Cambridge, Mass. - On Friday night a sell out crowd packed TD Banknorth Garden in downtown Boston to see the Cavaliers and Celtics.
More than 20,000 fans cheered at every dunk from the home team, let out "oohs" to slick passes and hissed when disagreeing with foul calls. The giant high-definition videoboard in the center of the arena kept track of points, and sideboards displayed rebounds and assists for the players in the game.
A national television audience on ESPN saw the game as well and those who checked the box score or read the media reports got much the same information.Even the most discerning fans probably left the game knowing that Leon Powe had 20 points and 11 rebounds and was a huge factor in leading the Celtics to victory. Many may have had the impression that LeBron James, who scored 21 points but missed three times as many shots as he made, had a poor game and the only reason the Cavs were even close was because of Mo Williams, who scored 26 points with a wonderful shooting performance.
About eight hours after the final horn, scores of middle-aged men in glasses and suits and students 20-30 years their junior settled into a building across the Charles River at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
AROUND THE ASSOCIATION
Still getting crazier in Oakland
Someday someone will write a fascinating book about this Golden State Warriors season and it will be an amazing read. Nearly every week, something bizarre is happening out there. You want to forget about it, but it is impossible. Not reporting the insanity to NBA fans just so they can rubberneck would be a small crime. So here's another chapter.
The San Jose Mercury News reported that coach Don Nelson has started a not-so-covert campaign for Jamal Crawford to use his option to get out of his contract at season's end, leaving $20 million on the table. No one in his right mind would do that in this economy, but then no one would bench Crawford just to mess with his head as Nelson did last week.
Now, the Contra Costa Times reported that Monta Ellis bolted just before the team photo to handle a family emergency, but also as a form of protest. The paper reported that Ellis now wants a trade. Which isn't all that rare, except Ellis missed the first half of the season recovering from an accident suffered while riding a mo-ped, an act his $66 million contract prohibits. No, make that his $66 million contract the Warriors are still thinking of totally voiding.
For your scorecards, this season the Warriors have: botched Baron Davis' free agency; wildly overpaid bench player Corey Maggette in response; given Nelson a contract extension he said he didn't want; and given Stephen Jackson a huge raise and a new contract - despite having two years left on his old deal - just because he was angry too many teammates were making more than him. They've also dealt with the entire Ellis incident, including an ongoing stalemate with his agent; fired their assistant general manager so Nelson could put his good friend in the job; left their current general manager hanging in the last year of his contract; had their first-round draft pick demand a trade; and many, many more.
Oh yes, and they've taken a promising, young and exciting team and pushed it to the verge of destruction. Check back next week for more.
Change coming
Kevin McHale has been in the NBA as a player, general manager and now coach for the past 30 years. Now the Timberwolves coach after losing his front-office role, McHale is looking around the league and forecasting major changes in the next couple of years. With the economy digging into the NBA, especially in smaller markets, McHale is being extremely realistic that the gravy train for everyone might be ending soon.
He's one of the few people to speak out on the matter and in an interview last week took the not so politically-correct position that everyone is going to be taking a pay cut in the near future. Especially when the collective bargaining agreement ends in 2011.
"There's a lot of changes on the horizon," McHale said. "I think that the whole thing has taken on a life of its own. I think our guarantees are way too long and way too much money. Corrections need to be made."
Oden's burden
Greg Oden's latest knee injury, a chipped knee cap from a collision just before the All-Star break, has been stirring up more Sam Bowie discussions in Portland.
It has not helped that the Blazers have revised his recovery timetable three different times, which is leaving an impression he's not willing to play through pain. Fans and media in Portland have been all over Oden, who has been growing more frustrated with a series of injuries that have plagued his first two NBA seasons.
"It's painful, and we have to be careful about it," Oden said. "It's a big level of frustration. I'd just as soon be out there playing. I want to be out there more than other people want me out there. I know how I feel about it myself.
"I can just imagine what other people are saying, knowing that I want to be out there a lot more. If I could be out there, I'd be out there. That's the frustrating part. People are out there talking like I don't want to be out there, I don't want to come back. It's like, are you serious?"
Apparently, some of them are.
BY THE NUMBERS
7: Players with the Bobcats in training camp who are still with the team.
95: Percent of season tickets the Minnesota Timberwolves are cutting in price for next season.
24: Consecutive double doubles for the Knicks' David Lee, below (heading into Saturday night).
They proceeded to talk about weighted plus / minus ratings, the balance of quantitative graphical analysis vs. qualitative graphical analysis, and the fine art of applied sabermetrics and APBRmetrics.
It would seem the only common thread in these two gatherings is they both took place in metro Boston. But in reality, they are also both a reflection of the modern NBA.
At the top of the Eastern Conference standings, the Cavs and Celtics are all the rage these days. But in NBA circles, what was going on at MIT was just as in style.
Near the center of MIT's campus is the Stata Center, a bizarrely constructed Frank Gehry-designed building that makes no sense from the outside. On the inside, though, there are large flowing common spaces and functional high-tech lecture halls. So it is quite the symbolic home of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which had its third annual gathering Saturday.
Or as guest panelist and often irreverent ESPN the Magazine columnist Bill Simmons labeled it, "Dorkapalooza '09."
The reams of data the new-age statisticians are now compiling ad nauseam for NBA teams - the Cavaliers being one of the dozen or so dedicated enough to employ analysts - can be much the same. Looking at columns of bizarre information can make almost no sense to the fans who are so familiar with the standards - points, rebounds and assists.
Yet with someone to interpret, it is turning into a valuable virtual scout. Following in the footsteps of baseball, analytics are contributing to the many decisions teams make, from personnel to coaching hires to how much to pay certain players.
On Saturday, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban got into a spirited debate with ESPN.com columnist John Hollinger, one of the fathers of the NBA stats movement, over the statistical thinking behind trading Devin Harris for Jason Kidd a year ago. Then, Cuban sparred with the Boston Celtics' statistical chief, a Harvard Law grad named Mike Zarren, over which team offered the best statistical trade package for Kevin Garnett. Cuban thought it was his Mavericks, who lost out to the Celtics.
Then there's Cuban's eight-year study of statistical trends of NBA officials.
"There's not 10 players on the court, there's 13," Cuban said. "And three of them determine about 80 percent of what happens out there."
Then there's MIT grad and Medina native Daryl Morey, who went from Highland High School to Northwestern to MIT to STATS Inc. to general manager of the Houston Rockets. Never even a varsity basketball player, Morey's move up the ranks with statistical analysis has pioneered the field and his MIT background has made the school the center of the movement. Now he employs a legion of interns to help him, many who live right in Cambridge and send data to Texas every day.
The Cavs do not like to talk about it but they are right there, too. Their stat guru - an economics professor named Dan Rosenbaum who wrote a blog that Cavs GM Danny Ferry became a fan of when he was in the San Antonio Spurs' front office - advises them on an array of moves.
Yet, Rosenbaum is not listed in the media guide even though you can find the scoreboard animator's name or the person in charge of mail-order merchandise in there.
The team's three-year quest to acquire Delonte West was based partially on the numbers Rosenbaum's computer spit out. When they started trying to trade for him, West was a member of the Celtics. He was there in part because Morey, who worked for the Celtics before moving to Houston, had a computer tell him the same thing about the tough-nosed guard from St. Joseph's.
One of Morey's better moves in Houston was to trade for Luis Scola, who has become a vital part of the Rockets' core despite not posting impressive popular statistics. To Morey's methods, which track hundreds of hard-to-quantify trends, Scola is an All-Star just like another player he traded for, Shane Battier.
So whom did Morey just barely outbid to trade for Scola? Ferry and the Cavs.
Which bring us back to James and Williams from Friday night. Saturday, the basketball analysts looked at the same game and said that James was in many respects more valuable than Williams. How? Because the score was even when James was in the game and the Cavs gave up 14 points when Williams was in. And that is just the extreme tip of the iceberg; they could have gone for hours on the matter.
Or as Cuban, perhaps the NBA's most forward-thinking owner, said, "The box score is useless."