wolf stansson

The bidding for that would be interesting. It'd be us v England and Spain.

Oh yeah, that's right! We've got the Michael Bradley v Jermaine Jones midfield battle this weekend. Nice.

Everybody knows Dengs a mother fuckin monster.

This Heat roster is sashimi thin. I can't tell what's worse, the Heat bench or Reggie Miller's analysis.

It sounds like Memphis pulled out. Good thing too-that deal with have been a minor loss for the Pacers and a major loss for the Grizzlies. Ya. Conspiracy theory: I've heard that Grizzlies GM and owner are never on the same page. Could the GM have pulled out and told his boss it was a paperwork problem?

Now that would be some funny [expletive] Hold off on J-Mac to Memphis deal. Word is the two teams may have missed the 3 p.m. deadline. Hahaha This will help OJ's attitude problem.

Jared Dudley is pretty good. I probably like Courtney Lee better, but Dudley is much better than Parker. I think if anything, bringing in another wing player helps Deng, who is playing a career high in minutes per game. Dudley can take Bogans minutes and about 3-4 of Deng's minutes. I think Lee is a better player, I just think the Dudley price tag would be lower. If we can get Lee without giving up one of our bigs then I'm all for it. His voice is awful, but he's nowhere near as annoying as King Quiet, you. The correct answer is, STOP IT!

When you play basketball for John Calipari, you don't have to be a student.

Bulls are after Jared Dudley. Intriguing. Great locker room guy, efficient role player and wouldn't demand the ball at all. Can knock down a 3. Basically a young, athletic replacement for Bogans in the SG rotation with Brewer and Korver. He's not a piece to build around but if he's cheap I like him more than Lee or Parker.

A Nets?

Discussions with the Rockets about Courtney Lee, but the Rockets want Asik in return. Chad Ford shook the tree about Mayo again this morning. Nothing definitive.

On a tee. Seriously though, Carmelo is underrated but he's not top 10 (I say without really putting much work into backing it up) but he's in the borderline discussion.

How is New Jersey going to contend? With Deron Williams and a center who can't grab more than 6 boards a game? Also by the time Boston is too old to contend, Howard will move to LA, Orlando will be Cleveland South while New York and Miami could have potentially debilitating cap issues. Obviously as long as LeBron exists, Miami will be a contender, but there's no reason to dread a 90's Bull-like hegemony in the East.

This Prokhorov vs Dolan battle is looking like serious matchup problems for Dolan. MOUSE IN THE HOUSE!

I don't know much about the youths. Here's a quick rundown: http://usa10kit.com/2011/02/15/so-lets-get-excited-about-this-u-17-team/

Isn't that what happened to Garnett a long time ago? His contract hit the cap as a max under the newer agreement, but he was actually being paid much more.

This is a great sentence. I'm glad aesthetics are subjective because without variety...get ready for another animal analogy...every dog would be a poodle or a pekingese. We wouldn't have Irish Wolfhounds, Rotweilers or even worse, mutts. Obviously you want art and efficiency, which is why Derrick is a sublime player, but teams like those above are extremely important to the evolutionary, organic nature of sports. Also, plenty of people enjoyed watching those teams because true appreciation of a sport requires appreciation of every strategy employed to achieve the desired outcome.

Of course it is. What it isn't is a contact sport. Which basketball is. D Rose's brand in particular. The thorns, obviously, the laurels you have down. What I'm saying is that laurels are clear and absolute and the thorns are subjective and mostly irrelevant to winning. Well you're baffling yourself then because I clearly did not describe Rose in those terms. To use your terms, I described Rose as both a brawler and a dancer who resorts too often to brawler for the writer's subjective taste. I then described that subjective taste as idiotic and hypocritical. What's your issue with that? Now you sound like the bizarro Bethlehem Shoals. Your desire to view Rose as grace personified without acknowledging his duality as both graceful and brutish is not only inaccurate, but also a disservice to Derrick's considerable talent and physical intelligence. Derrick Rose can run by you, through you around you or jump over you. You clearly appreciate the by, around and over but not the through and Shoals is too hung up on the through. My whole point is that this discussion is beside the point. The point being that basketball is not art, it's sport. It's not even mostly about aesthetics so getting hung up on them is pointless in anything other than a rhetorical exercise.

Sure he does. Not big guys, but relative to his position, he's extremely brutish and I interpret the article to be very much about positional relativity. The whole stupid point of the column was that he wishes Derrick would manipulate his opponents instead of just dominating them with his superior athleticism and strength. Elusive instead of powerful. 1-Acrobatic moves that can be impressive and violent. 2-You don't think there is grace in causing intentional contact? Love the nebulous villainy of the "haters." I love Derrick Rose like I haven't loved an athlete since I was a child. I appreciate him more than I thought I could ever appreciate another athlete in my jaded, ironic adult existence. I am absolutely not a hater. First, the absolute stupidest thing about Shoals' point is that he is penalizing Derrick for being powerful. He is arguing like grace and power are mutually exclusive when they are not. Just like my shark analogy. Sharks can use power and grace when pursuing prey. Ok, stupid analogy time is over. Essentially what I'm trying to say is that I understand what he's saying even though I disagree. He prefers a point guard that overcomes relative weakness and diminutive stature with deception and guile. Derrick has deception and guile but can also bust your ass if he wants to because he is so relatively strong to his position. So the article is essentially by a writer who has a [expletive], sentimental idea of what players should be based on position and the traditional skill sets that come with those positions. That is ridiculous as I assume he's a fan of Magic Johnson, Allen Iverson, Dirk Nowitski, LeBron James, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley and the dozens of other legendary players who are legends precisely because their talents transcended positional type. This is a hypocritical article written by someone who has made a career of approaching basketball as something as subjective as art. When you're operating under those rules, you never have to be wrong because it's all subjective, right? I want to be clear that if it seemed like in my attempt to interpret the article because I'm generally a fan of Free Darko's high-minded, abstract basketball analysis that I agreed with the article, that's not necessarily true. What I agree with is that Derrick isn't as graceful as he could be because he doesn't have to be. I think where my point is lost here is that maybe we're defining grace differently. All of those clips show incredible athleticism, balance, physical intelligence and strength and if that's how you define grace, then I guess he's graceful. If you define grace as gentle, light and demure movement like as you mentioned, a ballet, then Derrick isn't graceful. That's probably a bad definition of grace though, so yes, I was wrong in defining him as not graceful. This is why evaluating sports subjectively as an art form is absolute nonsense. It's the winning versus style argument that is so prevalent in soccer and it absolutely should have no place in professional sports. Derrick is a dominant point guard and helps his team win games by being dominant and that's the point.

Hilarity.

No, Luol Deng will have some issues finding a real estate agent if a hard cap is instituted. If they pass a hard cap, you can count on less salary-matching restrictions on trades. This is true, but from a business/revenue standpoint it's a huge win. Ticket prices, merchandising, media revenue etc is going to blow up. The Knicks were criminally underachieving in those areas.

Saying the word "subjectively" followed by the words "I find" is interesting. I also disagree that Derrick's game is particularly graceful. Chris Paul is graceful, Steve Nash is graceful. Rajon Rondo is deceptive and slinky. Deron Williams is deceptive and strong. Russell Westbrook is athletic but suffers a lot from the same thing Derrick does. That being sometimes the athleticism can get them places where other pg's can't go and sometimes they overcommit and have to either bail out with a chaotic pass, shoot a bad shot or turn it over. Westbrook is better at drawing a foul to avoid a bad outcome in those situations which is a significant value. Some of that is skill but some is probably due to him being weaker than Derrick. He plows through a lot of potential fouls that other players don't and can't. Derrick is athletic, strong and more aggressive than any other point guard in the league. He really is the point guard equivalent of LeBron and Griff. If you can find beauty in the brutish efficiency like me, then you subjectively think it's beautiful. Objectively the best argument that can be made is that it is so damn effective that it has to be beautiful because anything that contributes that much to winning basketball games has to be considered beautiful in much the same way a white shark breaching with a seal in it's mouth is beautiful and terrible at the same time. That said, I can understand why subjectively, a basketball fan could appreciate a graceful, ballet-like point guard more.

I'm not even sure what he's trying to say. He says Rose is on a hot streak, rather than developing into a great player. No way to really prove that, I guess, other than to wait and see. Says he dislikes Rose because he apparently won't become a complete player. Again, he doesn't know this, he's just saying it as if it is a fact. It's a lot of mumbo jumbo. Most likely, he doesn't like Rose because he doesn't play for his favorite team. He was on Boers and Bernstein and basically said that it isn't an indictment of how good he is or his relative value; just an aesthetic issue. He doesn't enjoy Derrick's game because it's just physical exploitation over less gifted individuals and there isn't much art to it. Which is true, but its something I aesthetically love. It's a very predatory, almost shark-like style.

I think he'd be a good fit.

Do you know what leverage means? Yes, thanks. Quite aware. Appreciate the concern, though. Then why the confusion?