LeBron and the Cavs

It’s the NBA season, so it’s time for a return of the carefully reasoned rants!

most people don’t share my dislike of LeBron and the Cavs, but here are my issues:

1) I hate the way LeBron plays. he is a freak athlete who is bigger, stronger, and faster than anyone else out there, so all he needs to do (and all he does) in big games is clear out his teammates and charge recklessly into the lane, because he will get the call. if everyone in the lane just jumped out of the way, LeBron would just run out of bounds because he’s not in control enough to actually finish without trucking someone.

2) Mike Brown is a terrible coach, because he fosters and encourages this behavior by LeBron. they lost to the Magic, because the rest of the team can be shut down, and LeBron can’t win by himself. The Celts reinforced that idea in game 1 this year, and the Raptors did the same in game 2.

it’s the Wilt Chamberlain vs Bill Russell theory. Bill knew that if you let Wilt do what he wanted, but focused on stopping the rest of the team, then Wilt would lose. and what happened there? Bill won 11 rings, and Wilt won 2 (only 1 during the course of Russell’s career).

which leads to:
3) the supporting cast in Cleveland is infinitely underwhelming, and easily beatable. without LeBron, that team struggles to make the playoffs in the EAST. strip away KG, and the Celts still make round 2 of the playoffs, take away Kobe, and i’m willing to bet the Lakers make round 2 as well. the Magic played without Jameer Nelson for a long stretch and still made the championship game.

the only real scoring threats outside LeBron are two extremely undersized guards in Delonte West and Mo Williams. Shaq and big Z are too old and slow. Anthony Parker is good, but shouldn’t be more than an outside shot specialist. and Varejao is a streaky energy guy at best.

any of the elite level teams can shut down all of those threats when they need to, and no matter what LeBron puts on the board, it won’t be enough.

NBA Draft

I just pulled this from the e-mail conversation on ESPN between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell:

Gladwell: “The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues. I think, for example, that the idea of ranking draft picks in reverse order of finish — as much as it sounds “fair” — does untold damage to the game. You simply cannot have a system that rewards anyone, ever, for losing. Economists worry about this all the time, when they talk about “moral hazard.” Moral hazard is the idea that if you insure someone against risk, you will make risky behavior more likely. So if you always bail out the banks when they take absurd risks and do stupid things, they are going to keep on taking absurd risks and doing stupid things. Bailouts create moral hazard. Moral hazard is also why your health insurance has a co-pay. If your insurer paid for everything, the theory goes, it would encourage you to go to the doctor when you really don’t need to. No economist in his right mind would ever endorse the football and basketball drafts the way they are structured now. They are a moral hazard in spades. If you give me a lottery pick for being an atrocious GM, where’s my incentive not to be an atrocious GM?

I think the only way around the problem is to put every team in the lottery. Every team’s name gets put in a hat, and you get assigned your draft position by chance. Does that, theoretically, make it harder for weaker teams to improve their chances against stronger teams? I don’t think so. First of all, the principal engine of parity in the modern era is the salary cap, not the draft. And in any case, if the reverse-order draft is such a great leveler, then why are the same teams at the bottom of both the NFL and NBA year after year? The current system perpetuates the myth that access to top picks is the primary determinant of competitiveness in pro sports, and that’s simply not true. Success is a function of the quality of the organization.

Another more radical idea is that you do a full lottery only every second year, or three out of four years, and in the off year make draft position in order of finish. Best teams pick first. How fun would that be? Every meaningless end-of-season game now becomes instantly meaningful. If you were the Minnesota Timberwolves, you would realize that unless you did something really drastic — like hire some random sports writer as your GM, or bring in Pitino to design a special-press squad — you would never climb out of the cellar again. And in a year with a can’t-miss No. 1 pick, having the best record in the regular season becomes hugely important. What do you think?”

———-

I don’ t know about pushing it to only having the lottery every other year, but full randomness in the lottery is actually pretty interesting.  Because I think he is right on the fact that the salary cap is the real determinant of success. The Lakers are always going to spend a lot, and they are always on top. The Knicks are starting to use their money wisely, and I like the way the future looks. The Spurs haven’t really bothered with the draft since Tim Duncan, and they are consistently a top level team. While on the other side, Toronto and Milwaukee, Minnesota, Memphis, the Clippers and Golden State don’t spend money, rely on the draft or spend their money unwisely and are consistently disappointing. I like how the future looks for Memphis and Toronto, but do we really expect them to be able to resign Gay, Mayo, or Bosh?

If teams aren’t willing to spend money on 3 key guys needed to win, why reward them for losing the most? Maybe a better idea than either that Gladwell proposes would be to rank the lottery chances in order not reverse order. Give the teams who are on the fringe of making the playoffs like Indiana, Charlotte and Phoenix the best chance at the top picks, so teams won’t routinely be stuck at the bottom with talent who don’t want to be there. Give all the teams incentive to win, and make the top picks worth more because it could really mean the difference between making the playoffs and not.

Fuck the equine

As have many people around the world, I’ve been watching the Olympics quite a bit recently and I have been struck by how out I place the equestrian events are. (Aside: I feel a rant a-coming, so I will try to be sussinct in order to avoid that.)

To put it simply: The equestrian events have no place on the Olympics.

The Olympics should be about the pinnacle of human achievement. Repeat, HUMAN achievement. Showing how well we can dominate and train another animal is not an achievement. It is the worst form of human hubris. It is not humans competing against humans. It is horse vs. horse.

It is not a sport. It is not human competition. It is pompous and annoying, and should be removed from the Olympics. That is all.

Hanshin Tigers Izakaya

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Originally uploaded from Mikeydangerous’ Flickr Set

For a while now, my parents have been telling me about an episode of “No Reservations” with Anthony Bourdain that took place in Osaka. It took me a long time to find it, but I finally did and of course he went to some amazing places in town. The annoying part is that the show gave no indication of where the places are in the city and because of the editing, it is completely impossible to figure it out.

As a bit of setup, Japan doesn’t have street names for the most part. Larger streets will have names, especially those following train lines, but that’s about it. The way addresses work is sort of like on Google maps where you start far out and focus in. As an example my address in Japan goes:
Osaka-fu (Prefecture)
Osaka-shi (City)
Chuo-ku (Ward)
Kozu 2(Neighborhood)
3 (Block)
15 (Building)

As you can imagine, unless you have a map and an address or at least some landmarks, it is nearly impossible to find a place.

Anyway, on the show there was an izakaya (bar/restaurant) where Hanshin Tigers fans got together to watch the game and eat sushi. I was able to find the place through a tourist info place. The place ended up being in Tennoji, my old neighborhood (though in the show it looked as if it were in Shinsaibashi, 4 train stops away from the actual location.) Adrian, Steve, Nadja and I went on Sunday, and it was fantastic. It was the best sushi I’ve ever had in my life. Of course the sushi was a bit awkward.

As you can see in the video, there was a live fish in the case in front of us. The thing about that is that if you look closely you’ll see that the bottom half of the fish has no meat on it. That’s because we ate it. The fish was flopping in front of us the whole time. It was delicious, but very strange.

The Tigers ended up winning the game, which meant that after the game beer was 100 yen ($1)! And to top it off, throughout the night the chefs and waitresses took quite a shine to us (likely because we were eating and drinking far more than any Japanese people could.) The chef who loved us the most was (I think) named Yuzu. He was a great tiny little man. I hope his name really is Yuzu, because that would be funny. A yuzu is a grapefruit/orange hybrid fruit here in Japan. Anyway, Yuzu ended up giving us some free sho-chu (delicious (because is was expensive) Japanese alcohol) and ice cream.

It’s probably for the best that we didn’t know that this place existed when we lived in Tennoji, because we likely would have spent all of our time and money there.