The Good Point: The re-invention of the NBA through the Western Conference Finals

Over at The Good Point, I weigh in on the NBA's Western Conference Final and especially on how the San Antonio Spurs have changed from a boring, borderline unlikable team into one of the most exciting and compelling in basketball. To wit:

Don’t make the mistake of sleeping on this Spurs team. Yes, Duncan is old, as at 3, he’s older than everyone on the Thunder, save Derek Fisher. They don’t have the same star power Oklahoma City does. Durant finished second in MVP voting, Parker a distant fifth and Duncan picked up one fourth-place vote. Yet they roared into the postseason with the top seed in the west with the best SRS in their conference and were tied with the Bulls for the best record in the NBA.

Still, it’s more than that. It’s taken years, but the Spurs have emerged as one of the most enjoyable teams in the league. It wasn’t too long ago that the Spurs played a style of basketball usually called boring: Duncan backing into the post, a half spin, a bank shot that rattles in. Their most recent championship was a Finals sweep of the LeBron-led Cavs, where the Spurs scored around 80 points per game. They were a team easy to dislike and easy to hate, especially after bloodying Steve Nash.

Click here to read the whole thing! 

The Good Point: Pujols with a few holes in his bat

My latest for The Good Point takes a look at three of the American League's biggest bats - Jose Bautista, Josh Hamilton and Albert Pujols - and how each has started the 2012 season, be it on fire, slowly or not at all.

From my piece:

Back on May 6, the Toronto Blue Jays lost to the LA Angels, 4-3. It wasn’t exactly the most memorable game except for one at-bat. In the bottom of the 5th, on a 2-2 pitch, Albert Pujols hit his first dinger of 2012, a shot to left over the head of Eric Thames.

It was Pujols, you may remember, that was one of the marquee signings of the 2012 offseason. He signed with Los Angeles for an astronomical sum: $254 million over 10 years, the second-highest contract in MLB history. And this season has not been kind to him.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The Good Point: Love for MVP? Plus NHL Playoff Picks!

My latest for The Good Point looks at why Kevin Love is getting attention in the NBA's Most Valuable Player race, despite being outplayed in almost every way by LeBron James. To wit:

By almost any standard basketball metric, LeBron James is the best player in the NBA right now. He has the highest Player Efficiency Rating at 30.7 and 12.2 Win Shares; best in the league. On his own team, he’s putting up better numbers than the other 60 percent of the big three, especially in shooting stats like True Shooting or Effective Field Goal percentages.

In other words, James is putting up better numbers than anyone in the league, is the best player on his team, itself one of the NBA’s best. This guy should be a shoo-in for MVP, right?

So why is Kevin Love getting to much attention right now?

 Click here to read the whole thing!

And while you're here, click here to read my Good Point review of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding!

Finally, my annual NHL Playoff picks follow the jump.

The Good Point: Linsanity and Carmadness

The people at The Good Point were nice enough to let me use a word that doesn't exist in my headline: Carmadness.

I have a few ideas and one I go back to often is the hype and hyperbole of the sports section. Right now, the best example of this is happening in New York, where a seven-game win streak ushered in Linsanity and made Mike D'Antoni some kind of savant for letting Jeremy Lin run amok. And then came a cold streak and D'Antoni resigning amidst claims that Carmelo Anthony wanted him out.

It's a nice story. It's something you can spin into three, five, a whole week's worth of columns. But it's not very accurate and blaming the coach or an individual player is blaming the wrong person. And it's not just a basketball thing, either: just look at the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Anyway, read the whole thing by clicking here.

The Good Point: Sonics - There and back again

My latest for The Good Point is about a team that doesn't exist anymore.

Okay, that's a little misleading. This is also about the Sacramento Kings, haunted by arena issues and the ghost of the Sonics. But Seattle is very much in the forefront here, too: from arena talk of this own, an owner willing to spend vast sums of his own money and the green and gold, showing up in the background of games everywhere in the NBA.

It seemed oddly fitting when the Sacramento Kings hosted Oklahoma City on Feb. 9. The former Sonics were playing a team whose owners are looking for a new arena and blogs asking – maybe even telling fans to chant and bring flyers that read “HERE-WE-STAY,” hoping TNT’s national audience would hear it on their only national TV appearance.

The game sold out and enough people wore dark colors that Kevin Harlan called it a blackout. When the Kings roared to an 11-2 lead, the crowd erupted in a frenzy.  It was hard not to think back to the 2002 playoffs. It would be a real shame if the Kings left town. Unfortunately, that’s a real possibility.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The Good Point: Is Andrea Bargnani the NBA's most improved player?

There aren't many storylines - which aren't even a thing, really - around the Toronto Raptors, but there's one that I couldn't get out of my mind: what's happened to Andrea Bargnani this year. Over at The Good Point, I explain how he's changed from a black hole and why it matters:

In a year marked by some bad teams, the Toronto Raptors are one of the worst. This is not a new thing. They’ve been bad for years, with a defense more porous than Havarti cheese. Last year, they regularly allowed 120 per game, sometimes as much as 140. You don’t have to know basketball to know that’s bad. 

The stats bear that out: the 2011 Raptors allowed the fifth most points per game, the fourth-lowest SRS and lost the third-most games in the league. And Andrea Bargnani, their much-maligned star, finished the season with just 2.6 Win Shares and a 16.4 PER, despite playing the second-most minutes on the team. 

Things aren’t much better for the Raptors this season. They dropped eight in a row in January, are 8-16 and have the league’s second-lowest points scored per game (86.8). And that’s mostly because of Bargnani. I mean it in a good way.

Continue reading at The Good Point

The Good Point: Joe Paterno - Legacy or Lunacy?

When Joe Paterno died, the easy reach was to was say he was killed by the scandal that enveloped Penn State, or to say he was hounded by an irate media. I'm not sure what the proper response is: he was a man with a mythic legacy. Being a head football coach at any major Division One school is as close to having a Supreme Leader as North America gets; as a society we give these people the mythic qualities that the poet Virgil gave to Aeneas. 


Given that Paterno was a student of Virgil, comparing him to ancient tragedy seems apt: his career ended from his own mistake, one transgression so odious it should overshadow everything else. From The Good Point:

Joe Paterno died on Saturday evening at the age of 85. He was coach of Penn State’s football program between 1966 and 2011, a span of 45 years. He both appeared in and won more bowl games than any other coach.

Yet he’ll be remembered for something else completely.

When someone is part of a program for as long as Paterno was at Penn State, the immediate question is one of legacy. It’s a fair question: he was a coach for a long time; his teams went undefeated five times, won three Big 10 championships and two national championships. His career, as a whole, is one of the better coaching careers in all of sports, not just college football.

And it’s all going to be overshadowed.

Continue reading at The Good Point 

The Good Point: The Passion Player

Tim Tebow is polarizing like nobody else in sports. He simultaneously represents everything overwrought about pro sports - the moralizing, the forced storylines, the hype and hyperbole - while at the same time, representing everything to love: the come-from-behind victory, the modest victor, the genuine person.


The cliche is Love Him or Hate Him, but with Tebow there's preciously little room between the two extremes: it's hard to find anyone in the middle ground. We all know the person who's drinking the flavor-aid on him and we all know the person who loathes him. But are these two opinions based solely on Tebow - or on preconceived notions from somewhere else entirely?

There’s nobody in sports right now as polarizing, decisive or cool as Tim Tebow. It’s not just a question of religion, politics or even quarterbacking. The divide he creates is more than that; it’s more personal.

I have a friend who, in most other cases, is a rational person. She is not the kind who jumps headfirst into anything or considers alternative viewpoints and has worked as an insurance adjuster. But she hates Tebow. She thinks he’s arrogant, overrated and a fluke. She uses the phrase “Sheblow” to refer to the quarterback. She is not alone, but we disagree.

Continue reading at The Good Point