so very lucky, or unlucky

How does a city get an NBA team before a good grocery store? Something ain't right about that.

Dear God: Why do you hate Kevin Durant?

If the Thunder are the only team in the league that pray for their players' safety...why are three of their starters injured?

Hey religious fanatics, God doesn't care if you pray. If it puts your mind at ease, gives you peace, helps you focus, go for it. Prayer can be an effective cognitive reminder that we humans are small and are not privy to God's will. It can help us consider and respect others and their views of the world. The only reason to do it at an NBA game is to make a statement. It is an attempt to marginalize everybody who doesn't think like the majority (big box christians in oklahoma). It is adolescent and embarrassing. And for those of you with the "love it or leave it" attitude...fuck you.

close reading: Presti on Wilcox deal

“I felt like we accomplished some things that we wanted to,” Presti said Thursday evening. “We’re excited to have Malik and Thabo join us and I think they’ll have positive impacts on our team and also our culture, and we’re excited to continue to take the momentum that we’ve gained in recent weeks and continue to build on it.”

I speculate that the key words here are "positive impact" and "our culture." This may be a downer after the assumption they were getting Chandler, but it sounds like they thought they needed to move Wilcox on for the sake of the locker room. The notion that this is some sort of critical failure (here and here) seems rather naive. You can only take the best offer...

smells like thunder, pt 3

More Rumble doppelgangers:

(1) Teen Wolf, as noted by aw-shucks Tramel.


(2) Chewbacca



Rumble seems to provide a bridge across the under-40 demographic with a series of cultural reference points (Star Wars, Teen Wolf, Messin' with Sasquatch). Add in the poignant mythology, the "Native American tale" as Baldwin puts it, which no doubt appeals to all those Americans with distant Cherokee grandmothers, and you've got yourself a truly trans-generational mascot. Here is that myth, in case you'd rather not have to read the DJ:

"A near-sellout crowd was told at halftime Rumble is a bison that hundreds of years ago led his herd to safety only to be trapped alone in a storm atop the Arbuckle Mountains. The story claims Rumble was struck by lightning and suddenly walked on two legs like a man."

And then the white man trapped him and made him dance with the Thundergirls, Oklahoma City's favorite dance team. Another tragic declension narrative.

smells like thunder, pt 2

This isn't "Rumble," the new Thunder bison mascot. It just looks like him.

Of all places, why would Oklahoma City produce a hippie-long-hair bison? They don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee. Bison have afros, not flowing locks.

Stupid me for getting my hopes up.

do the Thunder have a Battier?

Michael Lewis applies his modernization model to basketball, a sport that seems extremely resistant to meaningful statistical analysis given its dynamism and relative lack of positional specialization among the big three sports.

Is there an equivalent to Battier on the Thunder? Or at least an, ahem, poor-man's Battier? The candidates of invisible statistical value would have to be Desmond Mason, Nick Collison, and Kyle Weaver. Though, of course, the small sample of games since the Thunder began to resemble a respectable club (coupled with statistical naivete) makes this merely speculative.

The best player pair on the Thunder has been Weaver and Green, at +5.3 points per 48 minutes (this through Feb 10). Weaver's also relatively effective with the other two stool legs, Durant (-3) and Westbrook (-1). Mason was +0, -2, -3 with Westbrook, Durant, and Green, respectively. Collison is +2, -7, -6.

This isn't, of course, the sort of analysis Lewis describes in Houston. But even if we could plumb those depths, it's unrealistic to expect Weaver, at this point is his career, to practice the sort of spatial sophistication Battier practices. I suspect that Collison's value is least represented in the stats, particularly given the players he's asked to match up against.

I wonder if the Thunder have this sort of statistical capability. On the face of things, Presti seems to pass the eyeball test as one of the whiz kid stat nerds a la Theo Epstein. If I were a reporter with the Daily Joke, I'd be piggy-backing on Lewis and exploring this angle.

if i'm not outraged, it's because i expect it

Kenny Smith admits during the rookie-sophomore game that he hasn't actually watched the Thunder much this year. What exactly does he do? How unprofessional are these so-called analysts? I'm not sure if it's more shocking that this is the standard or that he admits it so freely, without any sense of responsibility or shame. What a sorry state of affairs.

I'd like to see two feeds of games: one with conventional, Roone-Arledge-inspired coverage and another with just crowd noise and squeaking.