ESPN NBA

First of all, a huge thanks to Kevin Arnovitz for his unbelievable work hosting TrueHoop while I was on vacation last week. The man is a professional, as I have learned from spending the early part of today catching up with all of the reading I missed while I was away.

I did a ton of stuff, but just about none of it involved a laptop. But that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking about basketball a ton.

Some of what occurred to me about the NBA over the last week:

• At one point my family and I went to a party where a bunch of people -- hobbyist musicians all -- played live music together for the first time. Tremendous fun to watch and listen. Especially cool: there are some basic rules, the rules of music, really, but there is no hierarchy or structure. Everyone has to feel out to what degree they ought to be starring. If your harmony sounds great, the right thing to do is to sing it loud! But if you're a little off-key, get on key, or stop! It's a constant balancing act, that thrives on skill, awareness, common understandings of what works and willingness to sometimes test that. In this way, five people playing music is more like five people playing basketball than almost anything else I can imagine. Singing loud is like taking a shot, saying my moment to star! Banging out a rhythm while someone else sings is like playing defense. And I can't tell you how much better it was without someone in charge screaming instructions. Many times somebody picked up this or that instrument and I thought it would be a mistake (Tambourine? Now? Really?) but which then proved to be tremendous. That doesn't mean the group can't be better with enlightened leadership -- undoubtedly it can. But it does mean that you don't want to take away the power that comes from the group doing its own thing, to some degree. Music and basketball are both group activities that work well with a big serving of improvisation.
  
• I read an article this weekend about swimmer Michael Phelps. Did you know that early in one of his gold medal races in Beijing his goggles filled with water? If you've ever had that happen, you know that makes you essentially blind. But he says he prepares mentally for that kind of thing, so that he won't react negatively. He counted his strokes to know where the wall was, performed flawlessly, and set a world record. Imagine, however, if when the water entered his goggles, he had let himself play the victim. It would have been very human to think something like: "My big race, I have trained years for, and my stupid goggles malfunction? Why must this crap happen to me?" At the moment all this happens he's trying to get his muscles to perform like a finely honed symphony. I put it to you that it's just about impossible to do that perfectly, to perform at your best, while feeling sorry for yourself. I can't prove it, but my theory is that victimhood is incongruent with elite performance. And here's where I think about the degree to which a lot of NBA players and coaches obsess about NBA referees. Yes, random bad things happen to athletes. But I suspect that there is also a performance cost to paying bad calls too much heed. It's just water in your goggles, right? Happens to everyone. Keep swimming.
• There is a lot of talk in basketball about the magic of going out on top (like Michael Jordan once did -- before coming back with the Wizards). That always seems odd to me. If you have a chance to be maybe not the best, but darned near the best, out of respect for all those killing themselves for the opportunity you still have, don't you have some obligation not to let that all drift away? In this regard, Lance Armstrong's third-place finish in the Tour de France is, to me, tremendous. David Thorpe once told me that tells his players that an NBA career is a "slog." That's his word. "Slog." You won't see that, however, in any highlight reels. That's something, Thorpe says, that players don't often anticipate. The NBA is seen as the promised land, and financially it is. But in terms of work it's long and difficult and full of unforeseeable challenges. You usually don't win a championship. We sometimes get the impression that it's supposed to be effortless. I know Armstrong inspires a range of different emotions, but as a competitor, he has set a tremendous example with this grit. Just like the Phelps example above -- keep battling even when things don't go perfectly, and you can do some great things. Armstrong's exactly right when he says that finishing third was probably really good and healthy for his kids to see. Good for his kids, and anyone else who thought humans could be invincible.