re: General NBA Links

David Roth learning to admire the Spurs

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Also you are doomed. You are arguing, uphill, that this boring thing is actually not boring at all, that it is actually cool and fun. No one has ever successfully explained to someone why a thing is cool or fun. We are not convinced that we like something; we do or we don't. But we can, in the fullness of time, come to like things that once did not seem cool or fun to us. Cool surfaces erode, and various buried valuables are revealed. Grace notes are suddenly audible, and suddenly awesome. We change, for better and worse.

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The Spurs have not changed, and that is the essence of what makes and keeps them great. They have found a way to do things that work well and maintained the humility to work that way for a shared end. For all the reasons we might watch a game, this more modest transcendence -- individuals into a whole, faith in a process made legible and even beautiful -- is not nearly the most vivid. We aspire to uncommon grace and force and poise, we aspire to flight.

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Matthew Yglesias at VOX on the draft

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The telling thing about Silver's analysis, however, is that even though he finds the financial surplus associated with obtaining the first pick to be larger than the surplus associated with obtaining a later pick, there is substantial surplus all throughout the draft. In other words, even the last player picked in the first round is expected to generate more wins for his team than the team could afford to purchase with the same money on the open market.

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And Ethan Sherwood Strauss with an article bemoaning the rise of small market teams we saw this year.

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Like the old riddle about a tree falling in the woods, if location parity happens and nobody's around to watch, is it a success? Right now it looks as though the success of the small means self-sabotage for all. How can the new CBA be working with so many people tuning out the sport?

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LINK

Yuck.