Throwdown number 1: Eric Gordon, eyeball vs. analyst

I call THROWDOWN! This is the first in what will be an ongoing series.

When he rated the NBA's incoming class of perimeter players using statistical methods, John Hollinger placed Eric Gordon among "the riff-raff" and wrote, "subjectively, I've been suspicious of him for some time, and I'm a little unsure what has everyone so excited."

The Sports Guy, contrarily, thinks "this kid is going to be great." He says this is one thing we'll enjoy about the NBA this year:

Eric Gordon's beautiful, moonball, knee-weakening, once-in-a-generation jump shot. It's just perfect. I love it. I love everything about it. Every time he shoots it, the Clippers crowd goes quiet for a split-second like one of the cheerleaders just pulled up her shirt. Even the spin is gorgeous. I can't say enough about it. I am in love with Eric Gordon's jump shot. I want to marry it. I want to have kids with it. I will go to at least one practice or shootaround this year just to see him hoist 200 of them. And by the way, the kid is going to be great -- he's bigger than I thought, and when he drives to the lane, defenders just bounce off him. He will end up being the third-best guy in that draft. Unless, of course -- and I'm contractually obligated to mention this since it's the most jinxed franchise in sports and we're only two years removed from Shaun Livingston's knee flying off his body and landing in the eighth row -- something horrible happens to him. Please, Lord, no. Just give us a decade of Gordon jump shots. I don't ask for much.

THE THROWDOWN

QUESTION: Barring major injury, will Eric Gordon be good by the end of his second year? (I'm splitting the difference between the two writers' time frames.)

JUDGMENT DAY: April 30, 2010

TERMS: For Simmons to win, Gordon must have a second-year PER of at least 15. That's Rajon Rondo territory. We don't ask him to be great, just good.


UPDATE: JUDGMENT DAY!

This one was looking bad for Hollinger early on, but he ended up winning this throwdown, though so closely that it's fairest to call it a draw. Gordon's second-year PER was 14.15, a disappointing number after 14.98 his first year. To date, Gordon appears to be better than Hollinger suspected, not as good as Simmons hoped.

Big Shot Bob: Robert Horry and the Hall of Fame

Let's take up a burning question in NBA circles: is Robert Horry a Hall of Famer?

OK, maybe it's a smoldering question, but it was burning during this season's playoffs, and among many other writers, J. A. Adande said yes, Horry belongs.

Those who know the general inclinations of stat geeks know that we tend to give less weight to postseason performance and to clutch performance than most other fans and analysts. Therefore, it's probably not surprising that I think Horry, whose only claim to the Hall involves some clutch shots in the postseason, is nowhere remotely close to a Hall of Famer. Many others could make that case better than I.

What separates this from a number of parallel cases (that of Jack Morris in baseball, for instance) is the media coverage of the incident in the 2007 playoffs when Horry pushed Steve Nash, and the resulting scuffle brought about suspensions to Horry, Amare Stoudemire, and Boris Diaw.

Reading and hearing reactions to this incident, I noticed a consistent pattern: in all the disputes about the dirtiness of Horry's push and about the fairness of the suspensions, everyone seemed to agree that Stoudemire's absence would hurt his team much more than Horry's would hurt his--even though Horry was suspended for two games and Stoudemire one.

My sense was that this consensus was exactly right: for all of Horry's previous clutch shooting, and even though Stoudemire hadn't won a thing, everyone seemed to understand that even in the playoffs, Stoudemire was the true star, Horry only a role player. This wire report offered the standard account:

The Spurs probably can do without Horry, a role player known for his clutch 3-point shooting. The Suns, however, will sorely miss Stoudemire, a first-team all-NBA selection and their leading scorer and rebounder in the series.

Precisely! And the League had to justify the suspensions in terms that acknowledged the obvious competitive unfairness of the suspensions:

"It is not a matter of fairness, it's a matter of correctness," said Stu Jackson, NBA executive vice president.

For almost a year, I indulged the fantasy that the comparison of Stoudemire and Horry had clarified for all the world that even in the playoffs, Horry's value couldn't touch that of a truly excellent player. That was a good year.

It's just criminal.

In the latest NBA scandal fueled by the downfall of Tim Donaghy, I haven't seen any news coverage of the most revealing word in the NBA's defensive posturing: criminal.

"There's one criminal here," says says David Stern, referring to Donaghy. Or check out this statement from Stern:

"He turned on basically all of his colleagues in an attempt to demonstrate that he is not the only one who engaged in criminal activity," Stern said Tuesday. "The U.S. Attorney's office, the FBI have fully investigated it, and Mr. Donaghy is the only one who is guilty of a crime. And he's going to be sentenced for that crime, regardless of these desperate attempts to implicate as many people as he can."

Criminal, crime, crime. If you look at other statements from the league offices, you'll see the same wording, over and over again.

Today's New York Times article does raise one way in which this language is fishy: "Stern's implication was that if the authorities had discovered other criminal misconduct, they would have acted on it. That is not necessarily the case, according to legal experts."

But there is another, deeper fishiness about this: Donaghy has alleged many abuses of power among NBA referees, abuses that would certainly violate professional ethics and possibly league rules. But few, if any, of these charges are allegations of criminal conduct--Donaghy is a criminal because of the way his misconduct connected with gambling.

Stern is issuing classic non-denial denials; such carefully parsed denials are nearly confessions of the misconduct they are crafted to keep silent. He is so far getting away with them.

The Sports Guy on the Donaghy scandal

I've been meaning to say more about what makes Bill Simmons a terrific sportswriter, one I'm almost always eager to read, even though his analytical instincts drive me nuts. This column on the NBA refereeing scandal is Simmons at his best. This is a sports story that is all about fan psychology--the way everybody will talk about games next year, and nobody covers that angle better than Simmons.

How about the Sports Guy Race Theorists?

Back in March, Bill Simmons got himself in a little hot water by saying that this was an "astounding realit[y]" of the 2005-06 college basketball season: "Two white guys (Adam Morrison and J.J. Redick) were indisputably the two best college basketball players alive."

Perhaps Simmons thought that Boston sports fans have such a longstanding record of interracial harmony and good cheer that nobody would notice that you can't explain the logic underneath that statement without cringing. Hey, I've got a minute. Go ahead and explain to yourself why the joke is funny. I guarantee at least two cringes, or a cringe and a wince.

When readers called Simmons on the comment, he thoughtfully offered this olive branch: "For anyone who was offended, I'm sorry … not for the joke, but for the bug up your ass." Yes, it takes a lot of courage and integrity to go for the old "bug up your ass" line. Not to mention writing skill.

Bill Simmons is a skilled writer and often a skilled thinker, too, but his head seems to shrink when he tries to joke about race. Here is his reason number 929 why he loves sports:


The Utah Jazz
I will never get used to this: One of our most white-bread American cities roots for an NBA franchise named for a musical movement created by African-Americans. It's genuinely insane. You can brainstorm with your buddies all weekend to come up with a name for a sports franchise that makes less sense -- there's no way you're topping Utah Jazz. Not even with Dallas Indians.

Let's leave aside the lack of originality here--seriously, has anybody not heard this before?--and go to the hysteria of Simmons's resistance to the idea of jazz in Utah. Obviously, Utah Jazz an odd name, with the oddity stemming from the team's move from New Orleans to Salt Lake City. Probably nobody would have considered giving the name to a new franchise. But "genuinely insane"? There's no topping it, even with hypothetical names?

I find Simmons's adolescent excitement about an old joke revealing. Utah Jazz is an oxymoron only in the dull-witted logic of bad jokes, in which all Utahans are Mormons, all Mormons are white, and no white people play jazz. The fact that lots of people have played and do play jazz in Utah is a side point, though, compared to the revelation that in Simmons's imagination, a loose association between a broad style of music and a racial group has more force than anything else he can imagine. So I take up the challenge to think of team names nuttier than Utah Jazz. Simmons offers us a weekend, but I'll take five minutes:

Laramie Surf
Minneapolis Camels
Havana Barons
Miami Frost
New York Humility
Hartford Rebels
Cedar Rapids Mountaineers

It's not so hard--if you think about it.