Basketball is a superb sport, and should be an easy one to market.

It 'works' for spectators in person, or should. One can sit close to the action, see the effort on the players' faces, sense their personalities, read the lines of tension between coach and player. It's absolutely made for television; no other sport is so accessible to the camera, partly because the basket's in a fixed place and one can frame images more easily than in a football or baseball game. (Baseball with its lame close-ups of pitchers on the mound suffers by comparison; one can hardly follow many plays, because the camera can't take in the action's essential points.) Basketball doesn't result in injuries at the rate of a football, so leagues can schedule games reasonably close to each other, and play a number of them, if they want. Lots of options are open that way. Win or go home? Best of 15?

The NBA is basketball's pinnacle. We enjoy other settings, players like Fran Vanquez don't want to come to the Association, but when you're talking about the highest level of the sport, this is it. Ricky Rubio grows up daydreaming about playing here.

The NBA playoffs should be amazing. They should present us with a dramatic line surpassing that of any other sport. Do they? How could we break such a judgment down?

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Does this ring a bell for anyone else? As of two years ago or thereabouts, one of the arguments that always, always came up about Kevin Love was that his offensive game underneath was too labored, so that his shot got blocked a lot. This was put forward as a fundamental flaw marring Love's potential, or I think it'd be fair to say so anyway.

In November, 2010 I put up a FanPost about this, comparing Love to the rest of the Wolves' roster. (Despite the perception, Anthony Tolliver, Corey Brewer, and Darko Milicic all were blocked more often than Kevin Love at the time. Nobody routinely bemoaned Corey Brewer's being stuffed; we lionized his dunks over defenders, mostly, when we noticed that side of his game.)

Love has since emerged as a first-tier NBA scorer. Does that mean he's fixed his tendency to get his shot swatted? What has changed over time?

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I'll keep things simple and stick to our "school grades" frame this time. Indulging my tendency toward metaphor would result in too many Achilles heels in the kitchen. (See how that works?)

The Wolves may need to do something drastic to pull off a road win in Memphis. I'm writing a little preamble to warm up to the game, and then I'll try out a simple tally system to arrive at my grades.

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Almost the very first thing David Kahn said upon his hiring, during the resulting press conference, was that he thought the Wolves needed to run.

For anyone who'd watched Al Jefferson as the centerpiece of the Minnesota offense, the assertion was jarring. He'd looked at the Timberwolf roster and concluded that "We need to run"? Three of our more productive players were Jefferson, Kevin Love, and Craig Smith. There were times the previous year when I'd look down from my nosebleed season tickets and picture three rhinoceroses, walking away with the word "Wolves" written across their butts. "I think we need to run"? It was like saying he thought we needed to trade everyone. (Insert a parenthetical remark of your own here.)

Since that opening press conference we've been talking about what, exactly, Kahn meant. What did it mean to trot out a "United We Run" marketing slogan? This year, we have a new phrasing of Kahn's doctrine – running is, we are told, 'in our coach's DNA' – and we have another new answer about what that actually means on the court.

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Two years ago I played my very own Corey Brewer drinking game. Not that I drank drank, most of the time. That might have gotten out of hand, given my rules, which went roughly like:

Whenever Corey Brewer exhibits the wildly inconsistent play that makes him so special, drink!

(If he does something extremely extra-special, attempt to throw the drink down in such haste that you spill on yourself instead.)

Imbibing every time Corey tried a layup off the wrong foot, or stole the ball and then promptly turned it over in his excitement, could have challenged the staunchest liver. Throughout the season, I did things like eat an M&M, or sip Holly Nog, or break a walnut, to mark the "drink!" moments. The point was the moment of recognition.

Corey and his goat are being fitted for rings just now – presumably the goat's will be a nose ring? do you do that for goats? – so I'm fishing around for new ritual games to play while watching a Wolves game.

Won't you help me choose?

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David Kahn was asked about how the organization works now at his press appearance. If you recall, when last we tuned in Tony Ronzone was a conspicuous departure – over "philosophical differences," or so we heard. (He was a utilitarian, and wanted to hire someone to perform routine utilitarian calculus on players; Glen Taylor is a hedonist. You just can't paper over these differences, people.)

Anyhoo, the questions and answers went like this:

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Posturing, spin, negotiation judo.... If you want to enjoy sausage, the aphorism goes, then you shouldn't watch it being made. 

I don't hate David Stern. His role during a collective bargaining negotiation is to represent the interests of NBA owners. We're all beyond expecting sports commissioners who see past that and represent the game, right? Nor do I hate Derek Fisher, the public face of NBA players this summer and fall.

Neither one of those guys is our favorite voice right now, either, though. We'd like to hear from them one last, positive time, shaking hands over a big vellum scroll with a deal on it and some signatures written in the blood of lowly stadium employees, and then have them disappear from our news feeds for a while.

But there have been some positives here too, haven't there? We knew that Kevin Love's a self-involved kid who likes to talk. But haven't you been surprised, a few different times, by the candid remarks of people you wouldn't particularly have expected to be honest and direct and fairly thoughtful?

Friday night "tweets":

There's a deal to be made just not 2day. 

Trust me us players understand that 50% of a bigger pie is better than is better than 52% of a small pie. But the 50% is not the real % after we pay all their expenses to BRI we're really left with about 47%. If that's the case than we need a favorable system and a BRI split where we're not responsible for their expenses especially since we have no say so about those expenses. 

Us being locked out isn't about basketball. It's about the division of revenues between promoters (owners) & it entertainers (players).

FABL2011 @  honest question. Say players stay firm and season scrapped. What will BRI split for players be a year from now?

@FABL2011 no one knows. That's the dooms day question that we r considering

Nazr Mohammed

and then, when he moved on from the CBA back-and-forth with a number of fans:

Saturday morning soccer. I'm so happy this is the last game. It's cold as sh*t out here.

That was funny...my son just ran over a kid cuz he knocked him down earlier. I love his fight but I have to act like it was wrong lol

You know.... There's a pretty reasonable, and basically honest, guy. Anyone who's been a parent at kids sports knows the conflicting emotions he's talking about. I know nothing much about Nazr Mohammed, but he doesn't seem like a bad guy.

So I got to thinking: Who else has shown us a decent, or anyway capable-of-surprising-us, side during this whole thing?

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Shall we hop into the Way Back Machine?

Feb 8, 1999: 

 The T-Wolves wound up losing Gugliotta to the Suns, but they're hoping that Smith, whom they signed to a one-year, $1.75 million deal, can eliminate some of the sting. Nobody expects Smith to put up Gugliotta's numbers, but Minnesota will be satisfied if he can provide some interior baskets and be something that even Googs wasn't—a shot-blocking presence. At Maryland, Smith was known for his little jump hook and his ability to tip balls and keep plays alive. But in the past season with the Warriors and the 76ers, Smith seemed to wander farther and farther from the basket, relying too heavily on perimeter jumpers. Saunders's first order of business is to get him back on the blocks.

Smith has already made it clear that he relishes a chance at a new start, aongside Kevin Garnett and Stephon Marbury. "I just want to be someplace where guys play hard and guys want to win," says Smith, who will be slowed early in the season by a right ankle sprain suffered in training camp.

Garnett, who is entering his fourth NBA season, contends that he's ready for a breakout year. Marbury also wants to prove his mettle during this shortened season, particularly because he'll be a free agent this summer and has already informed the T-Wolves that he wants to test the market....

Yes, 1999 was an eventful season for our Wolves. By the next spring we were dreaming of how Terrell Brandon and Wally Szczerbiak would complement KG. Googs and Marbury were gone. Joe Smith was, fatefully, changing agents – and leaving behind his extra contracts with the old office.

All of that began with a severely abbreviated post-labor-strife offseason schedule, for which our humble Minnesota franchise seemed notably ill-prepared. For example, the team was so hamstrung by Gugliotta's situation that Terry Porter left for Miami despite both he and the team initially assuming he'd have remained here. It wasn't clear that the team had even communicated with Porter's agent.

Say the marathon negotiation sessions end today with a settlement. How might the run-up to NBA games look? 

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An oddball rumor coming out of the CBA negotiations the other day sparked some conversation, both on Canis (thank you Timberpups, you even made it a Fanshot!) and elsewhere. It went something like this:

NBA owners have proposed adding a third round to the draft, and the players’ union has made counter proposals that include major changes to the draft’s format intended to address the league’s concern about competitive balance, SheridanHoops.com reports.

Under one of the NBPA’s proposals, the 15 teams with the worst records would get two first-round picks each – they would continue to pick 1st through 15th and would also have the Nos. 16-30 selections. The teams with the best 15 records would get the first 15 picks of the second round, as well picks 46-60, according to the report....

The resulting fan conversation I've seen has amounted to

1. Mild expressions of relief that the owners and players are talking about something that seems almost (gasp) constructive; and
2. Specific reactions to the proposed revisions to the draft, most of which were negative. 

Ultimately the idea of not every team being represented in every round of a "draft" strikes me as offending against a basic sense of how U.S. sports leagues are run. We probably can't carefully nudge the scale this way and that to make such a solution seem fair, can we? The outline's not right.

But the bigger picture question here is: How big a "competitive balance" problem does the NBA have, and what are the best solutions for that? If you had to order possible ways for the league to address the problem, how would that list come out?

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One of the obvious objections to Mark Jackson as a head coaching candidate was always that he hadn't paid his dues as an Assistant Coach or in any team's front office. Other wannabe head men – Patrick Ewing, for example – have spent several years waiting for interviews. Why should Mark Jackson be given a pass? Being a point guard isn't necessarily enough, is it? 

I'd imagined that positional bias was the main explanation for Jackson's being interviewed here. Catchers and utility infielders make good baseball managers, and point guards become basketball coaches. Still, even Nate McMillan did some time as an assistant, and Brian Shaw – another PG/"Utility Infielder" sort of player – has put in several years without being hired to lead a team.

Who knew, though, that Jackson's coaching fate was in fact being dictated by The Almighty?

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