Free Ballin’

I avoid reading deeply into advanced basketball metrics the way little kids avoid booster shots or broccoli: I’m told they’re good for me, but they hurt, and taste lousy.  Also, since much of the readily accessible stuff that passes for advanced metrics (like John Hollinger’s PER) is complete and utter bullsh*t, and the stuff being utilized by smart teams like the Rockets and Mavericks is proprietary, getting useful information means wading around in the mire of the basketball blogosphere—or crunching the numbers yourself.  And I find it so tedious.

This makes me feel weirdly guilty, like I’m copping out.  And I hear this guilt-inducing voice in my head—specifically the voice of Han, the badguy from Enter the Dragon.  After Bruce Lee is captured by Han’s minions  and brought out to the courtyard, Han wants Roper (the obligatory white good guy) to fight him.  But Roper refuses (in a way that doesn’t make him look wussy, a sort of “I won’t be your puppet” thing) and Han says to him, “So!  There is a point you will not go beyond.”  That’s what I hear each time I don’t want to go what feels like the extra mile.  And the thing is, I don’t know if I can answer that in a way that doesn’t make me sound wussy.  I mean, right after Roper refuses to fight Lee, he whups like twenty guys, fighting with Lee.  There’s nobody for me to whup.

I was thinking of these things because I was just writing about the Mavericks and why they aren’t contenders.  Some of it is observation, but I think some of the raw numbers support these observations, and I’d like to take a slightly (slightly) deeper look into it.  But each step you take begs more questions, and more and more, and the whole thing makes me sleepy.  But maybe I’ll take a nap, and when I wake up (like, tomorrow) I’ll try to find the patience to address some of the questions.  We’ll see.