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In the Grantland video below, Jalen Rose picks the stripped-down Sixers to be the worst team in the NBA. Bill Simmons says it'll be the Suns or Sixers. Hard to find real argument ...

... except from the Wages of Wins, where Arturo Galletti has a solid track record of geekery-based predictions. He picked a Finals of Spurs over Heat in six before the season even started -- which almost happened.

Galletti says the Sixers have a roster that could finish ahead of the Nets, Pacers, Knicks, Warriors and Lakers -- if they're trying to win.

Clippers associate head coach Alvin Gentry remembers the time he met Buzz Aldrin at a party.

The New York Times is a heavy-hitting paper, and a good chunk of its heaviest hitting comes in the Sunday Review section. It's not often about sports, but this past Sunday's cover is dominated by an enormous Rebecca Mock illustration of a baseball player taking a cut in an otherwise entirely empty stadium. The headline over Jonathan Mahler's article asks: "Is the Game Over?"

Tough question.

What follows is sober analysis of how the "national pastime" came to be as irrelevant as it is. Baseball can't touch football by any metric, and now is looking pretty bad compared to basketball too. This all projects to get worse as audiences age, and become more global. Mahler investigates, and makes some points that are straight from the HoopIdea playbook. Basically, in the name of tradition, baseball failed to adequately foster excitement.

As crazy as it sounds, baseball was once celebrated for its speed. Into the 1910s — before all of the commercial breaks and visits to the mound — it was possible to play a game in under an hour, says the author Kevin Baker, who is writing a history of baseball in New York City.

To the game’s early poets, baseball’s fast pace was what made it distinctly American. Mark Twain called it a symbol of “the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!” The 21st century, not so much.

At the NBA offices, they're congratulating themselves for being on the right side of this point. But that's no reason to rest. If there's any lesson of baseball's decline it's that institutionalized complacency, and an unreasonable attachment to tradition, can quickly catch up to any sport.

The first HoopIdea was to combat needless delays and standing around, sapping the fun of NBA crunch time.

Dramatic tension is to sports as cheese is to a quesadilla. It's not everything, but nobody'll give you a penny for one without it.

Mahler goes on to explore some reasons for the NFL's dramatic ascendance. They include some "structural advantages," like playing only once a week, elimination games all playoffs long, and a scarcity of games that helps each one rise to the level of mattering to a national audience. (With 162 games, plenty of them just don't matter. Mahler points out that a recent Astros game had TV ratings implying fewer than 1,000 people in Houston watched. Meanwhile, the trick is to matter on SportsCenter and in the national consciousness, a tough assignment for a baseball game.)

The funny part about that is ... every league could have those things. It's not like the NFL lucked into a better format. They chose it.

Meanwhile, there are, of course, real, long-term business reasons for minimizing the delays and standing around, and maybe even for reducing the number of games.

Ironically, the reasons those things haven't happened already in the NBA is: business. There's money to be made from the way things are. But that's short-term thinking mired in tradition and a fear of letting the game evolve.

The simple truth is, as much money as there is from the current set-up, there may be even more to be made, long term, from making every minute of every game as energetic, artistic and delightful as possible. That's what HoopIdea is about -- making the best game in the world even better. Getting those things right is fantastic. Getting them wrong ... look how that worked for baseball.

Sixers GM Sam Hinkie got the to job in Philadelphia, and seemingly within minutes, had essentially won draft night by somehow amassing a collection of four lottery picks -- the same number of lottery picks that, for instance, the Thunder used to turn their franchise around. Nerlens Noel and Michael Carter-Williams are already here, and in the mighty 2014 draft the Sixers will have their own pick, and, quite probably, an excellent pick from the Pelicans.

The youth movement is underway. And for all the love people have for Noel and Carter-Williams, and knowing the Pelicans pick has protections, it's clear the only way this team will get a "next LeBron" or "next Durant" type player -- Andrew Wiggins, for instance -- is if it comes from the Sixers' own pick.

As in, the crazy high pick the whole NBA expects they will be awarded for the wretchedness of losses they are about to unleash.

Look around the gym Friday at the Sixers' media day at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (where the team rents a gym in lieu of a practice facility). Noel is dribbling between his legs, smiling for the camera. Carter-Williams wears a Cat in the Hat hat shooting a reading promotion. A posse of season-ticket holders in the corner are hanging on forward Royce White's every word. Everyone is happy, because the losses are not yet wearing everybody down.

Who knows if it'll work. But it just might be that Hinkie's four-pack of lottery tickets is exactly how a contender is born. Sixers fans have been famously morose essentially forever. But now their familiar sludge of doom comes with a shot of espresso. There's a new roster, a new GM and a new coach, and a flotilla of talented youngsters. The Sixers may be as doomed as ever, but now they're doomed with a plan. Which is such a better way to be doomed.

A beat writer takes it all in then declares to his colleagues: "Everything's just so great right now. But you know it's only downhill from here."

Because anyone who has taken a moment to analyze Philly's current predicament realizes fans mostly value wins, while this team is valuing losses, and the roster reflects it. This team is going to be terrible, for a season, at least, in the name of rebuilding.

Jason Richardson is one of this team's rare veterans. I asked him what feels different about this season. "All the young faces!" he declares. "We was a young team last year. This team is really young. Three or four guys are really veterans, and everybody else is like rookies. It's going to be fun to see, because those guys are going to learn a lot this year."

The gym was full of players, being grilled about the upcoming season, and no one had any bravado. This season, there are no rivalries, no playoff aspirations, none of the normal "just maybe, if the stars align" thinking.

There are also no autograph seekers -- you could walk into this event off the street without a credential, as it happens -- because there are no stars. Who's the team's best player? Evan Turner? Thaddeus Young, maybe? Based on his high potential and cheap contract, Noel may be the key asset, but there isn't even much confidence Noel will play anytime soon -- projected as the top overall pick, the defensive big man fell to the sixth pick because he's coming off major knee surgery.

What the team has, maybe, are a few strands, ideas, mainly, that could -- if Hinkie and new coach Brett Brown are lucky as well as smart -- emerge into this thing called "winning culture." In other words, just maybe this season, in addition to a great pick, can deliver a way of approaching the job of playing in the NBA in a way that will pay off over the long-term.

Brown is from the Spurs, which is no small part of his qualifications. The Sixers don't need wins right now, but they do need a foundation for big winning down the road.

Malik Rose calls games for Sixers TV now, but for eight years he played for San Antonio, and for much of that time Brown was the coach he dealt with most. How long has Rose known the Sixers new head coach? "Too long!" he insists, laughing.

I've always kind of wondered if "culture," in terms of ideals, or things people say to each other, is something that really translates consistently to wins. So I ask Rose if there's really something, a real thing, Brown can actually transport from San Antonio to Philadelphia. (If you don't bring Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili with it, does it still exist?) Is "winning culture" real?

"YES. Oh. Absolutely. There's a culture." Rose is emphatic. "I know it's going to work here, too. Guys are held accountable. You're at the highest level of basketball in the world. That means keeping your mind, body, spirit -- everything -- ready to do your job. And if you're ready to do your job you're held accountable. And it goes from the future Hall of Famer to the 12th man."

What does it mean to be held accountable? Would you be fined?

"We never really found out what that meant," says Rose. "Knowing that those were the repercussions, you came into camp ready. You never had to worry about guys not coming into camp ready. It was just a way of life. Everything was about winning. Everything was about basketball. All other things, contracts, endorsements, even to a certain extent, family issues, if it wasn't anything life-threatening, or health-related, that stuff got pushed back when November came around."

I start to say that I recently learned that in the military, research shows the best motivation, by far, is ... Rose finishes the sentence: "The guy right next to you." Right. When the team culture is good, you work hard so you don't let that teammate down. That's how this ideally works.

Encouraging: Carter-Williams' comment about Brown was that "I can tell he really cares about us."



It is about love, according to the military research. And it is about work. Knowing Duncan and Parker would be in great shape kept Rose in great shape.

Hinkie is like a broken record on that topic. Nothing impresses him about a player more than a "great capacity to work." That is the foundation of the culture, and Brown, who was unpaid when he began with the Spurs, has lived it.

"He was just the grunt on the team," remembers Rose. "There to rebound. There to run drills. He started from the bottom. If ever you wanted to reach him, you looked in the gym."

"Coach Brown is a really unique coach. And it's his first time. It's awesome and exciting for me," says Royce White, a former first-round pick of the Rockets who has yet to play a regular season game because of complications of mental health issues. White has been in town working with Brown for two weeks, and says "it kind of feels like when I played for another coach who was doing this for his first time in [Iowa State head coach Fred] Hoiberg. It feels like that first time. Building that culture. And I'll hopefully be able to let him know that I'm loyal to him. He's a great guy."

Brown is also articulating the new vision for the franchise through an accent thick with the timbre of New England, where he grew up, and Australia, where he lived much of his adult life and met his wife. (Brown calls it "Bostralian.")

"For the most part I can understand him," says White with a laugh. "More so than being able to hear exactly what he's saying, you can feel him. Sometimes I don't know exactly what he's saying, but I'm like I feel you. I feel you. I feel the energy. It's a good thing."

As #NBArank rolls on, David Thorpe says any player's value depends mightily on context.

Take a minute to enjoy this exchange Cavaliers guard Kyrie Irving had while visiting South Africa with UNICEF:

Coaching, generally, is a multibillion-dollar global business. NBA coaching accounts for something like $120 million of that -- that's roughly how much the 30 teams' coaching staffs make together.

The key skill: inspiring the most accomplished individuals in the game to do what's best for the team, and to do it hard, consistently and professionally, as many nights a season as possible, through injury, exhaustion, politics and constant disappointment.

One of the NBA's mysteries: How do you motivate young men to be, essentially, good soldiers?

Asked literally, that's a question that wins wars and thus has been researched for millennia. And to the extent war has answers, they are surprising. And both delightfully clear and applicable to sports.

Journalist Sebastian Junger spent 15 months on the ground with soldiers in just about the toughest part of Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley, with some of America's most battle-hardened infantrymen. Even then and there, despite all the clear differences between sports and war, Junger writes in his book "War," the task is one of teamwork:

Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it's much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win.

That choreography -- you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up -- is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gitigal.

The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him, but on what's best for the group.

If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

The message: For success, cohesion is necessary, just as in sports. But somehow what works best to motivate soldiers remains underappreciated in sports.

To show what I mean, and assuming you can handle a few pointed curse words as well as vivid talk of violence, I can't recommend strongly enough that you watch this excerpt of the Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary "Restrepo," from Junger and now-deceased photographer Tim Hetherington. This clip, detailing the episode that later led to the first Medal of Honor given to a living soldier in four decades, drops some powerful clues about what really inspires performance under pressure.



Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta and his brothers in Battle Company spend their days not just focused on the group task, but risking their lives for each other in the toughest conditions. Every hour contains heroism, of a kind: Battle Company, Junger reports, "is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact -- by far -- of any in the U.S. military. Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company."

Not to mention, the parts of the job that aren't violent are hardly delightful: searing heat and brutal cold; days of carrying heavy packs, slathered in body armor, lugging heavy weapons; weeks without warm running water; intermittent electricity at best; scorpions; no real rest and relaxation in the country at all; and anti-malarials that give you crazy dreams. The urinal is a PVC pipe stuck in the ground.

What keeps them going? From afar, people talk about things like patriotism, duty, religion, honor, the mission and the flag. But the more people have dug into it, and the more you listen to the words coming out of the mouths of people who live it, like Giunta, the more those things take a back seat.

Lots of things have the potential to make people brave.

But what's the main thing?

Love. Not so much for families back home, but for fellow soldiers.

Junger cites 49 research papers from the last 50 years in the section of his book called "Love," and he affirms the researchers' findings in anecdotes from World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan and beyond. He summarizes:

The army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a way they were just different ways of saying the same thing. ...

The platoon was the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made your fears go away. It was an anesthetic that left you aware of what was happening but strangely fatalistic about the outcome. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.

Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self -- you're prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others -- so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered "bravery." Soldiers see it the other way around: either you're doing your duty or you're a coward.

In the NBA, motivation has long been seen as a personal thing -- Bill Walton once told me he couldn't care less if his teammates are motivated by a big contract, a title, or the pretty girl in the front row.

Coaches push all those buttons and more.

But the news from the front lines is that of all the motivations, love for teammates is the special one. That's the river that runs deepest. Powered by big hearts and brains evidently wired to work a certain selfless way, people will actually, amazingly, fall on grenades to save each other, and that kind of thinking underlies the most effective teams. Under duress, humans are capable of the most incredible bravery and selflessness -- so long as their hearts are full of love.

The players in the middle of #NBArank have clear NBA skills -- but not a lot of them. Ethan Sherwood Strauss and Henry Abbott discuss.

David Thorpe tackles the idea, which is somewhat evident in #NBArank voting (today revealing players 301-325), that NBA players who aren't superstars are all roughly the same.

 

CEO Jason Levien (who was on TrueHoop TV the other day enjoying his franchise's place atop ESPN the Magazine's Ultimate Standings list) talks about tweaks to the Grizzlies' roster, the team's style of play this season, coaching, finances and prospects.

Also ... some pointers on pickup ball with Grizzlies staffers.

 

Economist Tyler Cowen (He's "America's hottest economist," who was on TrueHoop TV recently talking about the end of the NBA's middle class), foresees a world in which NBA coaches work very closely with incredibly intelligent computers.

In fact, he says, it's happening already.

Tyler Cowen is one of America's foremost economists, the author of a new book called "Average is Over," and a blogger at Marginal Revolution.

Cowen is also a big NBA fan, which he proves by regularly purchasing Wizards tickets.

Here's the shocker: Cowen says advanced analytics are on track to help eliminate the middle class -- in the NBA, and in society. Fascinating and a little scary.



If you're interested in more, here's an interesting NPR conversation with Cowen.

Memphis Grizzlies CEO Jason Levien is delighted the Memphis Grizzlies topped ESPN the Magazine's Ultimate Standings list. And a tiny bit surprised.

 

The venerable Justin Kubatko, founder of Basketball-Reference and a lion of the TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown (although, it must be said, a cowardly one -- he won the thing twice and has refused to compete since) wrote (Insider) about teams that under and overachieved last year.

He noted something interesting, specifically that the Thunder were just 3-6 in close games last season, while a year earlier they had been much better. Kubatko writes:

Some might want to blame that performance on the loss of James Harden, one of the league's most efficient fourth-quarter scorers in 2011-12. But Harden's replacement, Kevin Martin, led the NBA with an effective field goal percentage of .793 on shots taken in the fourth quarter or overtime with a scoring margin of three or fewer points.

This piece of news is, for me personally, surprising, delightful and problematic all at once.

First: Raise your hand if you were once a devoted listener to Ryen Russillo's NBA Today podcast.

The story goes like this: In early 2011 I wrote a bunch of stuff about how Kobe Bryant -- despite his reputation -- was no king of crunch time because he misses a hell of a lot. People's thinking about Hero Ball has evolved some in the interim. But back then Kobe won every crunch time poll, whether from players, GMs or fans. That he might not be the best counted as earth-shattering. My friend Russillo was among those to say, essentially, what the hell.

Russillo asked me, on his podcast, something like: If the stats showed that some other player, like, say, the famously efficient Kevin Martin, had much better crunch time stats than Bryant, would I give the ball to Martin over Bryant?

I said that if the stats showed somebody was way better than Bryant at making late shots, I would pick that guy to take that late shot.

And in a small, Internetty kind of way, all hell broke loose. In the retelling, the fun little story among Russillo's listeners has become that I'm the nut who said I'd take Kevin Martin over Kobe Bryant, HA HA HA. It still comes up now and again. Even though I never said that. Such is life.

Now I know better. Now I know that's the wrong question, for two reasons. First, because crunch time shooting percentages, based on tiny sample sizes, bounce around like crazy from year to year and nobody is consistently near the top. Maybe nobody is truly "clutch."

But more importantly, picking any guy to take the last shot, no matter what the defense does, is dumb. Teams with go-to scorers who don't pass much are a cinch to defend and struggle to score, because all five defenders know who'll take the shot, which means that guy never has an open shot.

Covered shots are very hard for any player to make, and that's exactly why the super-talented Bryant misses nearly 75 percent of the time late in close games.

And it's also why, now, this story has taken a twist and, for a season at least, Martin is among the best anywhere at hitting in crunch time: Last season he played with two spectacular late-game ballhogs in Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

Which meant, by and large, Martin did not get the ball in crunch time. Simple as that.

He'd go dozens of minutes without launching a shot, as commentators said things like "this has got to be Durant's time." And so it was. On NBA.com/stats I just noodled around with the stats and found in the last five minutes of a game within five, the Thunder's two stars combined to take 176 shots ... to Martin's 12. Their shooting was crummy -- both below 40 percent -- but Martin barely missed.

My suspicion, in seeing Martin's killer numbers was: That's because Martin didn't get the ball unless he was wide open.

And sure enough, I looked up the video, and that's precisely what it shows. Here's Martin nailing a 3 in overtime against Dallas. There he is breaking the hearts of Nuggets fans on the road, putting the visitors up one with 1:25 left. There he is in Memphis, doubling a three-point lead with a 3. In a season's worth of crunch time 3s, the defense was consistently distorted to Durant and never got close to Martin.

The defense was betting Martin simply would not get the ball -- and it was usually correct.

On the odd nights he did get a crunch time shot, he usually made it, because he has always been an excellent shooter, and in other seasons was his team's go-to offensive weapon. These are warm-up shots for him. Martin played 98 minutes with the game within five in the closing five minutes, and over all that time he took six 3-pointers without missing a single one. He was wide open every single time. He attacked with his dribble six times, and scored twice. The rest of the time he didn't shoot.

Now, I don't know how much this does, if anything, to help Martin's reputation in the minds of fans and Russillo listeners. Martin is making shots lots of players can make, which doesn't make him more talented than Kobe ... there may be no way to rank them or anyone else. Any good scorer can score well in crunch time if the opportunities are there, and crunch time is rare enough that it might never be possible to prove anyone is, long-term, superior.

What's inferior, though, is running the "archangel" offense that the Bulls used for a time with Michael Jordan. If Durant and Westbrook had passed just a little more, the team would have scored more points. Advanced analysis has long shown the Thunder offense is better when the two stars do a little less. The same goes for Bryant, and all the NBA's "closers." Move it to the open man. The team gets better looks, and scores more, 'cause that wide open guy has it easy. Get him the ball, not because of who he is, but because of how alone he is.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss discusses why you should ignore NBA Rank at your peril.