobe will score 50, and they’ll win by 19 going away.”

Early on, Hoop Scoop magazine named Shane Battier the fourth-best seventh grader in the United States. When he graduated from Detroit Country Day School in 1997, he received the Naismith Award as the best high-school basketball player in the nation. When he graduated from Duke in 2001, where he won a record-tying 131 college-basketball games, including that year’s N.C.A.A. championship, he received another Naismith Award as the best college basketball player in the nation. He was drafted in the first round by the woeful Memphis Grizzlies, not just a bad basketball team but the one with the worst winning percentage in N.B.A. history — whereupon he was almost instantly dismissed, even by his own franchise, as a lesser talent. The year after Battier joined the Grizzlies, the team’s general manager was fired and the N.B.A. legend Jerry West, a k a the Logo because his silhouette is the official emblem of the N.B.A., took over the team. “From the minute Jerry West got there he was trying to trade me,” Battier says. If West didn’t have any takers, it was in part because Battier seemed limited: most of the other players on the court, and some of the players on the bench, too, were more obviously gifted than he is. “He’s, at best, a marginal N.B.A. athlete,” Morey says.

The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. Only the 1971-2 Los Angeles Lakers have won more games consecutively in the N.B.A. And because of injuries, the Rockets played 11 of those 22 games without their two acknowledged stars, Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, on the court at the same time; the Rockets player who spent the most time actually playing for the Rockets during the streak was Shane Battier. This year Battier, recovering from off-season surgery to remove bone spurs from an ankle, has played in just over half of the Rockets’ games. That has only highlighted his importance. “This year,” Morey says, “we have been a championship team with him and a bubble playoff team without him.”

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job. In 2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire new management for his losing team and went looking specifically for someone willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,” Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.”

The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved. Outcomes that seem, after the fact, all but inevitable — of course LeBron James hit that buzzer beater, of course the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl — are instead treated as a set of probabilities, even after the fact. The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of course to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence the new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on his team’s chances of winning. In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture inside baseball or football or darts. The difference in basketball is that it happens to be the sport that is most like life.

When Alexander, a Wall Street investor, bought the Rockets in 1993, the notion that basketball was awaiting some statistical reformation hadn’t occurred to anyone. At the time, Daryl Morey was at Northwestern University, trying to figure out how to get a job in professional sports and thinking about applying to business schools. He was tall and had played high-school basketball, but otherwise he gave off a quizzical, geeky aura. “A lot of people who are into the new try to hide it,” he says. “With me there was no point.” In the third grade he stumbled upon the work of the baseball writer Bill James — the figure most responsible for the current upheaval in professional sports — and decided that what he really wanted to do with his life was put Jamesian principles into practice. He nursed this ambition through a fairly conventional academic career, which eventually took him to M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. There he opted for the entrepreneurial track, not because he actually wanted to be an entrepreneur but because he figured that the only way he would ever be allowed to run a pro-sports franchise was to own one, and the only way he could imagine having enough money to buy one was to create some huge business. “This is the 1990s — there’s no Theo,” Morey says, referring to Theo Epstein, the statistics-minded general manager of the Boston Red Sox. “Sandy Alderson is progressive, but nobody knows it.” Sandy Alderson, then the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, had also read Bill James and begun to usher in the new age of statistical analysis in baseball. “So,” Morey continues, “I just assumed that getting rich was the only way in.” Apart from using it to acquire a pro-sports team, Morey had no exceptional interest in money.

He didn’t need great wealth, as it turned out. After graduating from business school, he went to work for a consulting firm in Boston called Parthenon, where he was tapped in 2001 to advise a group trying to buy the Red Sox. The bid failed, but a related group went and bought the Celtics — and hired Morey to help reorganize the business. In addition to figuring out where to set ticket prices, Morey helped to find a new general manager and new people looking for better ways to value basketball players. The Celtics improved. Leslie Alexander heard whispers that Morey, who was 33, was out in front of those trying to rethink the game, so he hired him to remake the Houston Rockets.

When Morey came to the Rockets, a huge chunk of the team’s allotted payroll — the N.B.A. caps payrolls and taxes teams that exceed them — was committed, for many years to come, to two superstars: Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. Morey had to find ways to improve the Rockets without spending money. “We couldn’t afford another superstar,” he says, “so we went looking for nonsuperstars that we thought were undervalued.” He went looking, essentially, for underpaid players. “That’s the scarce resource in the N.B.A.,” he says. “Not the superstar but the undervalued player.” Sifting the population of midlevel N.B.A. players, he came up with a list of 15, near the top of which was the Memphis Grizzlies’ forward Shane Battier. This perplexed even the man who hired Morey to rethink basketball. “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to see it.”

Alexander wasn’t alone. It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that, it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,” Morey says. “Because you can guard that shot with one player. And until you can’t guard someone with one player, you really haven’t created an offensive situation. Shane can’t create an offensive situation. He needs to be open.” For fun, Morey shows me video of a few rare instances of Battier scoring when he hasn’t exactly been open. Some large percentage of them came when he was being guarded by an inferior defender — whereupon Battier backed him down and tossed in a left jump-hook. “This is probably, to be honest with you, his only offensive move,” Morey says. “But look, see how he pump fakes.” Battier indeed pump faked, several times, before he shot over a defender. “He does that because he’s worried about his shot being blocked.” Battier’s weaknesses arise from physical limitations. Or, as Morey puts it, “He can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control.”

Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”

There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much. Players love the spectacle of a ball being swatted into the fifth row, and it becomes a matter of personal indifference that the other team still gets the ball back. Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag.” The finger wag: Mutombo swats the ball, grabs it, holds it against his hip and wags his finger at the opponent. Not in my house! “And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag. “We’ve had to yell at him: start the break, start the break — then do your finger wag!”

When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that can’t benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard. “Offensive rebounding,” he says, then reverses himself. “But even that can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on defense.” It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says. “We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs. “It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re getting paid.”

Having watched Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey has come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests. “Our last coach dragged him into a meeting and told him he needed to shoot more,” Morey says. “I’m not sure that that ever happened.” Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.

As the game against the Lakers started, Morey took his seat, on the aisle, nine rows behind the Rockets’ bench. The odds, on this night, were not good. Houston was playing without its injured superstar, McGrady (who was in the clubhouse watching TV), and its injured best supporting actor, Ron Artest (cheering in street clothes from the bench). The Lakers were staffed by household names. The only Rockets player on the floor with a conspicuous shoe contract was the center Yao Ming — who opened the game by tipping the ball backward. Shane Battier began his game by grabbing it.

Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents. They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject — which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how, instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could say we did, but we didn’t.”

People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that’s not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players — how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his right; when he goes to his left he kills his team. The Golden State Warriors forward Stephen Jackson is an even stranger case. “Steve Jackson,” Battier says, “is statistically better going to his right, but he loves to go to his left — and goes to his left almost twice as often.” The San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili is a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game — there is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the floor.

Bryant isn’t like that. He is better at pretty much everything than everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it, “the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.” One way the Rockets can see which teams think about the game as they do is by identifying those that “try dramatically not to foul.” The ideal outcome, from the Rockets’ statistical point of view, is for Bryant to dribble left and pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen often enough and you have to be satisfied with your night. “If he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.

The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.

And if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like. Bryant shot early and often, but he looked pretty good from everywhere. On defense, Battier talked to his teammates a lot more than anyone else on the court, but from the stands it was hard to see any point to this. And yet, he swears, there’s a reason to almost all of it: when he decides where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”

Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot afford to let it distract him. Only once during the Lakers game did we glimpse a clean, satisfying comparison of the efficient strategy and the inefficient one — that is, an outcome that reflected the odds. Ten feet from the hoop, Bryant got the ball with his back to the basket; with Battier pressing against him, he fell back and missed a 12-foot shot off the front of the rim. Moments earlier, with Battier reclining in the deep soft chair that masquerades as an N.B.A. bench, his teammate Brent Barry found himself in an analogous position. Bryant leaned into Barry, hit a six-foot shot and drew a foul. But this was the exception; normally you don’t get perfect comparisons. You couldn’t see the odds shifting subtly away from the Lakers and toward the Rockets as Bryant was forced from 6 feet out to 12 feet from the basket, or when he had Battier’s hand in his eyes. All you saw were the statistics on the board, and as the seconds ticked off to halftime, the game tied 54-54, Bryant led all scorers with 16 points.

But he required 20 possessions to get them. And he had started moaning to the referees. Bryant is one of the great jawboners in the history of the N.B.A. A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct. Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes against humanity. Just before the half ended, Battier took a referee aside and said: “You and I both know Kobe does this all the time. I’m playing him honest. Don’t fall for his stuff.” Moments later, after failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the ball, screamed at the ref and was whistled for a technical foul.

Just after that, the half ended, but not before Battier was tempted by a tiny act of basketball selfishness. The Rockets’ front office has picked up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in the final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on the wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it honestly at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to score. He heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer sounds. Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers Battier’s shooting percentage. “I tell him we don’t count heaves in our stats,” Morey says, “but Shane’s smart enough to know that his next team might not be smart enough to take the heaves out.”

Tonight, the ball landed in Battier’s hands milliseconds before the half finished. He moved just slowly enough for the buzzer to sound, heaved the ball the length of the floor and then sprinted to the locker room — having not taken a single shot.

In 1996 a young writer for The Basketball Times named Dan Wetzel thought it might be neat to move into the life of a star high-school basketball player and watch up close as big-time basketball colleges recruited him. He picked Shane Battier, and then spent five months trailing him, with growing incredulity. “I’d covered high-school basketball for eight years and talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids — really every single prominent high-school basketball player in the country,” Wetzel says. “There’s this public perception that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of them are really good guys, and some of them are very, very bright. Kobe’s very bright. LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never been anything like Shane Battier.”

Wetzel watched this kid, inundated with offers of every kind, take charge of an unprincipled process. Battier narrowed his choices to six schools — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Michigan and Michigan State — and told everyone else, politely, to leave him be. He then set out to minimize the degree to which the chosen schools could interfere with his studies; he had a 3.96 G.P.A. and was poised to claim Detroit Country Day School’s headmaster’s cup for best all-around student. He granted each head coach a weekly 15-minute window in which to phone him. These men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. “What 17-year-old has the stones to do that?” Wetzel asks. “To just cut off Rick Pitino because he calls outside his window?” Wetzel answers his own question: “It wasn’t like, ‘This is a really interesting 17-year-old.’ It was like, ‘This isn’t real.’ ”

Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named Elton Brand — and talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”

Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School, watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.

I pointed to his footwork; he pointed to a gorgeous young woman in the stands wearing a Battier jersey. (“You don’t see too many good-looking girls with Battier jerseys on,” he said. “It’s usually 12 and under or 60 and over. That’s my demographic.”) I noted the uncanny way in which he got his hand right in front of Bryant’s eyes before a shot; he motioned to his old high school library (“I came in here every day before classes”). He took my excessive interest in this one game as proof of a certain lack of imagination, I’m pretty sure. “I’ve been doing the same thing for seven years,” he said, “and this is the only game anyone wants to talk about. It’s like, Oh, you can play defense?” It grew clear that one reason he didn’t particularly care to watch himself play, apart from the tedium of it, was that he plays the game so self-consciously. Unable to count on the game to properly measure his performance, he learned to do so himself. He had, in some sense, already seen the video. When I finally compelled him to watch, he was knocking the ball out of Bryant’s hands as Bryant raised it from his waist to his chin. “If I get to be commissioner, that will count as a blocked shot,” Battier said. “But it’s nothing. They don’t count it as a blocked shot. I do that at least 30 times a season.”

In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what happened when he was 12.

When he entered Detroit Country Day in seventh grade, he was already conspicuous at 6-foot-4, and a year later he would be 6-foot-7. “Growing up tall was something I got used to,” he said. “I was the kid about whom they always said, ‘Check his birth certificate.’ ” He was also the only kid in school with a black father and a white mother. Oddly enough, the school had just graduated a famous black basketball player, Chris Webber. Webber won three state championships and was named national high-school player of the year. “Chris was a man-child,” says his high school basketball coach, Kurt Keener. “Everyone wanted Shane to be the next Chris Webber, but Shane wasn’t like that.” Battier had never heard of Webber and didn’t understand why, when he took to the Amateur Athletic Union circuit and played with black inner-city kids, he found himself compared unfavorably with Webber: “I kept hearing ‘He’s too soft’ or ‘He’s not an athlete.’ ” His high-school coach was aware of the problems he had when he moved from white high-school games to the black A.A.U. circuit. “I remember trying to add some flair to his game,” Keener says, “but it was like teaching a classical dancer to do hip-hop. I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the ego for it.”

Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people. “On Martin Luther King Day, everyone in class would look at me like I was supposed to know who he was and why he was important,” Battier said. “When we had an official school picture, every other kid was given a comb. I was the only one given a pick.” He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: “I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit in!” And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ‘‘Everything I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this,” he said. “What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game.”

Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn’t embrace the starring role. “He had a tendency to defer,” Keener says. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we lost his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors.” Even when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit. But it is a mistake to see in his detachment from self an absence of ego, or ambition, or even desire for attention. When Battier finished telling me the story of this unpleasant period in his life, he said: “Chris Webber won three state championships, the Mr. Basketball Award and the Naismith Award. I won three state championships, Mr. Basketball and the Naismith Awards. All the things they said I wasn’t able to do, when I was in the eighth grade.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“Pretty much everyone,” he said.

“White people?”

“No,” he said. “The street.”

As the third quarter began, Battier’s face appeared overhead, on the Jumbotron, where he hammed it up and exhorted the crowd. Throughout the game he was up on the thing more than any other player: plugging teeth-whitening formulas, praising local jewelers, making public-service announcements, telling the fans to make noise. When I mentioned to a Rockets’ staff member that Battier seemed to have far more than his fair share of big-screen appearances, he said, “Probably because he’s the only one who’ll do them.”

I spent the second half with Sam Hinkie, the vice president of basketball operations and the head of basketball analytics in the Rockets’ front office. The game went back and forth. Bryant kept missing more shots than he made. Neither team got much of a lead. More remarkable than the game were Hinkie’s reactions — and it soon became clear that while he obviously wanted the Rockets to win, he was responding to different events on the court than the typical Rockets (or N.B.A.) fan was.

“I care a lot more about what ought to have happened than what actually happens,” said Hinkie, who has an M.B.A. from Stanford. The routine N.B.A. game, he explained, is decided by a tiny percentage of the total points scored. A team scores on average about 100 points a game, but two out of three N.B.A. games are decided by fewer than 6 points — two or three possessions. The effect of this, in his mind, was to raise significantly the importance of every little thing that happened. The Lakers’ Trevor Ariza, who makes 29 percent of his 3-point shots, hit a crazy 3-pointer, and as the crowd moaned, Hinkie was almost distraught. “That Ariza shot, that is really painful,” he said. “Because it’s a near-random event. And it’s a 3-point swing.” When Bryant drove to the basket, instead of being forced to take a jump shot, he said: “That’s three-eighths of a point. These things accumulate.”

In this probabilistic spirit we watched the battle between Battier and Bryant. From Hinkie’s standpoint, it was going extremely well: “With most guys, Shane can kick them from their good zone to bad zone, but with Kobe you’re just picking your poison. It’s the epitome of, Which way do you want to die?” Only the Rockets weren’t dying. Battier had once again turned Bryant into a less-efficient machine of death. Even when the shots dropped, they came from the places on the court where the Rockets’ front office didn’t mind seeing them drop. “That’s all you can do,” Hinkie said, after Bryant sank an 18-footer. “Get him to an inefficient spot and contest.” And then all of a sudden it was 97-95, Lakers, with a bit more than three minutes to play, and someone called timeout. “We’re in it,” Hinkie said, happily. “And some of what happens from here on will be randomness.”

The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I looked up at the scoreboard:

Bryant: 30.

Battier: 0.

Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,” he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12. No matter what happens now, none of our coaches will say, ‘If only we could have gotten a little more out of Battier.’ ”

One statistical rule of thumb in basketball is that a team leading by more points than there are minutes left near the end of the game has an 80 percent chance of winning. If your team is down by more than 6 points halfway through the final quarter, and you’re anxious to beat the traffic, you can leave knowing that there is slightly less than a 20 percent chance you’ll miss a victory; on the other hand, if you miss a victory, it will have been an improbable and therefore sensational one. At no point on this night has either team had enough of a lead to set fans, or even Rockets management, to calculating their confidence intervals — but then, with 2:27 to play, the Lakers went up by 4: 99-95. Then they got the ball back. The ball went to Bryant, and Battier shaded him left — into Yao Ming. Bryant dribbled and took the best shot he could, from Battier’s perspective: a long 2-point jump shot, off the dribble, while moving left. He missed, the Rockets ran back the other way, Rafer Alston drove the lane and hit a floater: 99-97, and 1:13 on the clock. The Lakers missed another shot. Alston grabbed the rebound and called timeout with 59 seconds left.

Whatever the Rockets planned went instantly wrong, when the inbound pass, as soon as it was caught by the Rockets’ Carl Landry, was swatted away by the Lakers. The ball was loose, bodies flew everywhere.

55 . . . 54 . . . 53 . . .

On the side of the court opposite the melee, Battier froze. The moment he saw that the loose ball was likely to be secured by a teammate — but before it was secured — he sprinted to the corner.

50 . . . 49 . . . 48 . . .

The 3-point shot from the corner is the single most efficient shot in the N.B.A. One way the Rockets can tell if their opponents have taken to analyzing basketball in similar ways as they do is their attitude to the corner 3: the smart teams take a lot of them and seek to prevent their opponents from taking them. In basketball there is only so much you can plan, however, especially at a street-ball moment like this. As it happened, Houston’s Rafer Alston was among the most legendary street-ball players of all time — known as Skip 2 My Lou, a nickname he received after a single spectacular move at Rucker Park, in Harlem. “Shane wouldn’t last in street ball because in street ball no one wants to see” his game, Alston told me earlier. “You better give us something to ooh and ahh about. No one cares about someone who took a charge.”

The Rockets’ offense had broken down, and there was no usual place for Alston, still back near the half-court line, to go with the ball. The Lakers’ defense had also broken down; no player was where he was meant to be. The only person exactly where he should have been — wide open, standing at the most efficient spot on the floor from which to shoot — was Shane Battier. When Daryl Morey spoke of basketball intelligence, a phrase slipped out: “the I.Q. of where to be.” Fitting in on a basketball court, in the way Battier fits in, requires the I.Q. of where to be. Bang: Alston hit Battier with a long pass. Bang: Battier shot the 3, guiltlessly. Nothing but net.

Rockets 100, Lakers 99.

43 . . . 42 . . . 41 . . .

At this moment, the Rockets’ front office would later calculate, the team’s chances of winning rose from 19.2 percent to 72.6 percent. One day some smart person will study the correlation between shifts in probabilities and levels of noise, but for now the crowd was ignorantly berserk: it sounded indeed like the largest crowd in the history of Houston’s Toyota Center. Bryant got the ball at half-court and dribbled idly, searching for his opening. This was his moment, the one great players are said to live for, when everyone knows he’s going to take the shot, and he takes it anyway. On the other end of the floor it wasn’t the shooter who mattered but the shot. Now the shot was nothing, the shooter everything.

33 . . . 32 . . . 31 . . .

Bryant — 12 for 31 on the night — took off and drove to the right, his strength, in the middle of the lane. Battier cut him off. Bryant tossed the ball back out to Derek Fisher, out of shooting range.

30 . . . 29 . . .

Like everyone else in the place, Battier assumed that the game was still in Bryant’s hands. If he gave the ball up, it was only so that he might get it back. Bryant popped out. He was now a good four feet beyond the 3-point line, or nearly 30 feet from the basket.

28 . . .

Bryant caught the ball and, 27.4 feet from the basket, the Rockets’ front office would later determine, leapt. Instantly his view of that basket was blocked by Battier’s hand. This was not an original situation. Since the 2002-3 season, Bryant had taken 51 3-pointers at the very end of close games from farther than 26.75 feet from the basket. He had missed 86.3 percent of them. A little over a year ago the Lakers lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers after Bryant missed a 3 from 28.4 feet. Three nights from now the Lakers would lose to the Orlando Magic after Bryant missed a shot from 27.5 feet that would have tied the game. It was a shot Battier could live with, even if it turned out to be good.

Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.

Yes Way, Jose: Calder-On Track for Best Free Throw Percentage in NBA Season

2009-02-11T21:31:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I wrote a story about how Yao Ming leads a litany of 7-foot-3+ players in career free throw shooting accuracy. Impressively, the top six free thow shooting "giants" were born outside of the United States.

Until this year, though, Americans dominated free throw shooting excellence within a season - considering all heights. (Abdul-Rauf changed his name from Chris Jackson). This year, though, Toronto's Spanish point guard has shot to the head of the pack on the strength of an 87-consecutive free throw streak:

1.	Jose Calderon	.9800	2008-09
2.	Calvin Murphy*	.9581	1980-81
3.	Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf	.9563	1993-94
4.	Jeff Hornacek	.9500	1999-00
5.	Mark Price	.9475	1992-93
6.	Mark Price	.9474	1991-92
7.	Rick Barry*	.9467	1978-79
8.	Ernie DiGregorio	.9452	1976-77
9.	Maurice Williams	.9437	2008-09
10.	Ray Allen	.9434	2008-09

(n.b. Canadian Steve Nash is currently 11 and Serbian Peja Stojakovic is 21).
(source: basketball-reference.com)

His streak 0f 87, which ended Jan. 30th, places him 2nd in the all-time list for consectutive free throws made:

N.B.A. Consecutive Free Throws Records
97 straight	Micheal Williams, Minnesota Timberwolves, 3/24/1993-11/9/1993 (two seasons)
81 straight	Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, Denver Nuggets, 1993-11/16/1993 (two seasons)
78 straight	Calvin Murphy, Houston Roskets, 12/27/1980-2/28/1981 (one season)
77 straight	Mark Price, Cleveland Cavaliers, 1993 (one season)
75 straight	Ricky Pierce, Seattle SuperSonics, ends 12/13/1991 (one season)
74 straight	Steve Nash, Phoenix Suns, 4/6/07 to 11/30/07 (two seasons; 21 in 2006-07, 53 in 2007-08)
73 straight	Caron Butler, Washington Wizards, to 2/3/2008 (one season)
71 straight	Larry Bird, Boston Celtics, 12/19/1989-2/13/1990 (one season)
67 straight	Terrell Brandon, Cleveland Cavaliers, 12/8/1995-1/5/1996 (one season)
67 straight	Jeff Hornacek, Phoenix Suns, 11/12/1999-1/6/2000 (one season)
66 straight	Peja Stojakovic, Minnesota Timberwolves, 3/23-5/10/2004 (41 sraight reg. season + 15 straight playoffs)

(n.b. 3 international players now fill the top 13 including Calderon)
(source: mindspring.com)

Here's chicly crafted video of Calderon's impeccable shooting form:

Here's a nice break-down of Calderson's mechanics by the ABA's all-time leader Rick Barry.

And here's video of the miss itself. Notice it happens only a few days after the above video, just as Calderson said he feared it would:

Sweetest Dunk by Player Over 35 in History?

2009-02-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

I'd vote a resounding yes.
36-year-old Grant Hill, who was a 1996 gold medalist, must have drunk deeply of the elixir of youth for this one.
He unleashes a flood of fury upon poor Noah's head.

The above highlight made me search on highlights from Hill's, er, golden years.
I had forgotten how utterly sweet Grant was in the '90s. His balance was impeccable; he weilded it like a ginsu knife when cutting down the opposition's lane...

American Players Possibly Going to Europe

2009-02-01T08:19:00.000-08:00

A nice update from cbssports.com:

Europe still option for recruits, but hardly a vacation

Europe still option for recruits, but hardly a vacation Jan. 13, 2009
By Gary Parrish

So this Brandon Jennings Experiment isn't going quite as planned.

That's what you've heard, right?


Brandon Jennings (left) has struggled some to keep up while playing in Europe. (Getty Images)

That while his classmates -- like Georgetown's Greg Monroe, UCLA's Jrue Holiday and Wake Forest's Al-Farouq Aminu -- are here in the United States making serious impacts on possible Final Four teams, Jennings is over in Europe struggling with the adjustment, averaging only 8.9 points per game and turning the ball over just as much as he's recording assists.

Consequently, you've heard the European clubs have become skeptical of signing more American prospects interested in avoiding college while they wait the mandatory one year post graduation to enter the NBA Draft. And you've heard the market has been diminished for the crop of current high school seniors curious to see whether there's a paycheck waiting in Italy, Greece, Israel or Russia.

That's what you've heard, right?

Well ...

"That's not true," insisted Sonny Vaccaro. "I can tell you, none of that is true."

Vaccaro answered the phone Monday night with the same excitement he always possesses. He explained how he and his wife, Pam, are looking forward to attending President Obama's inauguration next week, then he transitioned right into his favorite topic, i.e., the inner-workings of the basketball world that have featured his fingerprints for decades. Yes, the Godfather of summer hoops turned anti-NCAA crusader is still very much involved in the sport, as the world learned last summer when Vaccaro helped broker the historic deal that made Jennings the first American to choose Europe instead of college. And now Vaccaro is likely just months away from helping secure a similar deal for a similarly heralded high school star, which was the focus of our late conversation.

Here's the gist of it:

• Vaccaro said he had breakfast Monday morning with a table of people working on behalf of or in association with European clubs, and that there are "six or seven" clubs considering offering a contract to an American more interested in spending at least one season in Europe than college. Furthermore, Vaccaro said there are people "right now" scouting various high school players, and that this will continue through March.

"They will make offers," Vaccaro said. "They will make offers (to players) they think can play."

• Though Vaccaro declined to name names -- "Now is not the time for that," he explained -- the 69-year-old legend was very specific about the number of prospects interested in exploring a jump to Europe. He said there are exactly "five" high school seniors who have either contacted him or had somebody working on their behalf contact him, and that there are "eight" underclassmen (juniors, sophomores and/or freshmen) who have also reached out.

"I can say this," Vaccaro said. "(According to) the recruiting things you look at, all of these kids would be considered top 10 prospects in their class. These are kids who are interested in playing professional basketball, and (ones who are) capable of doing it."

As far as this senior class, there is no consensus top 10 list, per se. But the prospects most commonly identified as "top 10-caliber" recruits are Derrick Favors (uncommitted), John Wall (uncommitted), John Henson (committed to North Carolina), Xavier Henry (committed to Memphis), Renardo Sidney (uncommitted), DeMarcus Cousins (uncommitted), Lance Stephenson (uncommitted), Kenny Boynton (committed to Florida), Abdul Gaddy (committed to Washington), Avery Bradley (committed to Texas) and Jordan Hamilton (committed to Texas). Again, Vaccaro declined to name names. But CBSSports.com has previously reported that the prospects who remain uncommitted -- specifically Wall, Sidney and Stephenson -- are the most likely to explore Europe as an option, though it's worth noting that Vaccaro insisted the group of prospects who are intrigued by Europe isn't necessarily limited to uncommitted players.

"I've given teams the names of the kids I think would be worth looking at," Vaccaro said. "That, I've already done."

• One of the common misconceptions of all this, Vaccaro said, is that the European clubs now realize how difficult it is even for a player of Jennings' caliber to transition from American high school basketball to European professional basketball, and that's why options will be limited going forward. But Vaccaro said the actual finances of a deal are barely an issue, because the European clubs put buyouts in contracts that essentially allow them to recoup any financial investment.

For example, let's pretend a European club wanted to offer John Wall, the nation's top point guard, a $1 million contract to play professionally next season. What it might do is put a $500,000 buyout in the contract, meaning if Wall was then selected No. 1 in the 2010 NBA Draft, whichever NBA franchise picked him would subsequently send $500,000 to the European club that initially signed him, meaning the European club would be out only $500,000.

That's how this stuff can work, give or take a few hundred thousand dollars.

"It's been under-reported in the American media, but the buyout pretty much protects the teams," Vaccaro said. "They're going to get most of their money back on the buyout. So money will not be the reason (a European club doesn't sign an American high school player). They might not do it because they don't think there's a player who can help them win games. But money won't be the reason, because they'll get most of that money back."

So what does this all mean?

It means that some group of college fans is almost certainly destined to be disappointed by a prized prospect shunning school the way Arizona fans were when Jennings opted for Europe. It also means the trend will likely continue for many years to come, and that the only thing that has changed in the five months that Jennings has been in Europe is that the difficulty of the task has been underscored for all to see.

Remember, Jennings really is averaging only 8.9 points per game, and he really has turned the ball over just as much as he has recorded assists. That alone proves that playing professional basketball in Europe is much more difficult than playing college basketball in the United States, and then there's the mental side of it that Vaccaro believes is actually the hardest part.

"There was a game where Brandon didn't play (at all) the whole game; that stuff happens in Europe, and you have to know how to handle it," Vaccaro said. "Brandon handled it. But if you're a prima donna who can't handle it, you shouldn't even do it. That guy won't make it. So while I will help any kid who asks for my help, I won't recommend this to a kid who I don't believe in my heart can make the mental part of this journey.

"But I can tell you, Brandon's experience has not hurt (the next batch of) kids," Vaccaro said. "It's just helped them understand that doing this isn't easy."

Japanese Men Eager to Fly?

2009-01-26T15:39:00.000-08:00

Many Japanese love American basketball superstars - Jordan, LeBron, Wade... hell, one - Kobe - is even named after a Japanese city (and a type of steak). The Japanese welcomed 24 nations to their homeland during the 2006 Basketball World Championships but reserved special love for the super-athletic American celebrities.

The amount of adulation doesn't differ much if you go across the sea to China or Korea, but China at least has its own NBA players to adulate. Japan, though, has only one former NBA player - Yuta Tabuse, whose official blog looks considerably better than his game.

In the video below, a couple of things are obvious:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

1) Japanese game show audiences relish mounting tension.

2) While I have never seen a Japanese player actually dunk, that doesn't mean there isn't some collective chip on the nation's ego summoning some of its bravest to venture a 30-foot, trampoline-fueled flight across a game show stage for a prize, yes, but - more importantly - validation that the Japanese people need not always look to America for basketball highlights.

Jennings Frustrated?

2009-01-26T09:18:00.000-08:00

Not all his honey and milk in the land of wine and dine for Brandon Jennings as the latter half of his Euroleague season begins.

He is currently averaging 8.2 points, 1.5 rebounds and 1.2 assists in 10 games of Euroleague play.

Here are excerpts from a recent email ojmayonnaise of brandonjennings.net posted:

“I’ve gotten paid on time once this year.“

“They treat me like I’m a little kid. They don’t see me as a man. If you get on a good team, you might not play a lot. Some nights you’ll play a lot; some nights you won’t play at all. That’s just how it is.”

“I don’t see too many kids doing it. It’s tough man, I’ll tell you that. It can break you.”

“My role is to play D and take open shots — that’s it, and I’ve accepted that role.”

It must be pretty humbling for such a creative playmaker to feel like his role is the same as Mario Elie's.
I think he'd feel differently if he had more games like he did below, last month, in which he played a season-high 29 minutes and scored 13 points against Tau Ceramica:

Fernandez First Foreigner as NBA Dunk Contestant

2009-01-19T20:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, what a time for Firsts.
A couple of days before Barack Obama became the nation's first black president, Rudy Fernandez became the first non-US born player to participate in the NBA's dunk contest.
That's 90 players in 23 years (no contests in '98 or '99) since 1984, folks. It's not like foreigners can't dunk - here's ample evidence of the aerials arts being practiced in the Euroleague. And in the NBA, there have been a few foreigner players with the ability to open bomb bay doors over rims or do nasty things in the air (e.g. Mikeal Pietrus, Manu Ginobli, Nene, Sarunas Marciulionis (look at the number six here), but none of them - save Ginobili - were ever popular enough league-wide to be voted into the dunk contest. And while Ginobili is a nice dunker, he's more known for being an acrobatic lay-up maestro than a devil-possessed ball detonator.

Fernandez came into the league with a reputation for doing R-rated things to the rim and, so far, he hasn't disappointed. An extremely popular player in Spain (where he played with Ricky Rubio for DKV Joventut last year and was the national team's most explosive perimeter threat), the weed-thin Iberian has also generated a legion of American fans with this bouncy exploits.
And so when the final spot of the four-person dunk contest came down to fan voting, Fernandez got in on the strength of 500,000 strong.

And so, without further adieu, in honor of the wicked, wicked wonders Rudy works whilst in air, here's a sample of his finest dunkmanship:

From the AFP:

The 23-year-old guard was selected through an online vote by more than 500,000 fans at the league's website, putting Fernandez into the four-man event on February 14 at Phoenix, where the All-Star Game will be played the next day.

Fernandez will join defending dunk champion Dwight Howard of the Orlando Magic, New York Knicks guard Nate Robinson and Memphis forward Rudy Gay. Robinson won the 2006 competition and Gay competed in last year's event.

This was the first time NBA fans had a chance to select a participant. Others in the event had been named by the league.

Fernandez received 251,868 votes with Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook next at 147,279 and Milwaukee's Joe Alexander third on 114,963 in a competition between NBA newcomers.

Fans will have the final say in the winner of the event by casting votes by text message or at the NBA website.

Barack Ball

2009-01-13T18:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a fascinating exploration of Barack Obama's basketball background from Sports Illustrated. There are plenty of international overtures, from Barack's last gift from his father - a basketball - to two lefty players he his game has been compared to - Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. From the video I've seen, though, I'd go with American Delonte West:

The piece asserts that Obama's primary victories in N.C. in Indiana may in part have derived from his ability to connect with those states' basketball-loving populations. One wonders if there wasn't a similar link at play with the world's embrace of Obamamania. If McCain had truly been a saavy politician in search of international love, he might have tried dribbling a soccer ball on his overseas trips....

While working on the piece for this week's SI about how basketball made Barack Obama who he is, I made sure to ask people I spoke with -- from Obama's high school coach back in Hawaii; to brother-in-law and Oregon State coach Craig Robinson; to pickup buddies in Chicago; to Baller-in-Chief.com webmaster Claude Johnson -- who the 44th President of the United States most plays like.

It was like administering a Rorschach test. Check out the Barack O'Balla mixtape and see who pops into your mind.

When I suggested an Internet poster's nomination of San Antonio's ManuGinobili, Johnson came back at me with, "Right team, wrong guy." Manu may be a lefty, but he's too mercurial, Johnson says; in Obama he sees instead the even temper and elegance of point guard Tony Parker.

Chicago investment executive John Rogers, who participated in the legendary pickup game in which Robinson vetted Obama as a mate for his sister, Michelle, cited a couple of ex-New York Knicks, one old school and one new -- Dick Barnett and Jamal Crawford.

Obama's erect carriage and lefthandedness led me to think of Lionel "Train" Hollins, who commanded the Portland Trail Blazers' backcourt when the kid then known as "Barry O'Bomber" was making his way through high school.

I also came upon references to Dennis Johnson, Kenny Anderson and Delonte West -- in the latter case, an Ivy League version, "without the neck tattoos."

But we did wind up with a consensus of sorts. Robinson weighed all the evidence -- size, savvy, lefthandedness and self-possession -- and came up with Lenny Wilkens, the Hall of Fame guard who campaigned for the candidate. Read the piece and you'll see that Chris McLachlin, Obama's coach at Honolulu's Punahou School, also buys into the Wilkens analogy, even though the teenage Barry, who spent his senior season on Coach Mac's varsity squad, had too unstructured a game to bag much playing time.

These analogies are very much in the eye of the beholder, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that politics might color a beholder's eye. A John McCain attack ad last summer suggesting that Obama didn't respect the troops featured footage of the three-pointer he bottomed out in Kuwait. The ad's purpose, as New York's John Heilemann put it, was to draw a portrait of "a blinged-up, camera-hungry, NBA shooting guard, Allen Iverson with a Harvard Law degree."

At the other end of the spectrum, there's the "Under-crwn" T-shirt that filmmaker Spike Lee rocked on the floor of the Democratic Convention in August. An inner-city classic, it features Obama as an airborne Vince Carter and McCain as a hapless Frederic Weis, the 7-foot-2 Frenchman whom Carter posterized during the 2000 Olympics.

Each offered a fleeting thrill at the partisan margins, but both are grotesques. By the end of the campaign Obama was neither Iverson nor Carter. He had closed the deal with the electorate by selling himself essentially as Wilkens, who for several seasons in Seattle was literally "a coach on the floor," and in 1979, from the bench, guided the Sonics to an NBA title.

Basketball people have never flinched at identifying black guys who "play white" (Paul Silas, Quinn Buckner, Charles Oakley) and white guys who "play black" (Billy Cunningham, Rex Chapman, Jason Williams). The "plays white/plays black" parlor game becomes even more challenging when you factor in racial persona as well as playing style. As a teenager Obama had what he has described as "an overtly black game." As Robinson suggested in an interview with HBO's Bryant Gumbel during the campaign, as ballplayers age they're likely to play a more and more "white" game, and Obama is no exception.

What's intriguing about Obama at age 47 is that his playing style has morphed into something as racially ambiguous as his persona.

It will be fascinating to watch Obama's relationship with the game unspool during his occupancy of the White House, and to see who snares coveted invitations to participate in "the First Run."

But even if basketball helps him develop and cement new relationships in Washington, there'll be a throwback quality to the role of the game in his life, whether he's running full court at Camp David, or playing at some random D.C. community center, like the one he and aide Reggie Love, the former Duke captain, dropped in on last weekend.

As Obama's sister Maya Soetoro-Ng put it to me, basketball offers the President-Elect "constancy and kinship with friends, a way to recline into his past."

The path is a familiar one: Ancestry in Kansas; influences from Africa; a kind of apotheosis in Michael Jordan's Chicago; eventual acclamation by the world. And while, no, basketball itself won't be sworn in next Tuesday as the 44th president of the U.S., the game has played an outsized role in forming the man who will. Basketball, says his brother-in-law, Oregon State coach Craig Robinson, is why Barack Obama "is sitting where he's sitting."

The game provided space in which the young Obama explored his identity as an African-American. He won a reputation as a consensus builder while playing recreationally in college and law school. A pickup game with Robinson did nothing less than confirm Obama as a worthy suitor to his wife-to-be. In Chicago, basketball helped him connect with the South Siders he worked with as a community organizer and with the circle of professionals who would help launch his political career. He began to scratch out notes for his 2004 Democratic Convention speech, the one that loosed his career from the D league of state politics, while in a hotel room watching the NBA on TNT. As for the two reddest states Obama flipped in the '08 general election, Indiana and North Carolina, each narrowly chose him after he made a basketball lover's case to basketball-loving people.

The more than 300,000 people who have watched the Barack O-Balla mixtape on YouTube, with its highlights from high school through Election Day, might describe Obama's game as old-school schoolyard: reverse layups, double-pumps in the lane, mambos off the dribble and a signature fake-right, drive-left move. (Obama also shoots a decent midrange jumper, though his high school nickname, Barry O'Bomber, is a misnomer.) Ask whom he resembles, and an array of answers comes back. Claude Johnson, founder of the website Baller-in-Chief.com, sees the elegance and even temper of San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker. Others receiving votes include Kenny Anderson, Dick Barnett, Manu Ginóbili, Lionel Hollins and Delonte West (sans neck tattoos).

Robinson weighs the evidence -- 6' 1 1/2", savvy, lefthanded -- and comes up with Lenny Wilkens, the Hall of Fame playmaker who campaigned for Obama and whose autograph graces the basketball that decorated the President-elect's spare Chicago transition office. "Lenny was a thicker player and Barack is very slight, even if [defensive] physicality doesn't bother him," says Robinson. "But the calmness of Lenny, that's Barack. He knows the game well enough to fit in and isn't out of his element athletically."

In the same way that his candidacy confounded much of the political wisdom about race, Obama's game at age 47 makes a muddle of categories. "Here you have a laced-up professional off the court -- a 'white' persona -- who throws behind-the-back passes and busts crossovers," says Johnson. "You'd think he'd have a basically stiff game, like Tim Duncan's, but no, he's showing up at a North Carolina practice or playing ball with [NBA guard Chris] Duhon. So the guy on the street says, 'Whoa, he's got a little game!' It's part of his appeal."

Obama remains something short of the total hoops package. He can't dunk. He doesn't have a nickname. His usual getup of black sweatpants and gray T-shirt (call it the Police Academy Trainee look) isn't likely to set a trend. But he does stick his nose in it. In Kuwait last July he didn't merely visit U.S. troops, he swished a three for them -- first try, no warmup. And as president he'll keep the counsel of a roster's worth of former ballplayers, in and out of his Cabinet, many better at the game than he.

Elizabeth Alexander is handling poetry duties at the Inauguration, but Obama himself could serve ably as bard of the new First Sport. In Dreams from My Father, his 1995 memoir, he captures both the cadences and the beguiling essence of the game: "And something else, too, something nobody talked about: a way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that's how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say, 'Damn....' "

Hoop Dreams from My Father

Obama's father, Barack, a Kenyan exchange student at the University of Hawaii, left his wife and son soon after the latter's birth in 1961. White, Kansas-born Ann Dunham was left to raise Barry first in the islands, then in Indonesia, where she moved in 1967 after marrying another exchange student, Lolo Soetoro. His mother, Obama writes in Dreams, believed that "to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear... [and] we were to carry with style."

Yet one day, roaming the library of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, where his mother worked, Barry read in a magazine of a black man's unavailing efforts to lighten his skin and the physical and emotional scars that followed. By age 10, sent back to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and attend Punahou, the elite private school to which he won a scholarship, Barry sensed a gap between his mother's romantic notion of blackness and the signals society sent his way. As for raising oneself to be a black man in America, he remembers, "no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." Aside from those stationed with the military, Hawaii in the mid-1970s could count barely 400 black residents.

Soon two events conspired to help Obama address his alienation. In December '71, during a visit that would constitute Barry's only memory of the man, his father gave him a basketball as a Christmas present. A photo survives of the two of them posing with the ball before the Christmas tree. Barry would come to regard that basketball as a charge as much as a gift.

The second event would take place a few months later, after Barry's grandfather scored two scarce tickets to watch Hawaii play. Between 1970 and '72 the Rainbows put together a 47-8 record and received the university's first NIT and NCAA invitations. With aloha-print shorts and bountiful Afros, the Fabulous Five averaged 90 points a game as the pep band played Jesus Christ Superstar and fans spilled into the aisles. As Obama recounts in Dreams, "I had watched the players in warmups, still boys themselves but to me poised and confident warriors, chuckling to each other about some inside joke, glancing over the heads of fawning fans to wink at the girls on the sidelines, casually flipping layups or tossing high-arcing jumpers until the whistle blew and the centers jumped and the players joined in furious battle."

This, he decided, was a world into which he could fit his young black self. By the time he hit his teens, he was taking his father's gift to school, shooting between classes and over the lunch hour. Teachers and students soon remarked that his gait had taken on a ballplayer's bounce, a suppleness of foot that can be seen today when he bounds onto a stage. As he grew more confident, he drifted to the school's lower courts, even after basketball practice. There, and at the university gym and at playgrounds around town, he would engage the island's best adult players. Chris McLachlin, Punahou's varsity coach, can't recall a player who loved the game more.

Posted: Tuesday January 13, 2009 9:18AM; Updated: Tuesday January 13, 2009 12:08PM

Alexander Wolff

VIEWPOINT

The Audacity of Hoops (cont.)

In those pickup games, Obama has written, "a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up. That you didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions -- like hurt or fear -- you didn't want them to see." An airy civility prevails in Hawaii -- No talk stink goes an idiom in the local pidgin -- but the playground offered an alien rhetoric that suited Barry just fine.

Obama admits to "living out a caricature of black male adolescence" with his embrace of the game. A Punahou senior who hoped to become a lawyer watched Obama, two years younger, inscribe a parting message in his yearbook: Get that law degree, and someday you can help me sue my NBA team for more money. But even if Obama played "with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent," as he writes, that passion came with perks. "At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own. It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn't be a disadvantage."

With all those hours of play he developed what he'd later call "an overtly black game." One of his favorite R & B songs was William DeVaughn's Be Thankful for What You Got, a mid-'70s ode to inner-city pose-copping, with its invocation of Diggin' the scene/With a gangsta lean. Obama's immersion in basketball was, in fact, a kind of pose. Eventually he would have to apply the message in the song title to his experience as a senior on McLachlin's Buff 'n' Blue varsity.

He had played jayvee as a sophomore and made Punahou's second varsity as a forward the next season. (The school fielded multiple teams in some sports to accommodate its huge enrollment.) After having learned the game on the playground, Obama ran up against McLachlin, a disciple of John Wooden, Dean Smith and Pete Carril. "We had some conflict," Obama told SI last year. "Some tension." A black friend, ratifying Obama's belief that he should be getting more playing time, hinted that Obama was now stuck in that other hoary African-American hoops narrative: Black Prometheus, Straitjacketed by the Man.

In McLachlin's telling, it was simpler and less sinister than that. "He was really, really good and could have started for any other team in the state," the coach says. "But we were really good, and it was so hard to break into that group. Three kids went on to Division I scholarships, two at his position." McLachlin, then in his early 30s, believes that if they had met later in his coaching career, Obama would have had a more rewarding experience. "I would have made a place for a player like him," McLachlin says. "But in those early days I was much more conventional. Play five, maybe one or two subs, go to the bench with a big lead. Obviously it was frustrating for him. So he negotiated."

During his senior season Obama led a delegation of pine-riders to McLachlin's office to make the case on their behalf for more playing time. "I reminded him it wasn't about him, it was about the team," McLachlin says, "and the end result was that we had a pretty amazing year." The Punahou team that beat Moanalua High 60-28 for the 1979 state title is regarded as one of the greatest in Hawaii history. In that game Obama missed a free throw and scored on a garbage-time breakaway.

That season, Obama told SI a year ago, he learned about "being part of something and finishing it up. And I learned a lot about discipline, about handling disappointments, about being more team-oriented and realizing that not everything is about you."

McLachlin agrees. "Despite the fact that there was pushback, he never lost sight of what the goal was," the coach says. "We sometimes don't get the lessons teachers teach us until years later."

When he returned to Punahou in 2004 to address a packed chapel, Obama admitted to having been "kind of a pain in the butt when I was here." From the dais the old second-stringer found McLachlin in the shadows. "Coach Mac, is that you?" said the new U.S. Senator from Illinois. "I've gotta tell you something. I really wasn't as good as I thought I was."

McLachlin felt a weight leave his shoulders. "As much as I berate myself for my own lack of maturity as a coach at that time, obviously some stuff stuck with him and helped shape his character," he says. "I didn't screw him up, is what I mean."

Obama has alluded to the many hours he devoted to basketball as time he might have spent rounding himself out. "I had bought into a set of false assumptions about what it means to be black," he has confessed. The game had nonetheless dug its hooks into him. And while by the time he left Punahou he knew how to get lost in a book, discuss geopolitics with friends and write up something for the literary magazine -- clique-conscious classmates wondered whether Barry wanted to be a jock or a brain -- one phrase leaps from his senior yearbook page. It's a kind of epitaph for his time in Hawaii: We go play hoop.

Community on the Court

If a presidential campaign is an MRI of the soul, as Obama strategist David Axelrod likes to say, a pickup basketball game is a polygraph of the heart. Obama's experience with the organized game would total three high school seasons, only one of them on Punahou's top varsity, and that largely on the bench. Thus he's less a retired ballplayer looking to keep in shape than what's known as a baller -- a product of basketball's speakeasies, not its licensed establishments.

"If he'd been in organized ball, it's very possible he'd have gotten the whole thing out of his system," Johnson says. "He might say he's better now than he ever was, but there's pathos there. You're still trying to prove you're good enough to start on your high school team. In basketball you're continually trying to prove yourself, and in pickup even more so, because there is no record. You can't say, 'Oh, I'm 19-1.' It's all on you."

Pickup ballplayers don't talk as much as golfers during a round, but they more quickly reach judgments about temperament and collaborative aptitude. And there's the emotional containment that ballers learn to bring to the court, even if only to ensure that no one can sneak up behind you to see emotions... you didn't want them to see. Asked the boxers-versus-briefs question, Obama gave the pitch-perfect pickup baller's reply: "I don't answer those humiliating questions, but whichever one it is, I look good in 'em."

Organized basketball, particularly in high school, is an exercise in submission to social control. Pickup ball, by contrast, involves collective governance and constant conflict resolution. It is, to borrow Sarah Palin's phrase, community organizing in which everyone has "actual responsibilities." For all its associations with inner-city pathologies, pickup ball harks back to a traditional time, when kids weren't squired to playdates or stashed with third parties but made their way to the park on their own, picked teams and -- as Obama did -- grew up along the way.

"There's an ethical undertone in pickup that people miss," Robinson says. "The game has to be played fairly or it breaks down. You practice an honor code, making your own calls and giving them up. If Barack travels, he'll give it up, not sneak it by you. You play with hundreds of guys who'd never do that. It all gets back to how you can tell a guy's character on the court."

One of the flaws Obama owns up to is "a chronic restlessness." As he made his fitful way after high school, however, basketball abided. He spent two years at Occidental, a small liberal arts college near Pasadena. The first fall he worked out informally with 15 or so freshman hopefuls, many of whom remember his stylish game. He never was on the school team, but he played "noonball" with faculty, students and staff. As Eric Newhall, a professor who played in those games, has put it, "The greatest contribution Occidental has made to American democracy was to help Barack Obama decide that his future wasn't in basketball."

By his sophomore year Obama had thrown himself into classwork and antiapartheid activism, and begun to map a path east. He transferred to Columbia and became more serious about his future, though he still made pilgrimages around Manhattan "to play on courts I'd once read about." After graduation he took a job on Chicago's South Side, where he brought together white priests, black pastors and civic leaders to solve common problems. It was frustrating work marked by intermittent victories. For example, he used basketball as a means to get through to an on-the-edge adolescent who was scaling back his expectations for life.

Several years later, at Harvard Law, Obama joined a group of law students who played against inmates at a nearby prison, where the cons lining the court made sure their visitors knew how many packs of cigarettes rode on the outcome. When he became the first African-American elected to head the Harvard Law Review, he won a 19th-ballot victory largely because conservative and liberal factions both believed he'd give them a fair hearing. At least a few fellow students had taken his measure on the court. "He was a passer despite the fact he could score," remembers classmate Andrew Feldstein. "Inclusive is the best way to describe him."

Soon after Obama began his second tour in Chicago, as a summer associate with the law firm of Sidley & Austin, he started seeing a lawyer there named Michelle Robinson. She would introduce him to John Rogers, an investment executive who had captained the team at Princeton; her brother would connect Obama to Marty Nesbitt, a parking garage baron and former small-college player. Both would help bankroll Obama's plunge into elective politics.

But before matters between Barack and Michelle could advance too far, she had a test to administer. Having grown up listening to her father and her brother, a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, insist that a man's character gets laid bare on the court, she hatched a plan. Craig Robinson rounded up a quorum of friends of varied abilities. "I didn't want the game to be too intimidating," he says, because it would've been painful to tell Michelle the prospect with the odd name hadn't made the grade. He needn't have worried. Obama found that sweet spot between not shooting every time and not always passing to Craig. In campaign appearances Robinson would retell the story with a kicker: "If I could trust him with my sister, you can trust him with your vote."

He Got Next

In the spring of 2007 the Obama campaign looked like tiny Milan (Ind.) High next to Hillary Clinton's Muncie Central. The director of the candidate's New Hampshire operation wanted to have Obama play ball with high school kids around the Granite State. Axelrod, who has a track record of persuading white voters to support black candidates, balked. "People didn't know him well yet, and I didn't want him to play into a stereotype," he says. But after losing primaries to Clinton in Ohio and Texas on March 4, the campaign looked at a two-month gap before critical votes in Indiana and North Carolina. "We wanted to do campaigning that got us closer to the ground -- more diners and less platform speeches," Axelrod says. "Basketball was a no-brainer. Besides, any excuse to play is one he'll take."

Obama engaged voters in those two states with an idiom familiar to Hoosiers and Tar Heels alike. In Indiana he played H-O-R-S-E with a boy in the hamlet of Union Mills. He played three-on-three in Kokomo. He sank a "buzzer-beater" at an arcade game during a visit to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle. Then he ran full-court with coach Roy Williams's varsity in Chapel Hill. "He actually got to the hole and blew the layup when he saw [college Player of the Year Tyler] Hansbrough coming at him," says Axelrod. On May 6 Obama won North Carolina and nearly captured Indiana, essentially locking up the nomination. Six months later, by which time Dean Smith had endorsed him, Obama carried both states against John McCain -- in each case by a lone percentage point. Basketball might well have made the difference.

On Election Day, Obama and 40 or so others picked teams and played round-robin at the Attack Athletics complex in Chicago. "He was the one who had noticed the pattern," Nesbitt says. "We played in Iowa and won. We didn't play in New Hampshire and lost. We played every election day thereafter."

Before the Iowa caucuses, after Team Obama won a game, the candidate offered a high five to the captain of the losing team. Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer, refused to deal digits in return. "Why are you being a sore loser?" Obama asked.

"I'll give you a high five back if you admit you stack the teams."

"I don't care who I play with. I'll play with anybody. You want to switch teams? We can switch teams if you want!"

Giannoulias declined as a point of pride, then got the grin that Obama has long deployed to defuse tense moments.

As the lone former Division I players under 35 in Obama's basketball circle, Giannoulias and Reggie Love always line up on opposite teams. Obama makes sure he's teamed with Love, the 6' 4", 225-pound former Duke captain (class of 2005) who served as his "body man," or personal assistant, during the campaign. "Barack gets feisty," says Giannoulias, 32, who stands 6' 2" and played at Boston University. "He always makes Reggie guard me, and it drives me nuts."

Indeed, following the May 6 primaries Obama campaigned with bruised ribs, the result of a shoulder Giannoulias gave him on a drive to the basket. "He's tough but not dirty," says Giannoulias, who won statewide office at age 30 thanks largely to Obama's support. "He has fun, but he's intensely competitive. Even as he gets along with everyone, he tries to find a way to win."

"I've seen him stand up for himself," says Robinson, "but I've never seen him lose his cool. That's the Lenny Wilkens part of him."

Not everyone accepts the Wilkens comparison. The McCain campaign aired an attack ad suggesting that Obama had disrespected the troops by shooting hoops with them, with footage of his three-pointer in Kuwait drawing a portrait, as New York magazine's John Heilemann put it, of someone "blinged up and camera-hungry.... Allen Iverson with a Harvard Law degree." By the end of the campaign, however, Obama had sold himself to the great, broad middle as a Wilkens type, a man who could channel street cred into the mainstream, who wanted the challenge and was up to it.

"It wasn't that he made or missed that shot," Robinson says of Obama's three-pointer in front of the troops in Kuwait. "It's that he took it."

That, Axelrod says, is what consistently strikes him about his boss. Before the first debate with McCain, Axelrod recalls, "We're standing in the greenroom and he's about to take the stage, and I could've easily gone to the bathroom and thrown up. So I ask him how he's feeling. 'I'm a little nervous, but it's a good nervous,' he says. 'Give me the ball. Let's play the game.' "

Baller-in-Chief

The outdoor half-court on the White House grounds isn't up to the all-seasons, all-court basketball ambitions of the new President. Giddy at what Obama's election could mean for its product around the world, the NBA has offered to help install an indoor full court. Meanwhile, Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin has offered use of the Verizon Center. At the very least, Axelrod and Nesbitt predict, there will be regular trips to the full court at Camp David.

After helping make him who he is, after helping him get elected, how might basketball influence the way Obama governs? People it will behoove him to get along with -- both Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) and Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero play regularly -- could wind up as guests in Presidential games. For Cabinet officials there will be face time with the President, and for those who play (prospective Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder) there will be in-your-face time as well.

Much has been made of how Obama has assembled, Lincoln-like, a "team of rivals" to advise him. Last summer McLachlin, Obama's high school coach, asked an AP reporter to relay a message to the candidate: In 40 years of coaching he'd learned that there's no such thing as the perfect coach, but there is such a thing as a perfect staff if you surround yourself with people who are good at what you're not. "People seem to agree he's done an amazing job of putting together a Cabinet," says the old coach. "It says a lot about why so many people latched on to him as a dream-giver. Because he's honest about his shortcomings, he can reach for the stars."

During his family Christmas vacation on Oahu, Obama and several Chicago friends met up with a handful of the President-elect's high school buddies and Coach Mac at the Punahou gym. Over nearly two hours they squeezed in four games. Obama dished out no-look passes and finished off a spin in the lane with a finger roll. He sank several shots from deep. Twice he crossed over former Punahou teammate and NFL player John Kamana, the best athlete on the floor. McLachlin, having bought into Craig Robinson's analogy, yelled "Lenny!" from the sidelines a half-dozen times.

There's more of McLachlin and his coaching influences in Barack Obama than Barry O'Bomber would ever have imagined. "Avoid the peaks and valleys," John Wooden used to tell his teams, much as Obama told his campaign. Dean Smith was a master at setting aside a loss and moving on, as Obama did after New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In November, Rogers, the old Princeton Tiger, supplied interim offices for the Obama transition team at his firm, Ariel Investments -- which meant that for three days the President-elect called world leaders from a conference room named after Pete Carril. The undomesticated high school ballplayer has fallen in with Duncan, Robinson and Rogers, ex-Ivy Leaguers who have won national three-on-three titles by using smarts and structure to school players half their age. Says Rogers, "He's around a lot of guys who know how to play and aren't just running up and down the court."

Throughout Obama's career there's been a pattern of counterweight, of his providing yin where there's yang, and vice versa. At Punahou, with order and orthodoxy all around, he chose to develop a gut-bucket game. On Chicago's South Side, where hoops and life tend toward entropy, he worked as an organizer. At a Harvard Law School roiled by ideological polarization, he was the difference-splitter. Basketball's appeal, Obama told HBO's Bryant Gumbel last year, lies in an "improvisation within a discipline that I find very powerful." With its serial returns to equilibrium -- cut backdoor against an overplay; shoot when the defense sags -- the game represents Obama's intellectual nature come alive.

Another dialectic, as old as the ancients, poses the great challenge of government: How best to balance the rights of the individual with the welfare of the group? That tension surfaces in Obama's speeches and writings again and again. "Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values," he writes in The Audacity of Hope, "the glue upon which every healthy society depends." In the Africa of his roots he sees the pendulum swung so far toward the collective that the individual can be overburdened and paralyzed. In the America he's poised to lead he sees individuals gaming a financial system so enfeebled that the collective faces deficits and recession. Where is the golden mean, that place where We the People might find "a way of being together," where the best players stop worrying about their points and the worst players get swept up in the moment and the score only matters because that's how you sustain the trance?

The same tension sits at the heart of hoops. Titles await teams that can braid what Obama, speaking of America here, has called "these twin strands -- the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity." Maybe Barry O'Bomber needed to be a Punahou reserve to become a Hawaii state champion. Maybe Barack Obama needed to be a community organizer to become a U.S. Senator. And maybe, just maybe, Americans chose him as their next president because they too have come to recognize that in the end it's not about you, it's about the team.

Perhaps on Tuesday he will say it: Come, let us get swept up in the moment. Let us create and sustain the trance.

Finnish Financial Foibles Ahoy!

2009-01-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a stocking stuffing to wish for next yuletide - a twisted tale of Finnish sports enterprising gone awry, submarining not only a single professional basketball team in the process, but an entire domestic league....

From ballineurope.com:
In 2006, the Finnish basketball federation removed all foreign player limitations. As a result, one small town club doubled its budget and decided to renew the entire team. The reform didn’t exactly go as planned…

Oskari Pastila’s documentary film, “Basket Case,” follows how new management decided to renovate the entire Porvoon Tarmo Korisleague team during the summer and fall of 2006. As a result, Tarmo used a grand total of twelve non-domestic players during league play, with seven of them staying in the roster until the final playoff game. Like a classic Greek tragedy, things start to go horribly wrong at some point.

“Basket Case” gives an in-depth view of a basketball club trying to fulfill high expectations with low budget. The events of the Korisliiga’s 2006/2007 season have led to the situation in which Finnish basketball finds itself now, with teams dropping out of league play and renegotiating player contracts because of financial difficulties.

Even though it’s hard to catch this documentary as a non-Finnish basketball fan, it’s definitely worth a look. “Basket Case” premieres in Helsinki on January 22nd, 2009.

Here's to hoping this documentary doesn't stay a stranger to netflix for long.

Pau Pau Pau!

2009-01-08T06:12:00.000-08:00

And, just like that, the Utah Jazz were riddled with "loss bullets", thanks to this magnificently executed fastbreak by 7-footer Pau Gasol - brought to my attention by my lunchpailin' pal, Andy.
Talk about bringin' the Euro flair, Senor Gasol!

Coming of (Correct) Age for Yi?

2009-01-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Despite averaging 9.7 points and 6 rebounds a game, 2nd-year New Jersey Nets Yi Jianlin could still make it into the All-Star game with the online voting support of his fellow Chinese. Online voters select 2 guards, 2 forwards and 1 center for the Western and Eastern squads. Right now, Yi's in third place, but with a voting surge from China, it's not unforseeable to see him leap-frog K.G. to secure a spot as the most undeserving NBA All-Star game starter ever.
Player	Votes
LeBron James (Clev)	1,259,764
Kevin Garnett (Bos)	905,506
Yi Jianlian (NJ)	762,162
Chris Bosh (Tor)	500,700
Paul Pierce (Bos)	313,474
Shawn Marion (Mia)	210,040
Hedo Turkoglu (Orl)	137,035
Danny Granger (Ind)	116,238
Josh Smith (Atl)	110,186
Michael Beasley (Mia)	100,257
Tayshaun Prince (Det)	98,262

While the above is apparent good news for (young?) Yi, the following is yet another piece of evidence inflaming the growing tinder heap of allegations that Jianlian is not now the freshly-minted 21-year-old he'd have us believe he is, but rather someone quite older (cue "Murder She Wrote" music)

From Interbasket.net

Breaking: Document Suggests Yi Jianlian 3-Years Older than Reported">Breaking: Document Suggests Yi Jianlian 3-Years Older than Reported

Recent evidence referencing a Sports Illustrated-China piece suggests that Yi Jianlian, the 7-0 forward from Heshan City, China, is much older than 21 years old, as all his official NBA profiles report.

The document is Yi’s senior registration form at Binhe Middle School, which has a picture of a young Yi and seems to have been filled out by Yi himself. The form is from 1997 and lists his date of birth as Oct. 27, 1984, and not October 27, 1987 as it’s found on NBA.com.

You can see in the image to the left, on the first line next to Yi Jianlian’s photo that it shows his birth date to be 1984.10.27 (click on the image to make it larger)

For more information and discussion, please check out our discussion thread dedicated to this. You can also see the full document in this thread (not that it’ll do you much good unless you can read Chinese).

Since Jianlian has become an NBA prospect to being a player with the New Jersey Nets, rumors and controversy surrounding the Yi’s real age has followed him where ever he has been.

And Yi has asserted in the past that his birthyear is 1987, and he has also denied to answer any questions concerning his age “I have no comment on that,” Yi said through translator Roy Lu back when when the then supposed-19-year old was on his way to his first practice with the Milwaukee Bucks.

No word on whether this document was discovered during a recent crackdown that found at least 36 Chinese players “age-shaving” or lying about their ages in order to qualify for youth tournaments. Chinese authorities have pledged to put an end to age fraud, which apparently is very common in China.

Bouncy Batum

2009-01-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

Remember the Spanish-French War of the mid 17th-century?
Well, most likely neither do Trailblazer Nick Batum and Laker Pau Gasol.
You'd think the conflict was reignited, though, with the way Frenchman Batum dropped a live cannonball on Spaniard Pau's face.

European Minor Leagues a viable option for American High School Players Looking to crack Euroleague

2009-01-02T20:35:00.001-08:00

Fascinating interview with shoe executive-turned-international basketball liason Sonny Vaccaro on ESPN.com churns out:

1) He said he's been contacted by 16 European teams showing interest in current high school seniors playing abroad next year.

2) He said of the 12-15 c/o '09 American players showing interest in playing in the Euroleague next year, he feels 2-3 are capable because a) the young player has to not only be a future NBA player caliber, but future NBA all-star caliber, to succeed in the Euroleague and b) the player has no where near the support system he would have in college if he goes abroad. The player's "posse" is gone, and Euroleague executives have much less tolerance for parental meddling than college coaches.

3) Still, "dozens" of American high school players are considering jumping into European minor leagues in the hopes of matriculating into the better-paying Euroleague at some future point. An influx of this scope would be nothing short of revolutionary.

Ricky Rubio Likely to Enter 2010 Draft

2009-01-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

It appears unlikely that 18-year-old Ricky Rubio will enter next year's draft. Not only is he a little underdeveloped physically for the wear and tear of NBA play, but leaving his European team's contract appears to be a knotty issue. Oh well - I like it. He gets to have one year of stardom in Europe, and taking on the American prospects who will be coming over next year - before taking on the Big Boys in The League.

from SLAM Online by Ryne Nelson

According to Rubio’s agent, Germa’n González, “it is a real possibility” that the Spanish point guard will not declare for the upcoming 2009 NBA Draft.

The following is rough English translation, as González told to Marca, the Spanish nationwide daily sports newspaper:

“We do not want it to go like other players who have left very high in the Draft and soon they do not play. The Americans have become crazy to have players there as soon as possible. The decisions will be taken based on which the European market also provides.”

While González also said Rubio’s decision to remain in Europe is not final, Rubio’s € 6 million ($8.4 million USD) buyout could eventually cause him to stay. A complex renegotiation with DKV Joventut needs to occur in order to reduce the high costs (higher than even the salary of a no. 1 selection) of rescission.

Despite talks of being a Top 5 pick in June, worries about Rubio’s NBA-readiness will likely cause him to forgo the NBA for at least another year.

Lucky 13?

2009-01-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

It looks like 13 high schoolers are considering the jump to Europe ala Brandon Jennings, although Jennings hasn't had a great season so far. Despite the potentional cultural acclimation stresses in a transnational move and the high possibility of not being "the man" as they would in college, there are a few advantages to going abroad for these 13:

1) Hundreds of thousands of dollars while biding time before playing in the NBA
2) Experience playing at a higher level and in circumstances more approximating the NBA
3) Jennings has already done it and is communicating with a few of these high school seniors right now. A trail half-blazed is still easier to follow than a none at all.

By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports Dec 31, 7:32 pm EST

In a hotel suite on the Las Vegas strip, Sonny Vaccaro negotiated the contract of high school star Brandon Jennings with the owners of Lottomatica Virtus Roma. Vaccaro has been one of basketball’s greatest business visionaries ever, but he insists that he’s baffled for the way the Euroleague franchise has been so stingy over the point guard’s playing time.

“I haven’t figured out the European game yet,” Vaccaro said. “I don’t know why if they were going to pay him a half a million dollars, that they don’t play him. It’ll be illogical to pay this kind of money and keep him on the bench.”

As much as anything, Jennings delivered Lottomatica immense publicity with his signing straight out of Compton, Calif. Few NBA executives believed that Jennings’ leap to the Euroleague would be without a sluggish transition. All along, they planned to watch closely and see how he handled it. Despite an average of just 18 minutes a game, NBA executives and scouts don’t consider him a disappointment.

NBA teams know Jennings is gifted, but most are intrigued with his staying power. How’s he handling adversity? How’s he interacting with his older teammates? Just three weeks ago, Jennings’ first coach with Lottomatica quit. For most draft picks, Jennings is experiencing a much more realistic simulation of a rookie year than had he been jacking up shots and getting coddled at the University of Arizona. Two NBA executives who’ve watched Jennings practice in Italy left impressed with his progress.

“It shows that he had the [guts] to be a trailblazer,” one Eastern Conference executive said. “This isn’t ideal if his confidence is frail, but so far he hasn’t shown to be a wuss. If the team can get to the Euroleague Final Four, he still has a chance to shine.”

Vaccaro, the retired sneaker executive, has turned himself into a conduit between Euro teams and the families of high school stars. He says that 13 different families of the top class of 2009 prospects have talked with him about the European option. With the NBA mandating that players must wait until one year after high school graduation to enter the draft, the possibility of making a few hundred thousand dollars in Europe is incredibly intriguing.

This move isn’t for everyone. Most kids couldn’t handle living in a strange country, never mind adapting to Europe’s far more team-oriented, passing game. Vaccaro says one team destined for the draft lottery has told him that Jennings won’t slip past it. Another Eastern GM says that unless Jennings gets into trouble between now and the June draft, nothing will push him out of the lottery. In what’s considered a thin 2009 draft, Jennings picked a good year to be a test case.

“If Brandon goes over there, makes a good dollar and goes in the [draft] lottery, I think that the balance of scales will be tested here,” Vaccaro said. “I think you’ll see more players wanting to do this. All 13 families have said to me, in one way or another, ‘How can they criticize us for thinking about going pro and making some money when the coaches and everyone else around us are making millions?’ None of them are saying they’re ruling out college – nor should they – but this is a legitimate option now.”

Nevertheless, it’s inevitable that the financial crises in Europe promise to change pay scales for players this summer. Several agents say that there’s no telling how dramatically contracts could decline this summer, but no one believes that Russian and Euro teams will be offering the lucrative deals available a summer ago. The bottoming out of oil prices have hit Russian teams the hardest. Teams have been late paying American players, and even later paying agent’s fees.

Moscow Triumph was glad to let center Nenad Krstic out of his multi-million dollar contract so he could sign with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Triumph had paid him on time, his agent, Marc Cornstein said, but sources insist that the Russian team was relieved to rid itself of the financial burden with Krstic. Jannero Pargo, the ex-New Orleans Hornets guard, is returning to Moscow Dynamo after its holiday break, but league sources say there is still a chance he could return to the NBA this season.

“There’s no question that this year has brought up issues [in Europe] that have never existed before in this business,” Cornstein said. “There are teams that they thought had a legitimate budget for this year, but for one reason or another, have been greatly affected.”

Marc vs. Pau Gasol: 2nd Half of Grizzlies-Lakers Game

2008-12-26T08:54:00.000-08:00

Here are more clips from the December 22 game between the Lakers and Grizzlies in Memphis. Fast forward to the last clip to see how Grizzlies fans sent Pau off after the game.

This series was by far the most animated people got all game. Thanks, Gasol and Guy Complaining in the Background.

The Grizz are still a young team and it's evident in how the players fail to mesh on the court sometimes. Here, Gasol sets a high screen and then cuts to the basket, only to be hit in the face by the ball before he can turn around to receive the pass. Kobe then goes down and makes them pay, followed by a OJ Mayo passing out gifts like Santa to Lowry for a three.

Ouch. Gay and Mayo throw up a pair of airballs, but Mayo shows awesome defensive ability in skying for a block, while the Gasol bros tussle underneath the boards.

Here's proof in the pudding of why Pau was the 3rd overall pick in 2001 and an all-star: very nice agility and touch for an extremely lanky 7-footer..

More proof in the aforementioned pudding: Big Brother again takes Little Brother off the dribble. Just like they used to do in the backyard.

Memphis guard Kyle Lowry shimmys into the paint and shows nice play-making, setting up Marc Gasol for a twisting lay-up conversion between two Euros.

For international fans who may have never seen an NBA game live before, here's a smattering of of the joie de vivre that goes on during breaks. Lots of lights, loud sounds, and a marching band.

Pau met a range of fan reactions when he left Memphis' FedEx Forum court after his post-game interviews. He naturally met tons of people during his 6.5+ years in Memphis, and some of then showed him mad love as he entered the tunnel leading to the locker rooms.. Other fans, though, still carry a carload of resentment toward him for somewhat-sudden his exit to LA last season, as was evident in "We hate number 16!" chants I heard behind me while he was waving to the fans. I think Pau carried off the whole returning thing as classily as he could.

Grizzlies vs. Lakers Live - First Half

2008-12-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

On Monday, I visited my first NBA game of the season, and saw the Lakers' Pau Gasol make his long-awaited return to play his former team, the Grizzlies. Adding to the intrigue was his shaggy-bearded face-off with his brother, Marc Gasol, now manning the same position for the Grizzlies Pau once did. Here are first-half highlights:

Like Serbian Sasha Vujacic in the latter part of this courtside video, the Lakers nearly bobbled the win away, but hung on to secure a 105-96 victory by yet another round of Kobe Bryant heroics.

Vujacic substantially more sticky-fingered in this go-around, showing some court generalship and entry passing saavy.

Memphis center Marc Gasol is normally not considered the quicker of the Gasol brothers. The seven-footer is, after all, 20 pounds heavier than his lithe Laker sibling. In the sequence below, however, he posts Lamar Odom, executes an impressive spin move, and is fouled before he can drop the "Spanish Hammer."

After converting the free throw, Odom gets Gasol back, proving even the up-and-comer still has a bit farther up to come to stop the "Odom bomb" from dropping!
At the end of the clip, M. Gasol shows his quickness again in diving into the paint.

Gay shows some impressive blow-by speed against the Lakers' swingman Trevor Ariza. Not sure about the subsequent "MVP" chants, though, especially in light of how he finished the game.

All hail Darko! The oft-ridiculed Serbian center shows his defensive wares againt Pau and then go after a three-point miss by Gay with the tenacity of a preying mantis tearing into her mate!
He had 8 rebounds in the game.

Marc misses a jump hook shot over the long-armed defense of his older brother, and then Kobe trots down the court and unfurls a trifecta, making it look ridiculously easy.

The end of the first half brings physical play between the Gasol brothers and more proof that quicksilver Memphis point guard Mike Conley is the first human to ever be born with ice skates on.

Is Coach Watching? The Athlete-Bloggers' Dilemma.

2008-12-18T06:37:00.000-08:00

Rod Benson, who until recently was a part-time blogger, most-of-the-time power forward for SLUC Nancy, raised a most interesting question this summer before he jetted off to France for a stint with the Euroleague team. As a D-league player trying out for NBA teams during summer league play, he wondered if his blogging had a negative effect on his marketability as a player. Could it be that his off-the-cuff blog-plosions could one day miff a potential employer and squash his chances of filling an NBA roster spot? While he took solace in the fact that other athlete-bloggers had trodden where he treads, he was keenly aware that he was among the more outspoken to brandish both ball and keyboard.

In the end, Benson decided to continue blogging:"...I certainly don’t see my own writing as having a negative impact on my chances of getting signed. I’m going to continue to write because I enjoy it and I just get so damn bored. I can only play so much Madden!"

He then asked his blog's reader's if they thought "the number of athletes who are candid about their social lives in their blogs will continue to grow? Do you think they should censor their material (beyond the obvious; clearly nobody should bad-mouth the NBA or their team in public)?"

The question post generated 172 comments in less than 3 days.

More than half of the people urged Rod to continue writing. Still, almost as many said that if he had to choose between playing and writing, he should first choose the former, only to indulge the latter once his playing days are over.

Here's the creme de la commentary creme:

Pro Rod's Blogging

From Jay S.
If the N.B.A. can 'work' (and I say work very loosely), with the gun-toting-nightclubbing-at-4am-involved-in-a-driveby-on-the-way-to-McDonalds-but-he-was-innocent-sort, then I can guarantee that a blog would not hurt your chances. To be brutally honest, if you were touted like Dwight [Howard] was, this discussion would not exist. N.B.A. sorts would let a blog slide depending on how much revenue you generate for them once your signed. Work on your game and make yourself Rod Benson, the guy who is a can't miss in the N.B.A., not 'Rod, the D-Leaguer / blogger'.

Or, as Matt Tharp put it, "I don't think that blogging is keeping you from playing at the next level. If any NBA owner thought any player could help him win 5 more games, I think he could go on television to host a show about being a male prostitute and still play."

From Jaris C:
As you've seen from youtube and just the internet, pro athletes are dying to show how "human" they are to the public. They have so much free time and why wouldn't a GM want his star PF blogging on a night before a game in Miami instead of partying on South Beach is beyond me.

From Key:
From a fan stand point, I would much rather read an athlete's blog than to read the story in a newspaper or magazine. It's always nice to get the story from the horse's mouth and not from another source.

(Such sentiment surely doesn't bode well for aspiring sports journalists like myself!)

From Natalio:
i think the nba would prosper from having you in their ranks and writing. the thing i like the most is that you're showing that you're more than a basketball player. i'm sure that's true about a lot of players -- i'm sure some of them are musicians, painters, businessmen, do magic and have other talents. but you're showing yours. you can call yourself a player and an author. anyway, nice work. i think most fans appreciate you, and i think it will pay off in the end by and nba team appreciating you too.

Against Rod's Blogging:

From Real World:
While the NBA is basketball, it's a business first. Real world business does not care about creative freedom. They care about business, perception, profits etc.. Most of the people running these corporations (make no mistake - a basketball team is just another corporation and often part of many other corporations) are also from different generation with different ideas of what values and communication are. Aside from a few of the youger generation owners like Mark Cuban, most don't get the concept of blogging or even using the computer/surfing the net.
Once you're on board, utilize it. Or wait until you're retired...

From ojochal1:
Life's full of choices. You can't have it all. It may come down, to blogging or playing ball. If it costs you your job by raising a stink It is time for you to sit down and think. Maybe that is why most great people write memoirs "after" they have had a career worth writing about and a little time for reflection upon events, versus in the moment "blog" spots.

(An interesting point, though how many worldwide acclaimed "great people" can the blogging world claim just 5 years into the technology's mainstream usage? Some of history's "great people" - like Julius Caesar, Francis Bacon, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill - regularly wrote letters that let them vent their cogitations in the same way blogging does for today's youth.

The above leaves a sports/humanities lover like myself with oodles to mentally chew on. I believe that Benson wouldn't have this quandry were he a much better player. His blogging is quirky, yes, but in no way incendiary. Players can mass distribute team-image damaging messages in a variety of ways besides blogging. As an NBA team owner, I'd worry more about a less-than-tactful player mouthing off on a youtubized video against the national anthem (cf. Howard, Josh), appearing in an underground DVD celebrating crime witness intimidation (cf. Anthony, Carmelo), or questioning an ex-teammate on how one's ass tastes (cf. O'Neal, Shaq-Daddy).

Questioning whether Benson should pour the time he now spends on his shannanigans and subsequent blogging into honing his basketball game is fair.

In the shortest term, messing around and writing about it has to be more fun than taking an extra 200 jump shots after practice or doing fast-twich plyometric training.

In the medium term, that messing around may prevent him from developing his basketball skill set, which in turn could cut down his playing time and deny showcasing himself for that elusive fat NBA contract.

Think long term, though.
Benson's now developing writing skills and the ability to craft a focused, entertaining blog post quickly. He's acquiring a legion of followers. He's developing his own "brand." He'll be able to grow it during the 10+ years left in his basketball career - which may, in the end, turn out to be more of a launching pad for his writing career.

I can easily see him down the line being a colorful talk show host a la John Salley in The Best Damn Sports Show Period and blogger/author to boot.

His earning potential will only increase throughout his 30s and 40s instead of stagnating in his late 20s as it would with a professional athlete.

And he'll walk with less of a hitch, too.

The Return of Ricky

2008-12-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

Seemingly all hair, elbows, knees - and, oh yeah, frightfully fulgent talent too - the Iberian Boy King of Basketball is Back.

Ricky Rubio - 18-year star point guard of his home town DKV Joventut team - burst into mass international awarenesss in last summer's Olympics as the darling of the silver-winning Spanish national team.

As a 17-year-old - someone who wouldn't be able to legally smoke in the United States - he was smokin' world-class competition in the 18.5 minutes he averaged in 8 Olympic games. His line? 4.8 points, 4 rebounds, 3 assists, 2.1 steals per. His knock? 28% percent from the field. That will undoubtedly improve with age, though.

His Olympic success seemed to pave the way for the Spanish town of Badalona's Finest to dominate this season in Euroleague and domestic play. Especially since the team's star from last year, EuroFlyer Rudy Fernandez, is now scraping the stratosphere for the NBA's Portland Trailblazers.

Alas, before the season he had surgery on a wrist injury sustained in the Olympics and has missed all games until this week...

His production in the two games since his return has been understandably low: 2.5 assists, 1 rebound, 1 steal in 6 minutes per. He hasn't even attempted a shot yet. But, more importantly, his team has won its two games - against Union Olimpija and Fenerbahçe Ülker.

Still, for those hankering for visions of the "Rubio of old," check out this mix of Ricky atomizing kids as a 14-year old:

Ricky Rubio at 14 year old
Uploaded by no1pointguard

(Found through Ballineurope)

When Cold Domestic hits Hot International

2008-12-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

First things first.
Let's clear up what this pic from Brandon Jenning's Under Armour blog is all about.
It's about B-Jennings getting up early in the morning for a photo shoot with ESPN the magazine.
And it's certainly about acclimating pretty well to the locals, at least for this particular shoot.
Slight non-sequitor: What is it with some of these Italian males and their machismo? Even the lil one front, center and splayed, seems knee-deep in it. You'd think think he was holding onto a security blanket or something - jeesh.

How's Jennings' team doing?
Despite head coach Jasmin Repesa's surprise resignation on Dec. 9, Lottomatica Roma continues to do really poor/well. From Euroleague.net:

The shock announcement came the night before Roma heads to play DKV Joventut in Badalona on Thursday, when assistant coach Nando Gentile will take over the visitors' bench on an interim basis. Roma has lost four straight games in the Italian League, but has won five straight Euroleague games to lead Group C with a 5-1 record and on the verge of clinching a berth in the Top 16. Repesa cited domestic results in statements quoted by the club. Roma has struggled at home in the Italian League, losing four straight games, and currently sits in ninth place in the domestic standings.

Quinton Hosley Emerges in Efes Pilsen-Real Madrid

2008-12-03T01:11:00.000-08:00

Real Madrid won the match 95-81, and surged to 3-2 in Euroleague while dropping Efes Pilsen to 2-3. Real's Quinton Hosley did his best Niagra Falls impression this game, drowning Efes in a overpowering torrent of buckets.

Hosley, a 6-6 swingman, who graduated Fresno St. two years ago, was making his first trip back to Turkey after dominating in the country last year. Playing for Izmir's Pinar Karşıyaka, Hosley averaged 23.2 points and 11.3 rebounds a game, garnering MVP honors for the domestic league.
Although he hasn't been doing quite as well this year, averaging 12.2 points and 3.4 rebounds a game in Euroleague competition, he absolutely blew up against Efes. He scored 10 points in the first 8 minutes of the 1st quarter on an assortment of dunks, lay-ups, and short jumpers.
He finished the 1st half with 20 points on 6/7 overall shooting in 11 minutes in the first half.
For the game, he finished with 23 points on 6/7 shooting for 2-point range and 3/4 shooting from 3-point range in 23 minutes. Only 2 rebounds though.
On the Turkish side, Serbian Milos Vujanic played an exceptional 2nd quarter, scoring 13 points on 3/3 shooting. His behind-the-back, hesitation, 8-foot teardrop to cap the first half was beauty borne of skill.
Efes trailed 40-46 going into the 2nd half.
Vujanic finished the game with 16 points while Charles Smith led Efes with 27 points.

N.B. In my preview article about Efes Pilsen, I noted the team's "takeover" of Turkish players this year relative to last year. For the record, 3 Efes Americans chipped in 42 of the team's 82 points against Real, while 2 of the team's Turks accounted for 20 of the points.

Efes Pilsen - Real Madrid: An experience made in Eurocasting Heaven

2008-12-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

Using someone else's internet connection, I was able to tune into ESPN360 today and check out the recent match between Istanbul's Efes Pilsen (check out my preview article) and Real Madrid. The game was not broadcast by ESPN, but by Euroleague.tv and as watched the warm-ups I immediately noticed the familiar woodwind duduks of the Turkish crowd. Ah, memories...

A few other observations:

Listening to only one play-by-play announcer was a bit strange. It was like watching a man shoot play pool by himself. It seems Euroleague.tv does not have as large of an operating budget as the European broadcasters of soccer matches. The only 7,000 who watched the Efes-Real match in Istanbul bear testimony to this. Adding to the strangeness quotient was that the announcer was non-English speaking native. Some of the stranger, entertaining, things he said:

Real's point guard Bullock throws alley-oop to Hosley, who lays it up in traffic. The announcer afterwards says: "Hosley, which were asking foul on that action."
Real Madrid player makes a nice pivot and pass in the 2nd quarter. Announcer: "A gooood delicious deliver!"
He tended to end everything with an extraneous "uh" - like a profoundly unsexy version of Michael Jackson, or Otis Redding.
Efes' Vujanic missed a free throw and Real's Alex Mumbru almost hit a 3/4 court shot to end the 1st quarter.
The announcer: "Missing the second-uh.. "Mumbru with a HOPE!.. close to the basket-uh..."
Had a habit of saying a basketball player had found a "good solution' whenever he drove to the basket and scored a basket.

Like during Olympic basketball on nbc, euroleague.tv also didn't inject commercials during the breaks, leaving the American viewer to wallow in a kind of televised purgatory. Luckily, in this game, cheerleaders gesticulating wildly to songs that seemingly changed every 20-30 seconds filled the void.