Category: NBA Preview

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What It Is: 10/25/10

What I’m reading: Finished Never Let Me Go, read Charles Burns’ X’ed Out, and began Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza.

What I’m listening to: Barking, Walking Wounded, and a new Mad Mix I’m working on.

What I’m watching: Leaves of Grass, plus some football, some baseball, and Bored To Death and Eastbound & Down.

What I’m drinking: I’m outta limes, so I went with Amy’s gluten-free alternative: Bard’s sorghum malt beer.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Taking a nice, energetic hike on Sunday, (pix here and spex here) and getting overstuffed on treats at Rusty’s on the way home.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! Why? You got somewhere you think I should go?

What I’m happy about: The autumn sensorium is just so beautiful. You can check out the first couple of pix from the hike to get an idea of the visuals.

What I’m sad about: The Yankees getting knocked out of the playoffs. On the other hand, I’m also happy about this because it means I won’t be staying up late watching World Series games. So it’s a wash.

What I’m worried about: Eating too much candy on Halloween.

What I’m pondering: Blowing off another NBA preview. The season starts tomorrow, so I’m guessing that’s less of a ponderment and more of a certainty.

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There’s nothing wrong with you that I can’t fix. With my stats.

Possibly the greatest basketball-to-comics non sequitur ever, courtesy of ESPN’s NBA preview article on Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey:

Morey grew up reading Bill James’ Baseball Abstract and later worked for the stats guru, but his geekier tendencies might actually have more to do with his boyhood love of comic book anti-heroes who cut against the grain, figures like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. “In a league in which 30 teams are competing for one prize, you have to differentiate yourself somehow,” Morey says. “We chose analytics.”

What’s great is that this article is all about using calm, cool reasoning and “analytics” to explain the decision to trade for Ron Artest!

Bonus: Did I mention that the annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview will be posted on Tuesday morning, just in time for the debut of the 2008-2009 season? I just did!

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NBA Preview: The Warnening!

The annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview will post next week! It promises to be filled with inscrutable cultural references, obscure free-agent details, and predictions that stand no chance of coming true! You’ve been warned!

To tide you over, here’s a photo I just received as part of an e-mail from Ticketmaster. I’m on their Knicks mailing list because I took a client/buddy to one of their games last spring.

I’m not sure what’s funnier:

a) the sheer ugliness of (l-r) Zack Randolph, Jamal Crawford and Eddy Curry, or

b) Stephon “Are you getting in, or not?” Marbury’s, um, ball-handling skills.

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Two words: Play offs

It’s NBA Playoff time, dear readers! There’s no chance on earth that the early games will be as exciting as last year’s, but that’s no reason not to watch!

To help you along, I offer up the inaugural Official VM NBA Playoff Preview! With commentary and predictions from a truly bizarre array of people, journalists (Mitchell Prothero and Tom Spurgeon), a law professor and author (Thane Rosenbaum), and some average schmoes (me, my brother, and my buddy Craig), this preview is bound to entertain, please, and provide no useful information for gambling!

So check it out and leave us your own darn predictions in the comments! Happy hoops!

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When bad metrics happen to bad GMs

Anyone who’s read our VM basketball previews in the last few years knows that the Timberwolves are in terrible shape, and it’s due to the incompetent dealings of its general manager, Kevin McHale, who can also be faulted for being part of the Joe Smith debacle that ruined Kevin Garnett’s career.

So that’s why it’s really funny that when Forbes.com came up with a system of metrics to evaluate general managers across the major sports, they ended up with Kevin McHale as #1.

Given the failure of that system, I’m going to have to take any of their other rankings with a grain of salt. I think this is an instance where the metrics sounded good, but when they were applied and led to this Bizarro world where McHale’s #1 and Billy Beane is #26, someone should have said, “Maybe we need to re-weight or add some other factors.”

And ranking Billy King of the Sixers at #3 was also pretty mind-boggling.

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Containment Policy

I spent a chunk of the day wearing containment gear during a visit to a drug manufacturing facility near Toronto. Unfortunately, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement before the visit, so there was no way to take photos of myself in this amazing get-up.

My guide for this tour told me that the facility’s policies are for redundant safeguards against contamination (there’s some high potency materials in this site), so we were overdoing it for the sake of added safety. Even so, we didn’t enter any of the production suites where the material actually gets handled; the staff in those rooms wear full rebreather gear on a daily basis.

So, as you can tell, I’ve started another trip. This one’s pretty brief: I’ll be visiting one more drug manufacturer tomorrow, then hitting the Raptors/Celtics game with my contact at that company, official VM buddy Sam Ricchezza, last seen writing the Raptors report in our NBA preview, and goofing on me for not coming up to visit him and see his company.

Right about now, I’m hitting up the minibar for a caffeine fix. I’m also eyeing the pod-coffee machine pretty suspiciously, but it might be necessary to keep me awake till dinner, which we’ll be having at Rain, which “was once the site of Toronto’s first women’s prison,” according to the site.

Anyway, I took Shakespeare Wars with me (hardcoveritude be damned!), and have enjoyed the first 50+ pages. I’ve also got my Yoga for Regular Guys with me, since I’m trying to make a habit/practice of that. The weather’s pretty grotesque, so I doubt I’ll be able to take any good pictures. It’s a pity, since Toronto’s a kinda neat city. It’s my 3rd trip here, and it’s always struck me as a pretty good place to be. Admittedly, I know nothing about the economics of the place.