The key element, though, is that once I start down this road I know what’s coming next and there are no possible surprises: I’ll go to Angeno’s, eat the pizza, feel briefly good, then feel awful, physically and mentally, for the next twelve hours or so.  As I pause in my kitchen, car keys in hand, I can see this with perfect clarity.  And then I leave anyway, and it all falls out the way I have foreseen.

*

This is the closest I can get to describing the feeling I had sitting through the second quarter of last night’s Timberwolves game.  I knew what was going to happen; I knew how I was going to feel about it.

*

Kevin Love wound up with thirty-one points and thirty-one rebounds.  I’ve read that the game wasn’t on TV, so you might think you know how someone goes about getting thirty points and thirty rebounds, which hasn’t been done in 28 years.  But you’d be wrong.

The reason you’d be wrong is because Kevin Love did not bust his ass the whole game as a relentless scorer and rebound-getter.  He had zero points and two rebounds at the beginning of the second quarter; he opened the game bricking shots, shuffling back on defense, and in general playing like he was helping his brother-in-law resurface a hardwood floor: you can’t really not show up, but you don’t have to like it.

At one point in the third quarter, when they were down by around twenty, I suggested to Chad that the Wolves should show one of the games being played by some other team on the Jumbotron, so that we’d have something to watch.  He agreed that was a fine idea.  Then we talked about Tiger Woods for a while.

*

So basically, Love’s historic 30-30 game happened in three quarters.  This is what I don’t get — how the same player can phone it in, and then bust his ass at the highest possible level of ass-busting.  During a stoppage in the fourth Love was hunched over panting, hands on knees, and appeared to not even know where he was.

“Imagine if he played hard all four quarters,” I said.

“No way,” Chad said.  ”If he’d played the first quarter, too, he’d be dead by now.”

*

The other thing is that I’d like to invite Darko to come over to my house.  We can get pizza, watch an episode of Arrested Development.  That poor guy.  I’m not even mad at him, and you shouldn’t be either.  He’s trying, and he’s pretty good defensively.

Darko moves around the court not really looking anybody in the eye, playing hard but not getting excited.  It’s like when Metallica got that new bassist, and they still rocked, but even in the midst of it that guy was always on the outside.  Darko is like that, except minus the group success.  It’s as if something inside him broke and then set wrong, and now he’s mangled.  This isn’t even about basketball now, which is why I’m not upset.

If anyone knows Darko, tell him I want to have him over.  Monica will make cookies, it will be just a nice evening.  We can all relax.

1) White Guys

The Wolves _have to_ be the whitest team in the league now.  Ridnour, Love, Milicic, Koufos, Pekovic.  Five out of fifteen are white, and none of them is some token ‘three point specialist.’  All get real minutes.  Is any other team even close to this?  I can’t think of one.

2) Height

The Wolves are suddenly tall.  They suddenly have a bunch of giant guys guarding the paint and blocking and changing shots.  I don’t think I have ever seen a Wolves team who could assemble that kind of wall inside.

3) Defense

After one quarter my opinion was: son of a bitch.  Here we go again.

After two quarters, and through the rest of the game, my thought was: am I watching a team of android dopplegangers?

Could this really be the Wolves?  Because their defense was, at times, extraordinary, mostly the flavor of extraordinary that results from having a bunch of giant white guys in the paint.  Milicic is very, very good defensively, which I’d heard but didn’t really believe — good at showing and recovering on pick and rolls, good at falling back to challenge stuff.  Pekovic is also good.  Koufos is also good.  Corey Brewer, once he got into it, is an amazing nuisance, and even Beasley was great: active hands, sneaky, good anticipation, very smart.  Love is somehow the best rebounder in the NBA, which isn’t exactly defense but sort of is.

4) Offense

The Wolves seemed way better running a kind of triangle-ish offense than I remember from before.  Ball movement was generally very fluid, and Darko looked comfortable in the pivot with the two guys cutting around him.  Beasley is really crafty: likes his spin moves, creates a lot of contact on drives.  Could this be the first Wolves team that gets to the line?  Swoon.

5) Darko

Darko is quite the mixed bag.  He’s way bigger than I used to think; he’s way better defensively than I used to think.  But his offense is among the worst I have ever seen — his single move is a kind of abortive hooky thing from six feet, which I say ‘hooky’ because it’s not properly any kind of real hook, more a “release the ball above my head” flailing kind of shot that never once went in.  I mean, it’s almost eery how devoid his game is of any kind of offensive mechanics or artistry.

6) Love

Love is, in my mind, one of the biggest puzzles in the NBA.  Looking at him you’d think he worked at a gas station; and yet somehow he manages to be the best rebounder in the entire league.  He manages to get to the right place at the right time and when the ball’s released he works his ass off to get to it.  It’s like the guy’s schizophrenic, in fact: I’d say about 70% of the time he absolutely busts his ass, and he’s all hustle.  The other 30% he’s not exactly sulking, but sort of.  How can those two qualities live in the same person?

Anyway, maybe next semester when I have some time I’ll dust off the play by play code I wrote last year and do some statistical analysis, because I can tell already that Love’s the kind of player who’s way more valuable than shows up in box scores: he moves the ball well in ways that don’t result in assists; he positions himself in ways that take rebounds away from guys who would normally get them; and he not only scores a substantial amount of his own points on offensive rebounds, but draws fouls in the process, thereby getting the other team’s players in foul trouble, and the other team in the penalty.  Guys like this win championships on the sly, regardless of who appears to be the hero by hitting the game-winner.

7) Idiots sitting behind us

Once again I had the good fortune to sit right next to some douchebags rooting for the other team, and not only that, but one of them could yell super loud, and was not shy about using this gift.  He missed a calling as a rock star or opera singer to focus on being a fat choad in a baseball cap who supports the Bucks.  Which has got to wear on you during those reflective moments.

8) Summary

It’s way too early to tell, obviously, but this is an intriguing team with a huge upside.  And aside from basketball, there’s a lot of human drama afoot — particularly, a kind of redemption story for Beasley and Milicic; a ‘growing up and becoming a man’ opportunity for Love.  It’s like a very complicated kind of cake that could turn out super good or super shitty.  Actually that’s a crap metaphor, I don’t know what to compare it to.  But at least they’re interesting, there’s the possibility for good things to happen; and seems like forever since I’ve been able to say that about the Wolves.

As soon as the Celtics got into the locker room following their victory, Garnett gathered everyone in a circle and let them know it would take more teamwork to close the deal.

“It feels like we’re in somebody else’s neighborhood and we’re gonna have to fight to get out of it,” Garnett told them passionately. “We gotta fight, we gotta fight, we gotta fight to get out of this neighborhood.”

His teammates knew exactly what he was talking about. In a gang fight, you’re a unified front. Everybody’s muscle is needed. No one gets left behind.

“He meant it’s going to take all of us to do this,” Tony Allen said. “That for us to reach our ultimate goal, it’s going to take all of us. This whole year, he’s been talking about team, team, team. He always says something that makes you sit back and think, ‘Ah yeah, he meant everybody.’”

This is nothing new, either. It’s not something KG picked up as his impact diminished. Before the Celtics went to Italy for training camp in 2008, Garnett was organizing full-roster outings to New England Patriots games. And when in Rome, the entire club hung out together on the Spanish Steps.

Over the past few seasons, when he and Pierce have been expected to conduct their every postgame interview at the podium, KG has always been quick to point out when a teammate deserved to be up there instead of him.

“We just try to keep it team,” Perkins said. “Obviously, we’ve got the future Hall of Famers and we’ve got Rondo, an All-Star who had a great year. But we keep it one goal, one team. Doc does a great job making sure everybody stays doing their roles, not caring who gets the credit. All of them preach that, especially KG. He don’t like it when they say it’s ‘The Big Three’ or ‘The Big Four.’ He likes it when it’s team. That’s all he preaches is team.”

I’ve posted on this topic a number of times before, and never satisfied the only person who pays any attention at all to those posts. So this article won’t satisfy him either, but that’s only because there’s something wrong with him. But not only him. It’s just so damn easy to pay attention to the obvious things:

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

The stats they measure in basketball are the stats it is possible to measure in basketball with the naked eye and a piece of paper, in real time. But those stats aren’t the ones that win games. They’re only a proxy for winning games, and are problematic because sometimes they seem like a very good proxy. Since the team with the most points wins, for instance, people automatically conflate point-scoring with being good. Obviously, all else being equal, it’s better to score 20 points than to score 10. The problem is that all else is never equal.

The secret, then, is to figure out how to measure the things that _actually_ win games, not just the things you _think_ win games; not the things you tend to notice. This is a painstaking process, one that’s been impossible to discuss quantitatively until relatively recently because you just couldn’t compile the data and you couldn’t crunch it. But now, apparently, there’s a statistics renaissance in basketball, and people are being paid to do the job I wish I was doing:

Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents. They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject — which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how, instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could say we did, but we didn’t.”

I knew a guy who played like Battier. His name was Dave Hanenburg, and he was, by far, the worst person to play against that I ever met in my whole life. Everything he did on the court was designed to fuck up the opposing teams in ten different ways: he’d force turnovers, rebound, block shots, push people out of their spots, score when nobody else could but only then. His teams almost always won, regardless of who he was playing with, and at the end, if you’d been keeping stats, you wouldn’t have been awestruck by the numbers he racked up. Usually what happened was that some rather nondescript player would suddenly go from averaging a point a game to scoring six.

Hanenburg beat my team many, many times. Which is what makes this anecdote so sweet:

A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct.

Once Hanenburg’s team was inbounding after a foul. He almost always guarded me, and I always guarded him, except on the rare occasions when he was shooting a lot, in which case I guarded his team’s second-best player because there was no point in wasting my defensive skills on Hanenburg when he was on a scoring binge. The more shots Hanenburg took, even if they went in, the less his teammates would score, which took them a little bit out of the game. A small, statistically hidden point, but sometimes it was all you had to hold onto.

Anyway, his team had the ball, and he was inbounding. Every so often when the person I was guarding was inbounding I would jump randomly in some direction with my hands outstretched. This almost never worked; maybe one time out of twenty I would steal the ball. But this one time, and only this one time, Hanenburg passed the ball to the place where I had jumped, and I stole it. I still remember his infuriated expression; it’s one of the handful of most prized moments from all my playing days, because in that one play I burned Hanenburg with the ultimate Hanenburg move.

The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I looked up at the scoreboard:

Bryant: 30.

Battier: 0.

Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,” he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12.”

I think about that steal all the time. Even now, when I haven’t played for years, I think about it every week, at least. People who know me know that I’m always making basketball metaphors for everything, but this one is probably my favorite, because it seems so clearly about what life is about: doing a series of small, thankless things, over and over, repeatedly, with no real thought to glory, but knowing that without them you’ll never have it.

You jump on the inbounds because one out of twenty times you’ll get the steal. And when you play the numbers long enough, that one out of twenty adds up.

1. Salaries matter. Over this season and the next two, would you rather pay David West $27 million or Amare Stoudemire $43 million?

2. Age matters. Would you rather have Chauncey Billups for the next five seasons or Rajon Rondo for the next 12?

3. Pretend the league passed the following rule: For 24 hours, any player can be traded without cap ramifications but with luxury-tax ramifications. So if Team A tells Team B, “We’ll trade you Player X for Player Y,” would Team B make the deal?

4. Concentrate on degrees.Neither San Antonio nor Orlando would make a Howard-Duncan trade, but the Spurs would at least say, “Wow, Dwight Howard’s available?” and have a meeting about it while the Magic would say, “There’s no frickin’ way we’re trading Dwight Howard.” That counts in the big scheme of things.

5. The list runs in reverse order (Nos. 40 to 1). So if Carmelo comes in at No. 16, players 1 through 15 are all players about whom the Nuggets would probably say, “We hate giving up ‘Melo, but we definitely have to consider this deal.” And they wouldn’t trade him straight-up for any player listed between Nos. 17 and 50.

Personally, I think he has David West, Tony Parker and Ginobili way too high.  Take West away from CP3 or Parker/Ginobili away from Big Fundamentals and they would all be shells of their former selves.

Pre-ACL he had Al Jefferson @ #9.

:(

But there is tons of discussion fodder NBA fans.

Anyway – there’s something very special going on right now and it makes me feel very clever. Before the beginning of last year I, along with some others, said the key for the Celitics season was Rajan Rondo. I said this having never seen the guy play, having only seen some rather complex statistical analyses. And, indeed, Rondo was critical to their winning the title.

And before this year, I said: the Cs could win it again, but only if Rondo takes the next step. Well, he’s taken the next step. In fact, over the last five games or so he’s taken two steps. And it’s beautiful to watch somebody transform right in front of you; to watch somebody realize how good he can be, and suddenly go from a nobody into an All Star.

Summary: if you haven’t been watching the Cs, and you like basketball, this opportunity doesn’t come along very often.