Silent Film Series: Baron Davis (Oakland, CA 2007)

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The writers and readers of this site tend to be employed or otherwise disposed during the day such that watching video clips on full volume usually doesn’t happen. If there’s something I really want to hear, I save it for lunch or the end of the day, and I suspect a lot of people do the same thing. This means that there are a lot of us watching a lot of videos– the general tenor of the internet being what it is– on mute. Conventional wisdom suggests that this practice detracts from our experience of these videos. Conventional wisdom also suggests that you never get involved in a land war in Asia, but is Afghanistan even in Asia and anyway that’s not what we’re talking about because the fact is that conventional wisdom can be wrong about videos and about wars (but not about videos of wars), which is why we’re introducing the ALDLAND Silent Film Series.

The concept is simple: some videos are better without sound. Whether they’re made that way or are seen that way for some variation on the modern reality alluded to above, this addition-by-subtraction effect is very real.

The Series’ inaugural feature comes from Oakland, California in 2007. Yesterday afternoon, Amos Barshad included the clip in his possibly prescient (given the Knicks’ loss in Miami last night) contingency plan for the end of Linsanity. It stars a somewhat (i.e., five-years) younger Baron Davis in his role as point guard for the Golden State Warriors, and it comes in the final minutes of a 20+ point win over the visiting Utah Jazz.

I neither am nor aspire to be Chuck Klosterman: a second-by-second analysis of this video hardly seems necessary. Instead, as you watch it (sans audio!, of course), appreciate the silent cinemagic of every shot of Davis, his teammates, Andrei Kirilenko, the fans, and the referee. Sound can improve these visuals in zero ways.

Feel Good Friday Jam

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Whipping through downtown Louisville on my way back from the Kentucky-Vanderbilt game, I hit scan on my radio, and my car immediately was filled with a digitonic breakdown the likes of which I had not heard since Eiffel 65 first struck my ears on a late-night walkman blast in 1999. The song soon faded out, and I scanned again, immediately hitting a much earlier point in the same song on the very next station. I only found it once more on my drive, but I got hooked, and now you can too:

* Apologies for the advertisement, which was necessary to bring you the highest available definition for this video, and the excessive shirt-waiving, which was not.

Bluegrass breakdown: Kentucky defeats Vanderbilt 69-63

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After a rough opening period, Vanderbilt erased a thirteen-point halftime deficit to twice take the lead in the second half, but an inability to score any points for the final 4:09 of the game doomed the Commodores to defeat at the hands of the #1 Wildcats. Complete postgame coverage is available here, here, and here. My impressions of the game were 1) Kentucky is a very good team; 2) Vanderbilt showed it could overcome obstacles and come back in a game, playing the best team in the country better than anybody has since an early season ‘Cat loss to Indiana; and 3) UK and Vandy at Memorial Gym is one of the most exciting sports scenes out there.

After a late arrival into Music City Friday night, I couldn’t get myself to the gym for the early taping of ESPN’s Gameday program, but things got on track quickly with a lunch of the best fried chicken in all the land with with 2/5ths of the VSL Brain Trust, among many other notable persons. Follow that up with afternoon honky-tonking– the live sounds of Tootsie’s and Robert’s– and a fresh growler from Jackalope Brewery, and I was primed to enjoy a pregame treat in the form of watching Michigan State defeat Ohio State over some fresh brats. A Sunday morning visit to St. Augustine, and I was Northbound again. Traveling through Kentucky, picking up WKU Radio’s Barren River Breakdown program dulled the sting of the previous night’s loss just a little bit.

The ‘Dores get another regular-season chance against the Wildcats this weekend when they travel to Rupp Arena, where Kentucky has won forty-nine straight.

For more of my pictures, click here, here, here, and here.

Previous Live Coverage:
Beale Street recap: Vandy falls to Cincinnati in the Liberty Bowl, 31-24
Bpbrady’s Long Overdue Sugar Bowl Writeup
Windy City recap: Red Wings fall to Blackhawks 3-2
Michigan’s unfriendly welcoming of Nebraska
B1G Roadtrippin’: Michigan at Illinois
Nashville recap: Georgia escapes, 33-28
B1G Roadtrippin’: Michigan at Northwestern
The Little Brown Jug stays in Ann Arbor
Recap: Detroit Red Wings’ Red & White Game
Motor City recap: Tigers win, 2-1
Music City recap: Vanderbilt wins, 45-14
Concert report: Lyle Lovett and his Large Band
Concert report: An evening with Bruce Hornsby, Béla Fleck, the Noisemakers, and the Flecktones

Twitcruiting, or, Oklahoma Has The Internet Now

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Jay Norvell is a co-offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach for the University of Oklahoma. Ricky Seals-Jones is a four-star recruit who is expected to commit to the University of Texas tomorrow.

I saw the above in the @ALDLANDia twitter feed a few moments ago. Assuming it was real, it since has been deleted. Further assuming it was real, it strikes me as all kinds of problematic.

As I’m writing this, SB Nation confirms that the above tweet was real and that Seals-Jones wasn’t the only recruit to receive such a message.

LeBron James is the best professional basketball player ever

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It might not seem like it, but, as discussed on ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike this morning, LeBron James’ current season is the best season a professional player has ever had. John Hollinger, also of ESPN, created the Player Efficiency Rating (PER) metric for basketball players. In (his) general terms, “the PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.” It’s an advanced metric, and really, it’s a doubly advanced metric because it’s derivative of other advanced metrics. If you want it, the nitty gritty is here, but what PER allows us to do is compare individual players with their contemporaries and with those from other eras on equal footing.

The following is a list of the top individual full-season performances, based on PER, in the history of the NBA and ABA:

Rank    Player PER Season Tm
1. Wilt Chamberlain 31.84 1962-63 SFW
2. Wilt Chamberlain 31.76 1961-62 PHW
3. Michael Jordan 31.71 1987-88 CHI
4. LeBron James 31.67 2008-09 CLE
5. Wilt Chamberlain 31.64 1963-64 SFW
6. Michael Jordan 31.63 1990-91 CHI
7. Michael Jordan 31.19 1989-90 CHI
8. Michael Jordan 31.14 1988-89 CHI
9. LeBron James 31.10 2009-10 CLE
10. David Robinson 30.66 1993-94 SAS

The full list from Basketball-Reference is here.

James already has two of the ten best seasons, and he’s the only active player in that group. (His teammate, Dwayne Wade, is the next active player listed, at 13.) If the current season ended today, though, James would post a PER of 32.8, by far the highest mark ever recorded.

Perception is a valid and important check on the things statistics tell us. I feel like there are a million things one could write about James and perception, expectations, image, and legacy, all of which would get at the fact that the title of this post is something I’d guess most people reject as an initial, gut reaction but also something we all expected we would read, write, or say at some point. There are myriad potential lessons here. One is that these advanced metrics are a way of witnessing history in the moment, something that’s difficult to do based upon perception alone. Another is that, darn it, I hate LeBron and sabermetrics are for idiot-nerds. A third raises questions about the value we place on winning championships as a component of individual players’ legacies. A fourth is that Patrick Ewing, whose best season comes in at #117 on the big list, might not be the Dan Marino of the 1980s and 1990s NBA, and Kobe Bryant, whose best season so far comes in at #51, isn’t quite the heir to His Airness’ throne, or even Shaq’s big seat. And on and on.

Brian Phillips on Kobe Bryant and outer space

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In terms of watchability, the Lakers are a miserable team this year, even by NBA standards, and the pre-season rap that the (well, more than) once-great team was little more than an aging-but-relevant superstar loner, a largely unsupportive (and largely unrecognizable) supporting cast, and a coach not named Phil Jackson has borne out. Even the team’s most famous fan thinks these Lakers are a snooze-fest.

But what about Kobe this year? First, he was visibly upset about the dismissal of Lamar Odom. More recently, he was visibly ignorant of Jeremy Lin. Slightly more recently, he was the victim of Jeremy Lin’s best career NBA performance. The uniform he’s wearing this year is too big. He seems to lack context, even for himself. What’s his story this year?

Kobe has arguably reached the end of his prime, and while it’s fascinating to watch him hoop with somebody’s swooning great aunt, you can’t help but feel like the moment deserves higher stakes. Kobe’s relentlessness has always been his most celebrated quality, but this season, he’s starting to remind me of one of those space probes that somehow keep feeding back data even after they’ve gone out twice as far as the zone where they were supposed to break down. You know these stories — no one at NASA can believe it, every day they come into work expecting the line to be dead, but somehow, the beeps and blorps keep coming through. Maybe half the transmissions get lost these days, or break up around the moons of Jupiter, but somehow, this piece of isolated metal keeps functioning on a cold fringe of the solar system that no human eyes have seen.

That’s Kobe, right? While the rest of the Lakers look increasingly anxious and time-bound, he just keeps gliding farther out, like some kind of experiment to see whether never having a single feeling can make you immortal. He’s barely preserving radio contact with anyone else at this point, but basketball scientists who’ve seen fragments of his diagnostic readouts report that the numbers are heartening. It’s bizarre. He’s simultaneously the main character in the Lakers’ drama and someone who seems to have nothing to do with the narrative logic of the post-Phil team. Whatever the Mike Brown era is, he’s got no point of contact with it. Even Gasol and Bynum, his best supporting players, essentially just concentrate on not interfering with his flight path. Everyone stays out of his way, which is easy, because “his way” is a couple of billion miles from the rest of the Lakers.

So writes Brian Phillips for Grantland, in a piece arguing that the Lakers have nothing to lose by adding Gilbert Arenas right now.

I’m not sure what I think about Agent Zero these days, I do know that I think Phillips pretty much nailed it with that description. 2012 Kobe is playing like carry-the-team-on-my-back Kobe, except that he doesn’t seem too concerned about whether he’s actually dragging the team along behind him. Spike Lee’s Kobe Doin’ Work was about the 2008 playoffs, but the title might more aptly describe this season, where Kobe’s blue collar isn’t so much the value and virtue-laden, American proverbial blue collar as it is an indication that he’s merely punching the clock.

Just another Monday

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This time of the year is a bit of a lull in the sports calendar, though college basketball continues its upward march toward March, and both Michigan State and Vanderbilt— two teams that have traveled in different directions a bit, mostly by virtue of their original positions this year– appear to be pulling it together when it counts.

After the Red Wings’ record-setting win on Valentine’s Day, they have extended their home winning streak to 23, now besting all such streaks (and not merely those within a single season).

Out East, the Linsanity rolls on. Out West, a rolling avalanche killed three skiiers, including the head judge of the Freeskiing World Tour, in Washington. (These, of course, are not the season’s first skiing deaths.)

Coming attractions here this week include my overdue report on the Kentucky-Vanderbilt game, bdoyk’s nod to Tim Wakefield, and a preview of the 2012 NASCAR season. Thanks to Jalen Rose and all the rest of you for dropping by.

Smackland podcast: The Jalen Rose Show

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Growing up in Michigan, I knew of Jalen Rose as a member of the Fab Five, that faceless monolith of basketball greatness operating out of the east side of the state. Who these guys were wasn’t as important as the fact of their youth and the color of their socks. You knew you were supposed to be able to name them, and that was that. We soon learned to distinguish Chris Webber, though, if not for his timeout, then for his draft position. I remember his #4 Warriors jersey exploding all over the local sporting goods store. I remember it being the first time I ever knew that there was an NBA team called “the Warriors,” also learning that they played in some geographically mystical place called “Golden State.” Understanding these things became less important when he left after his first year for the Washington Bullets (whose geography I only thought I understood until reading a Sports Illustrated for Kids reader poll about new mascots for that team, which suggested “the Presidents” as one of the alternatives). I knew a couple of the other members played in the NBA– that’d be Rose and Juan Howard– and I knew the other two, Jimmy King (who did have limited NBA exposure, Wikipedia tells me as I write now) and Ray Jackson, played in the CBA, which remained popular on the west side of the state until east-side star Isiah Thomas drove it into the ground. Given our instruction as to their greatness, I at first didn’t understand why they weren’t all NBA all stars, but my concern diminished as my escalating interest in the rival Spartans grew and my interest in the NBA decreased.

It therefore was with some surprise that I began to hear Rose making post-playing-career appearances in the national sports media, first (to my ears) on Jim Rome’s radio show, where the two considered each other “brothers in smack” (not a drug reference), and then as an NBA analyst on ESPN. Later, Rose rode the social media wave, positioning himself as an independent online presence through his Twitter feed and interactive website.

I haven’t been a podcast person– until recently, my lifestyle lacked one of the two alternatively necessary elements: a long daily commute or the structure of a single, working person– which is why I didn’t mention Grantland’s podcast section in my initial assessment of that site. Since then, though, I have attempted to integrate podcasts into my regular media consumption, and so far, only one has stuck (although I did check in with The Solid Verbal during the college football season).

When I saw the announcement about the firstsecond episode of the Grantland Network’s “Jalen Rose Show” (the first time it was called that), I didn’t realize it was an actual show or series, and I thought the headline was a reference to Rose’s talkative personality, his ability to carry a segment, a show, a full podcast. Fifteen episodes later, I’m glad I was mistaken.

To give you a flavor of the program, here’s the first of two video clips they have released:

There really isn’t anyone like Rose in sports media today. He is candid, thoughtful, and unintentionally funny. Things he avoid include clichés and directly answering the question asked of him. Keep reading for another video clip…

Some Clever Title Involving the Number 21

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Last night, the Red Wings set an NHL record with 21 straight home wins.  The record had previously been held jointly by the 1929-30 Bruins and the 1975-76 Flyers.  There has been a lot of chatter on the internets about how the Wings’ record does not mean as much because the two other teams that made it to 20 straight wins did it without overtime or shootouts.  That’s bogus . . . 21 straight wins at home is 21 straight wins at home, however you cut it.  The record wasn’t “number of wins at home in a row without overtime or a shootout.”  It’s just “number of wins at home in a row.”  There are also compelling arguments for why the Red Wings’ winning streak is equally as or more impressive than the ones rattled off by the Flyers and Bruins, such as the fact that the salary cap-era NHL features significantly more parity and the fact that the Red Wings continued this streak amidst several trips to and from the west coast.  In the end, the Wings should be happy about this accomplishment, but not too happy because I still expect to be flying back to Detroit for a parade in June.