A couple of big signings today in Lee Sinins' email. First, Milton Bradley to the Cubs for three years, $30 million. This is a terrible deal for the Cubs, mainly because they don't get to use a DH. Even DHing 97 times last year, Bradley was only able to get on the field for 126 games. That's his highest total since 2004, and his second highest career total. Three years of guaranteed money to an injury-prone guy just strikes me as a poor allocation of resources, even if he is a great hitter. Bradley certainly had a great year in 2008, but he hit .321: this brings his career average up to .280. If you lop 40 points of batting average off, he's a .395/.523 OBP/SLG hitter. That's still an excellent hitter, one of the best in the game: but is it a hitter you pay $10 million to for 300 games over three years (at best)? Especially when you're paying for his age 31-33 seasons, when his hitting is likely to decline a bit anyway?

Pat Burrell got two years and $16 million from the Rays, which strikes me as a much better deal. Burrell will DH for the Rays, negating the fact that his glove might chop two wins off his value as a hitter, even in left field. As has been written elsewhere, Burrell is a fantastically consistent hitter: for the last four years, he's had an OPS+ of 128, 122, 127, and 125. He'll be 32 and 33 during the contract, which is certainly the beginning of the decline phase, but it's only the first two years of it: the Rays didn't go crazy and give Burrell and a four-year deal or anything. Even if you're pessimistic and you figure Burrell puts up a 120 and a 115 OPS+ in his two years in Tampa, this deal looks excellent.

Will Norv Turner put Ron Winter on his holiday card list for next year? The holding call on the Colts that handed the Chargers the game was utter crap -- if that's defensive holding, then there's defensive holding on every single play of every game. I'm most upset that we've been deprived of an actual good game next week -- the Chargers against either Tennessee or Pittsburgh is not going to be fun in the least.

"Garnett elbowed Aldridge after a free throw and Aldridge responded by slapping Garnett in the head." (Cite.)

Murray Chass apparently doesn't follow the NBA all that closely: "Under the rules in the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League and what was proposed in Major League Baseball, teams may pay an individual player anything they negotiate. The team, though, cannot exceed the amount of money allowed under that season’s rules for its entire team." (Cite.)

Basketball fans, of course, know that the NBA does, in fact, create a max individual salary for players. (There are exceptions, but the basic rule is that there is a max salary based on the number of years you have in the league.)

Nico at Athletics Nation has this, with the key quote being: "But teams are supposed to build their team, their identity, through their farm system, using trades to fill holes or rebuild."

Wrong. There is no "supposed to" in sports. Teams are not "supposed to" build their teams through their farm systems any more than teams are "supposed to" spend a particular amount of money. There are no morals. You do what you need to do to win.

Now, as it happens, intelligent drafting and international scouting along with coaching in the minors is the cheapest way to build a good team, but it is not the only way to win, and it is not the normatively superior way to win. A team never was anything more than a collection of guys wearing the same uniform as last year's guys did, and it never will be any different than that, either. It's time to accept this fact and move on instead of constantly whining about the Yankees.

From Freedarko comes this:

So if we all agree that guards, especially the pointy type, are gaining in value, but require more scouting, and big men are drafted on crude factors and no longer rule the game, the age limit makes perfect sense. Put simply, it gives the greatest opportunity to the greatest number of players, not just those born with tremendous height. The argument at Vassar hinged on the Williams/Ellis/Miles troika. The other side claimed that their being drafted showed that the age limit worked for guards. My point was, it shows that it didn't. Had Monta spent a year in college, he would've been a no-brainer lottery pick.

Indulge me in an analogy. If we all agree that pitchers are gaining in value, but require more scouting, and hitters are drafted on pure tools and no longer rule the game, the age limit makes perfect sense.

Ok, nobody in baseball is arguing this. Why? Because it's a problem for individual teams, not for the league. It's not David Stern's concern or Bud Selig's concern if the teams aren't smart enough to recognize that they shouldn't draft Kwame Brown. Nobody ever holds it against GMs when they pass up great players if they get good ones. Let's say Joe Dumars had drafted Chris Bosh instead of Darko Milicic. Would people still bitch about he could have had Carmelo? No, because he got Bosh, and that's all anybody would remember. GMs shouldn't worry about the "we might be passing up the next great player" factor and instead just focus on the "we should get a guy who can actually play the game" issue. And the league as a league needs to keep its nose out.

If John Schuerholz really is going to let one negotiation sour him forever on Arn Tellem, then best of luck to him, but it's a stupid thing to say. "I'll never deal with you again"? Come on. It's a business, John, get over it.

I think Mark Jones just said that Zaza Pachulia is "not afraid to back down". Um.

Props to London Fletcher for calling himself the "Susan Lucci of the NFL". How many NFLers even know who she is?

Participatory journalism will always get me going, whether it's George Plimpton playing quarterback for the Lions or AJ Jacobs reading the encyclopedia. I was excited, then, to read that Jack McCallum conceived of his project as one of participatory journalism. Unfortunately, McCallum appears to have either not read or completely missed the point of Plimpton's great work in this field, because this book is not participatory in the least. It's just a book about the Suns for which McCallum was given more access than a journalist usually gets.

After that initial disappointment, though, I was ready for a good yarn: team, supposed to be on the verge of greatness, loses Amare Stoudemire but makes use of new additions Raja Bell and Boris Diaw to make a run through the regular season and then into the Western Conference finals before finally falling to Dallas. No such yarn emerged. To say that there's a narrative here would stretch the meaning of the word. It's a collection of anecdotes loosely tacked on to the playoff run, with "timeouts" so that McCallum can have flashbacks to anecdotes from the regular season that he thinks are appropriate at the time. This could have worked, but it didn't. The "timeouts" didn't really add flesh to the playoff story so much as provide secondary anecdotes marginally related to the ones he'd told in the chapter before.

Now that I've lowered the expectations from "masterwork of participatory journalism" down to "collection of anecdotes about an interesting team", did the book work as the latter? Kind of. I don't think I have a lot more insight into Steve Nash or Mike D'Antoni, the two leaders of the Suns revolution. I didn't get anything new about Tim Thomas or the down-bench guys (Pat Burke, for instance).

But it's not all bad. The role of the assistant coaches is illuminated effectively, as McCallum shows how each coach takes on a particular persona and has very specific responsibilities on the team, with some of them acting as the "personal coach" of particular players who the coaching staff thought needed individualized attention. Amare Stoudemire's slow comeback from knee surgery is revealed to be at least in part due to his lack of desire to do the work necessary to come back. (Although there is one infuriating moment when Stoudemire hurts his other knee and attributes it to "overcompensating". McCallum dismisses this out of hand as a "predictable layman's theory", which is absurd. Injury cascades due to changed mechanics from compensating for the pain or inability to move an injured joint the same way are well known. Dismissing Amare's theory out of hand in this way may have been correct in this case (the doctors said the two injuries were unrelated), but to dismiss the entire idea is silly. More on silly comments later.)

The most fascinating character in the book ends up being Shawn Marion, the guy who thinks the coaches dump on him harder than anyone else, the guy about whom the coaches admit they might dump on him harder, the guy who can dominate a game or completely coast through it, the guy who wants desperately the attention and adoration given to Nash and D'Antoni. Bill Simmons took potshots at Marion for years, but having read the book, I'm not sure they were entirely warranted. Marion's more complex than "he wants his own team" and it's unfair to characterize him with simple aphorisms.

Boris Diaw, meanwhile, has become my new hero because he is apparently the consummate Frenchman: diet, clothes, attitude. The best line: someone breaks wind and Diaw responds, "Someone has died but does not yet know it." Is that not brilliant coming out of a 6'9" basketball player? It is.

Ok, now to my actual biggest complaint about the book: McCallum's horrible homerism. I understand that as you get close to a team, you start to root for them. You get to like the players and the coaches, you're watching all their games, it's only natural. But as a professional journalist, as someone who, as a Sports Illustrated writer, is supposedly at the top of his profession, I'd expect McCallum to be able to separate his personal feelings from his professional feelings a little bit better than this. The most egregious examples are when McCallum simply takes what a coach or player has (presumably) told him and repeats it as fact, not "D'Antoni says X" but simply "X". A brief catalog of infuriating instances:

1. On pg. 142, Kwame Brown is quoted saying that the Suns "are not a fundamental team. They just go out and they just run a bunch of screen-and-rolls and have such good shooters." McCallum launches a mighty defense of the Suns: "In Brown's world, 'fundamental' equates not to movement and spontaneity but to isolation plays and set offense." No, Jack, that's not what Kwame said at all. He said that Phoenix doesn't run an offense, they just run around, set a few screens, and hope one of their shooters gets an open look. Kwame, as a guy who was trying to learn the triangle, understood very well that basketball was not about isolation plays -- the triangle is very motion-oriented, with backdoor cuts and interior passing being staples of the Lakers' repertoire. There's a reason that the Lakers, as an inferior team, almost won the series with the Suns: they were able to slow the game down and the Suns had no real answer in the half-court set because they don't have an offense to fall back on. How many times did the Suns offense actually devolve to isolation, with Nash or Barbosa breaking their man down? McCallum bought into the revolution a little bit too hard.

2. On pg. 151, McCallum refers to the Lakers walking off the court without shaking hands as "poor sportsmanship." He notes that the Pistons did the same thing to the Bulls in 1991, "but at least the Pistons, who had won the previous two championships, were somebody." First, it's entirely unclear to me how that last thought is relevant. If you're "somebody" (whatever that means), you can get away with not shaking hands? But not if you're a struggling seventh or eighth seed? Second of all, poor sportsmanship! Raja Bell had clotheslined Kobe Bryant earlier in the series! Not even in the context of a play! Bell literally put the cheapest shot I've ever seen in my years as an NBA fan on Kobe, and the Lakers were supposed to shrug that off and shakes hands etc.? Fuck that.

3. "[Avery:] Johnson notwithstanding, there is something irritating about the Mavericks." He goes on to cite Jason Terry and Mark Cuban. Does Jason Terry really irritate anyone who's not a Suns fan? And come on, if you can't acknowledge that Mark Cuban is irritating precisely because he wants to be irritating, because he wants to be like the small-town mayor who bets a turkey against the other small-town mayor on the high-school football game, then you need to take a step back.

4. Probably the most egregious and utterly irresponsible moment comes when he lauds Raja Bell's takedown of Bryant as a "big moment" for Bell. Not in a neutral way does he say this, but in a positive way, as one of his "three big moments" in the playoffs, the other two being a game-tying three pointer and his Willis Reed moment against the Mavs. I really couldn't believe when I read it that McCallum would applaud Bell's ugly thuggish move like this.

5. On page 289, he refers to the Dallas PA announcer as "obnoxious." I don't know what planet McCallum is on where every PA announcer in the NBA isn't obnoxious. To call out Dallas's isn't really justified.

Those aside, there was one place where he just said something dumb that I feel obligated to point out. On pg. 101-02, he writes "[H:]ome teams generally get more favorable calls than visiting teams. ... [O:]verall, a home team gets the majority of close ones." But does he back this point up in any way? I don't expect him to break his chapter down and start an empirical study, but come on, a footnote maybe? This kind of unattributed nonsense without any pretense of proving it's true is the worst of the journalistic world.

One thing McCallum gets right: "If the [dress:] code is not inherently racist, it is certainly racial." I like that he took two paragraphs to basically just give his thoughts on the dress code, and I like that he got it right.

Finally, one other bit: Raja Bell's mom actually talked trash to Kobe after the series was over (pg. 153), proving that Raja Bell's mom has exactly the same amount of class as Raja Bell.

I was looking at Cleveland's schedule so far this, trying to figure out how on earth they have a 13.5 point differential for the season, and I realized that they haven't beaten anyone yet this year. Of the other nine teams with a .600 or better winning percentage: they lost to Boston on opening night; they don't play the Lakers until January 19th; they don't play Orlando until January 29th; they don't play Houston until December 23rd; they play San Antonio on February 27th; they play Portland on January 21st; they lost to Detroit; they lost to New Orleans.

Of the top eleven teams in the league, the eleven with single-digit losses, they've beaten two: Utah (who were playing without Deron Williams, Mehmet Okur and Andrei Kirilenko) and Denver (good win). Let's not starting anointing these guys the best team in the world until they're better than 2-3 against the good teams. (To be fair, they have taken care of business against the bad teams while the Lakers and Celtics have slipped up against Indiana and Sacramento. But the Lakers have a 4-1 record against those .600-and-greater teams while Boston is 7-1 against them. Boston, as much as it pains me to say so, is clearly still the class of the NBA. The Lakers are probably an unfocused second that is going to have to step their game up if they want to have better than an outside shot of winning it all.)

What does defense in the NBA come down to? Keeping the opponent from scoring. That's all that matters, regardless of how you do it: turnovers, forcing tough shots, yelling really loud, whatever. As long as the other team scores less than you do, you win the game. Of course, some teams give up a lot of points because they play fast, so the other team gets more shots, so they score more. And some teams don't give up many points because the play slow, run 20 seconds off out of every 24-second clock, and so forth, so that the other team doesn't get as many shots, so they score less. The question, then, doesn't come down to "how many points does the other team score per game?", because that doesn't take into account how many times you get the ball per game. No, the question is "how many points does the other team score per possession?"

Coming into the game against Phoenix, the theme of the pre-game meetings between the producers, Mark Jackson, and Dave Pasch was clearly "these teams don't play defense." It's the same thing we've been hearing out of Charles Barkley for years and years about Phoenix. Now that the Lakers play at a Phoenix-like pace (third-fastest in the league), the "they don't play defense" cries come crashing down around them. But guess what, Mark Jackson, who bashed the Lakers all damn game, over and over and over, about how horrible their defense is? The Lakers are third in the league in points allowed per possession. (They're also third in the league in points scored per possession. That's why they're 18-3.) The problem for Mark Jackson is that I've seen no proof that he is, in fact, better than that. He's a half-assed Charles Barkley -- just as uninsightful, but a third as funny.

The Suns, of course, used to suffer the same criticism. It wasn't quite as unfounded as it is about the Lakers this year, but it wasn't quite fair, either. Last year, Phoenix's pace was fourth-fastest and they were an average defensive team, ranking 16th in points per possession. The year before, they were 13th. Before that, 16th again. Before that, 17th. In other words, during the Suns' run as one of the NBA's best teams, they weren't a good defensive team, but they didn't have the kind of defense you could excoriate, either.

Pace effects are the park effects of basketball. People thought Vinny Castilla and Dante Bichette were good players because they didn't understand park effects. (Although it's possible that Colorado's extremity helped popularize the idea that a park can have a great effect on hitters and pitchers.) In the same fashion, people underrate defenses like L.A.'s and Phoenix's because of their pace of play. The effects of pace are starting to seep into the mainstream, though. I'm not as much ahead of the curve in basketball as I was in baseball -- a lot of my realizations about the various misunderstandings we have about basketball have come from ESPN's website rather than outsider sources like Baseball Prospectus.

It's not all rosy, though. Fire Joe Morgan didn't close because of a lack of material, they quit because a huge segment of the baseball writing population was making the same arguments over and over and over again, never learning, never thinking things through. It's the kind of thing that's going to take a generation to change despite the efforts of some of the old guard, notably Peter Gammons. I expect nothing different in basketball.

The tear-down of the Suns continues, I found out from ESPN. Raja Bell and Boris Diaw have been sent to Charlotte for Jason Richardson. I'm not the only one who thinks this deal is crazy for the Suns, am I? Richardson can score the basketball, with an 18.8 point average for his career. He shoots the three at a very good rate, including 40% last year and 46% so far this year. But think about all the things he doesn't do: he doesn't pass the ball, he doesn't rebound, he's not known as a defensive player, and even at the thing he does best, scoring, he's only moderately efficient. He's a ball-stopper. Obviously the old Suns would never use this guy. But does he fit the new Suns any better? Is there problem really that they don't have enough ball-stopping shooters who don't play defense. Is that any team's problem? The Suns, more and more, look like a team without a plan. They decide that they're going to blow up their entire philosophy under Mike D'Antoni and run with a Steve Kerr-Terry Porter-Shaq tradition-fest. So why on earth do you trade your best wing defender and a guy who's established that, if you give him the minutes, he'll give you 12/6/6 and be utterly unselfish?

So now you've got Jason Richardson. You've already got Steve Nash, Shaq, and Amare Stoudemire. Richardson's the fourth guy here, right? Nash is Nash, and Amare is still immensely talented, a great offensive player. Shaq showed that he's still got some pop the other night when he scored 35, and, maybe more importantly, he doesn't have the personality to take a relegation to fourth option well. He's had enough difficulty adjusting to being the third-best player on the team. So ok, Richardson is the fourth option. He's not getting the one-on-one opportunities to break down his man. He'll be a spot-up shooter most of the time, working to spots to get the ball from Nash or Shaq. Is Richardson really that much better at that job than Raja Bell that you're willing to sacrifice Bell's defense, his leadership on the team, his beloved status in Phoenix, and the all-around play of Boris Diaw to get him? (Spoiler: I wouldn't ask the question if I thought the answer was "yes".)

Now, the deal doesn't make Charlotte a good team right now, but when you can get back two good players at reasonable prices for one guy who's always been overrated because teams overvalue individual points at the expense of all the other things it takes to win a basketball game, I think you've won the deal.

Best of all? Phoenix will be very shorthanded against the Lakers tonight, with L.A. coming off a bad loss to a bad Sacramento team. They will of course be missing Bell and Diaw, but also Shaq, who will unfortunately be in New Jersey for a family funeral, and Sean Singletary, who was a throw-in in the deal.

(Interestingly, John Hollinger likes the deal for the Suns. However, he makes the assumption that the trade is a sign that the Suns are going back to running and gunning. I think he's off base. They can certainly try to do that, but the architect of that style, the man who can fix it when it's off-kilter and keep on his guys to keep running, is running the Knicks. And remember, Richardson is a ball-stopper. Yes, he's a finisher in transition, but the Suns aren't always in transition. When they're not running, they still need to move the ball.)

This is a great post by the always-reliable Joe Posnanski, reviewing the game he considers to be Greg Maddux's greatest. It's a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of each at-bat in a game when Maddux faced just 28 hitters and threw just 84 pitches in shutting out the Yankees in July, 1997.

You should read the whole thing, because it's great, but I wanted to make two comments about Posnanski's preamble. First, take a look at the ERA+ chart for Maddux's prime. The first two entries are this: Maddux, 191, Clemens, 153. It's cliche, but it bears repeating: Maddux was the most dominant non-dominating pitcher ever. When he really muscled up, he could get his fastball up to 92. He never ever blew away a single batter. His strikeout rates in his prime were very good, but never at the level of the other great pitchers in history. He might be the only top-ten-all-time pitcher to be there because he didn't walk anyone, didn't give up home runs, and got ground balls. As we've learned from the progeny of Voros McCracken, though, if you combine a (merely) good strikeout rate with absurdly good walk and homer rates, you will be a great pitcher. It's just that it's so rare to actually see that combination.

The second thing is Posnanski's review of the pitches Maddux threw. The brilliant thing about Maddux, as Posnanski notes, is that he didn't really have three or four or five discrete pitches. He had a continuum. He threw the curveball, which was it's own discrete pitch. But other than that, he had a fastball that ranged from straight-and-92 to wicked-movement-and-82, and then a circle change that he threw with a different grip but that was really just a continuation of the fastball continuum -- it'd move even more ridiculously than the slow fastball and be even slower.

People talk about Greg Maddux's pitching intelligence, but I think his physical pitching ability might be underrated. There's of course the ability to throw the ball 92 mph in the first place, which is obviously incredibly uncommon. But combine that arm with the manual sensitivity and muscle control necessary to finely adjust the pressure points on the ball and the speed of the pitch to achieve that infinite variety of pitches. You also don't win 173 Gold Gloves, or whatever the actual number was, without being a talented athlete. (The game review linked above touches on this as well, as he threw a perfect pickoff throw to second base to erase a runner at one point.)

The Raptors are the latest team to fire their coach. He was great on The Wire, less great in the NBA.