The Darius Miles Situation

So, I am sure most of you that care already know, but there are big doings for the Blazers on the whole Darius Miles thing.

For now I am not going to delve into the whys, whats or wherefores of the whole thing, but there is one point I feel compelled to get out there. Many of the people that are discussing this issue find the letter/email sent out threatening litigation to have been little more then bluster. "How can you prove the other team acted maliciously?" they ask. The short answer is "circumstantial evidence," or "inferential reasoning" if you will.

Here is the crux of the issue:  If Miles plays 2 more games this year it would have a somewhat significant negative impact on Portland's cap space heading into the off season. In the NBA a team can sign a player to 10 day contract which would be enough to Miles in to two games without significant cost to the signing team. Portland sent out a letter making it clear that if it appeared a team was signing and playing Miles for the purpose of harming Portland's cap they would take legal action.

So consider this:  Team A signs Miles to a 10 day contract, plays him 1 minute of garbage time in each of 2 games during that 10 days and then lets him go. Miles isn't signed and doesn't play another game all season. In other words, Team A did just enough to put Miles' salery pack on Portland's cap. Sure there is no direct evidence of the intent, NBA executives are smart enough not to put thier ill intent in an email. But we can infer their intent. And a jury/judge could do the exact same thing. I am not saying it would be the easiest case, but the "journalists" claiming that it can't be proven are some combination of naieve, dumb or too lazy to think it through. 

Rip City

So, a month or two ago I was thinking about the Blazers. Specifically, around the time they announced they were going to retire Terry Porter's number I started remenicing about those old Blazer teams again. Then I remembered the awesome Blazer rap songs and Rip City Rhapsody in particular. I spent hours (literally several hours over 2-3 nights) searching for an mp3 or youtube video of the that song.  You see I loved that song. I had the cassette tape. I had a VHS tape of the highlights from that season that had the video. And I watched it on a pretty regular basis. But I couldn't find it. It didn't exist anywhere. Adter that amount of searching I was convinced that the internet had let me down.

So, why did I tell you all of this? Because I thought perhaps it wasn't clear how big of a dork I was/am?  No, not exactly. You see, the great Lord of the Tubes has granted my wish. So to all of you that love it, to all of you that have never seen it, I present the video of Rip City Rhapsody! Big thanks to Bust-a-Bucket for getting this done.

While watching the video keep your eye out for some classic Drazen shots... as well as Kevin Johnson crying like a baby. But perhaps best of all, is hearing the Schonz calls in the background.

Random Acts of Kindness

Before reaching our feature presentation, a short note. As I typed the title to this post, my mind half wandered and before I knew it I had types "Random Acts of Congress." I am sure that isn't exactly a new joke, but it made me chuckle. Anyway, on to the real reason I am here:

First things first, here is the article that inspired this post. 

There, have you read it? You should, my rant will make more sense that way. In case you are too lazy here are the cliffs notes: 1) Girl at Sheldon High starts a club to perform random acts of kindness. It grows quickly. 2) They start by giving free hugs at a Duck game, and all is good. 3) They try to rake leaves for people in the neighborhood. One of the people they approach decides these high-schoolers (7 girls and 1 guy) are there to burgle her house and calls the cops. 4) They try to hand out cards with nice messages and mints at VRC. Security kicks them out for violating the anti-soliciting rule.

It really is quite incredible. Unbelievable, frankly. Now, I can be as cynical as the next guy. Maybe even more so. I try not to be, but the fact is it is almost impossible not to grow cynical in my job. But here we have kids trying to be good. High schoolers spending time doing something other then  drinking, or trying to score some dope, or partying etc. and what happens? They get kicked out of VRC? An older woman calls the police and reports them as suspicious for trying to rake her leaves? I always knew that the world wasn't a place all full of happy sunshine and rainbows etc. And I know most people know it too. But still, if 7 girls and 1 guy, all of high-school age offered to rake my yard for free? I really don't think I would suspect them of trying to burgle me. And I deal with thieves, burglars and drug addicts on a daily basis. 

I don't know, maybe if it was in Detroit, or certain parts of Los Angeles or something I could understand the suspicion. But Eugene? C'mon! I guess I am just disappointed in people. I seems like such a wonderful idea for the students, and that it got such an antagonistic reception saddens me. 

Unbelievable

I mean unfathomable, as in someone making a watchable movie out of the Silmarilion unbelievable. Now obviously I am Duck fan. But with the Ducks idle, and being a college football fan (and a little under the weather and thereby confined to my chair) I thought I would watch the OSU @ U of A game, right? Wrong. For some reason known only to FSN, which I now strongly suspect is actually run by a small cadre of monkeys, they have decided to replay the Apple Cup. The game they just showed at noon! For god's sake the Washington schools had 1 win between them. Why in the name of all that is holy would you re-play a game between two shitty teams (that was just on) instead of a new game that has Rose Bowl implications.

So I am laying her in my bedroom, listening to the Blazer game. You see I don't have Comcast, nor is there a Trailblazer radio affiliate in the Astoria area. Luckily, from one spot in my bedroom I can pickup the broadcast on 95.5 out of Portland. Anyway, none of that has a whole lot to do with this post. This post is actually another in my sporadic series looking at modern statistical analysis and the NBA.

It is still pretty early in the season, so any statistics we could look at would be significantly limited by small sample size limitations. However, I came across a couple of articles at Basketball Prospectus (main page: here) that I think bear some comment, and with a little luck, some discussion. Kevin Pelton is the main writer for Basketball Prospectus, and he has worked to develop a projection system called SCHOENE that is (at least in some ways) similar to PECOTA, a baseball projection system. See here for a nice in depth explanation. In essence, SCHOENE uses last years stats to build a projection for every player that played at least 250 minutes in the previous season. Once the player projections are finished, those can then be used to build team projections. There are obviously several important adjustments made, if you are curious about those follow the link above.

So, that is a long explanation that you probably didn't need just to link to this. That is the SCHOENE projection for the Northwest Division this year. A little surprising to me was the projection for Portland: 51-31 and the division winner. Now don't get me wrong, I love the Blazers. I am just not sure they are 50+ win team this year. Compare this with Hollinger, who looks at Portland as more or less a .500 team. In some ways I tend to think Hollinger's projection is closer to reality, but honestly I am not qualified to discuss which system is stronger. I do think it is important to point out that Hollinger uses 3 years of weighted statistics rather then just last years. Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting.

PS. Kind of funny, looking at Lamarcus Aldridge's closest comparison (that is what player of similar size, position, etc. did his last season match closest): Channing Frye. 

1st half thoughts.

Sort of live blogging this... Here are the thougths I had.

Frye's first 3 of the season didn't look good. I know he has been working on it, and I won't judge from one shot but it looked rushed and flat.

Frankly, the whole team has looked jittery and rushed. I know they are young, but I was hoping at least Roy and Aldridge would show a little more poise. I hope it gets better soon or tonight could get long in a hurry.

Greg looks a little lost on the offensive side of the ball, at times I can't say I am completely surprised, but this is the first chance I have been able to watch him. He does look rebounding on the defensive side.

Half way through the 2^nd and Outlaw looks like he is starting to heat up. That would help. Portland needs some kind of offensive spark if they are going to make a game of this. Of course, that doesn't mean he nees to force ugly shots...

Like you would expect from a young team, Portland looks really good on one defensive possession, and really bad on the next. If there is anything to take away from this game going forward I think it is this. There is a lot of talent, but it is still young. Consistency will take time, and I think Blazer fans are going to need patience.

I still say Portland should make one of the last 2 spots in the playoffs this year.

Greg just dropped a great move. Drew the double team, split it, drew the foul and still got off a clean shot.. It didn't go in, but it was a look at what he can do.

That goal tending call on Oden looked like bullshit to me. You will notice TNT didn't show the replay...

Blake needs to knock down wide open shots. I have been a big defender of him, but you need to knock down those shots.

LA is playing aggressive defense, but Portland is making it really easy on them. They have no offensive focus. Whatever the game plan was, it doesn't seem that Portland is executing it.

The last 2 minutes there looked a lot better. Let's hope Portland comes out with better energy after the half.

No matter what the TNT announcers say, I don't think there is any legitimate home court advantage in the LA Coliseum.  

Quick Thoughts from Early in the Blazer Game

I am not particularly surprised that Oden caught a couple of quick fouls. That is just the refs saying welcome to LA.

Portland is jacking up too many jump shots, and the ball really isn't moving. Once it gets into the hands of either Outlaw or Aldridge the whole arena knows a shot is going up. If that is going to be the case, Portland doesn't have a chance in this one.

I haven't seen enough to comment on the defense yet.

Look for another, more in depth post later.

More on Kittys.

So, a comment on my last post reminded me something. I posted about our new kitty a little while ago. But I forgot to tell you wonderful readers that we got another one. Specifically, we got Misha's sister since nobody else was going to take her. I couldn't stand the idea of having her go feral, or be turned over to the county shelter. We have a good shelter, but they are very full.

So we have two kittys now. We (really, I) named the new one Sierpinski, though we often call her Sierpi for short. They have similar coloring patterns, except that Sierpi is black with white (it took me three tries to spell "white" right there. Not typos, just three wrong spellings...) instead of grey with white. 

Anyway, here are some photos of the two kittys. It is kind of tough to get a picture of just Sierpi on her own.

538

Astute, politically savvy readers know the meaning of the number 538. They also know the importance of 270. For those that might be a little behind in their high-school civics 538 is the number of electoral votes for a presidential election, 270 is magic number to move to White House.

I have been watching this election shape up for a long, long time. I may not be the political junkie that some of you out there are, but I find presidential politics to be darn interesting. In furtherance of that, and with a healthy thanks to my boy Paul, I have been cruising around a pretty awesome new site.

Some of the numbers there are pretty encouraging for someone of my personal leanings. But more interesting for me is that nobody in the news seems to be looking or talking about the numbers in this much detail. Now, I am not a statistical genius. In fact most of my knowledge in statistical analysis comes from a few college classes a growing love affair with in-depth statistical analysis in a sports context. That said, based on my somewhat limited knowledge, the methodology here looks quite solid. I understand sports announcers not digging into SABR type numbers. Most viewers don't know what to do with honest statistical analysis, and it is too tough to explain. But here, the people that watch MSNBC, or CNN are obviously fairly well informed, but nobody references numbers this in depth. Instead they use one or two polls to give them a jumping off point. It seems to me that honest, hardcore, statistical analysis of an election should have a place in the media. Alright, enough ranting about the statistical illiteracy of the populace, I do enough of that when I am talking about sports.

Small Personal Update Space:

My life is 90% boring, and I like it that way.

I just finished reading The Center Holds. It was pretty good. Not quite in the league of The Brethren, but good. I am about to start on Democracy Reborn. Let there be no doubt that I am a dork...

Only new music lately isn't that new, but if you haven't listened to Band of Horses, you should probably fix that, lest your life seem empty and grey.

Oregon vs Boise State

I thought I would share a few of my thoughts on this game since I am not particularly sleepy.

But before I do, I have to drop an insanly awesome link. If you haven't heard of Hulu.com, you have problems in your life. Seriously, what do you do all day? I suppose if you live somewhere with Comcast's OnDemand, this would be of a little less interest. If, like me, your cable company doesn't have such a service, this website is pretty rockin. It seems to work like this: Get yourself a free account, watch tv shows and movies for free with fairly limited interuptions. So far I have had no freezing, skipping or caching issues, and the video quality is awesome. Did you miss Arrested Development when it was on the air, or maybe you just miss it in general? Not to fear, Hulu has the entire series. Ready to watch, for free. It is also the only place I know where you can still see the 3 part musical blog of Dr. Horrible. I shouldn't have to tell you how awesome that is.

Alright, interlude aside, how does it look for Oregon tomorrow? Well, I don't see a blow out, but I think if you played the game under these conditions 10 seperate times Oregon comes out on top 7 of them. This one may look like some old-school football. Lean on the defense and run the ball. With Oregon's somewhat green (thank god they played the backups in the first few games) QB's the goal should be to make it easy for them to succeed. And although BSU has good team speed, I don't think they will be able to completly stop the running game. I also think Oregon's defense is extremely good. Good enough to keep them in most games. Maybe not against USC in the Collesium, but good enough for just about anything else. Given that, and that BSU's QB is making his first ever college road start, I think the defense should have a pretty good game. I would be really suprised if BSU scored more than 24, and pretty suprised if they even break 20. If the Oregon O-line does it's job, and the recievers catch the balls that are thrown, I think Oregon will just about cover the spread. I am calling 28-17 Oregon. Not quite enough to cover the spread (11.5) but a winner if you took the under (o/u @55).

Go Ducks. (BTW, in 2 years Harper = very scary )