re: General NBA Links

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The jokes write themselves. Kirk Hinrich has made millions and millions of dollars from the Bulls on account of his grit. Tom Thibodeau would have a rightful claim to the title of Grindfather if not for the existence of Tony Allen down I-55. The Bulls of the past few years openly decline interest in the finesse superstars of the NBA, instead preferring to ride with gritty wolves like Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson and Jimmy Butler.

But as it turns out, there is some science on grit out there. What Forman might be referring to is the research of Angela Duckworth, who runs a lab at Penn focused on the study of grit and self-control.

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if Duckworth's science is right, there's value in it for general managers (in identifying truly gritty prospects) and coaches (in developing grit on the team). Surely some teams have already used cognitive tests to identify the presence or lack of grit; front offices do all of those prospect interviews at the Combine for a reason. And a lot of what would be specific about building grit is likely baked into existing player development philosophies. In a sense, Duckworth's work on grit (as far as I understand it) is a quantification of well-known theory

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That brings up another point that the brilliant Kevin Pelton makes:

The interesting question to me is how much grit is already priced into a player's statistical performance.
In other words, can a player without grit put up huge numbers in college or the pros? What would be valuable to NBA GMs is an ability to determine analytically what players have put up numbers due to having a high level of determination and long-term goal setting and what players have done that in spite of lacking grit.

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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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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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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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One of many interesting things to note about this is that back in his peak performance years of 2003 and 2004, the Timberwolves paid Garnett $25 and $28 million a year. This season Love got $17 million. Adjusting for inflation, Garnett's 2004 salary equals $35 million in today's dollars. That's more money than any NBA player is currently paid.

And that, in turn, is no coincidence. The owners have acted over the past couple of CBAs to restrain how much money top stars get paid. One big consequence of that is that top stars are increasingly picky about where they want to play and increasingly forceful about getting there. After all, if you can't make mid-aughts Garnett money then you're going to demand some non-monetary compensation.

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I wouldn't be shocked to see owners go for a hard cap next CBA

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Throwing crumbs to the help when things are going great is flattering?

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The owners are the more interesting issue. It has long been assumed they will opt out in 2017, even though things are going swimmingly for them. Rich guys don’t turn down the chance to get even richer, and they crush labor underneath their $1,000 shoes. They might not be satisfied with winning the last lockout when they could win another one and trim the players’ share of revenue below the 50 percent mark.

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But lockouts are work stoppages, which means no games, and at least for a time, no checks from the TV networks. They cost money. If things are going great, there is at least the chance the owners just ride out the CBA until its expiration in 2021. “There’s at least a chance they feel they’ve reached an equilibrium,” says Gabe Feldman, a sports law expert and associate law professor at Tulane, “and that we might be on the verge of an era of labor peace.”

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But Feldman doubts it, even in light of a $2 billion purchase that suggests owners should just want to keep the party going. “I don’t think this really has a significant impact,” he says. “I don’t think it really changes some of the arguments the owners used in the last lockout. Teams don’t have to be losing money for owners to lock the players out.”

Ballmer’s purchase actually proves out one argument the owners put forth last time around, Feldman says: It costs a ton of money to run a team, and those costs are going up as the league expands its digital and international reach. The revenue-sharing system counters some of that spending, since it will lift up the poor teams, but it doesn’t help every team equally. “If I’m Steve Ballmer,” Feldman says, “I overpaid for this team. I can’t give up anything in the next collective bargaining deal.”

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