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Showing posts with label
Iowa State Department of Basketball Conspiracy.
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Showing posts with label
Iowa State Department of Basketball Conspiracy.
Show all posts
Brad Stevens must not be sleeping very well in the government-issued mind helmet that he must keep on at night to prevent his genius brain from emitting dangerous waves. The top-seeded Boston Celtics are down 2-0 to the cantankerous old Bulls who crept into the playoffs by the thinnest of margins, who appeared to quit on the season numerous times in 2017 alone, whose members spent most of their time finding newer and more exotic social media websites on which to feud. Brad Stevens is down 2-0 to Fred Hoiberg, who even as we speak is investing his obscene coaching salary in repeated attempts to win a stuffed gorilla in a a carnival peg toss.
Richard Nixon conducted his foreign policy under what he called the "madman theory," hoping to wring concessions out of his rivals in the in the Soviet Union, China, and other governments forced to deal with him as the keeper of a terrifying nuclear arsenal by convincing them that he was enough of a maniac to act on his darkest threats. Henry Kissinger, according to one memorandum, told a general that "the President's strategy has been...to 'push so many chips into the pot' that the other side will think we may be 'crazy' and be willing to go much further."
Fred Hoiberg has been using a similar strategy with the Bulls. How could Stevens or any coach gameplan for someone who spent the regular season rotating point guards at random, shuttling them from moldering on the bench to starting with the arbitrary whim of a basketball Caligula? How can a basketball coach, even one armed with cutting edge statistical models and video replay, determine the Bulls' tactics when Bulls may mutiny upon Hoiberg at any point? How can one discern patterns and strategies when the opponent seems to operate without them?
Fred Hoiberg learns all about dealing with office wiretaps
There is no way to prepare for the Bulls when the exact composition of the Bulls remains a mystery. Sure, the Bulls appear to have a set rotation now. But it's impossible to say at what point Hoiberg will change things up-- he could decide to put in Denzel Valentine to demoralize the Celtics with geriatric post moves or Michael Carter-Williams to silence a raucous road crowd because they rightly fear that his jump shots can at any time fly into the stands to bonk unsuspecting spectators in their heads and or land in their snacks and shower them and their neighbors with nacho detritus. Hoiberg may at any time and without warning unleash Joffrey Lauvergne, whose main basketball skill seems to be playing as if he was wearing the magnetic prison shoes from Face/Off.
Lauvergne hopes to use this playoff run to launch his new sneaker line
The Celtics are run by a vast network of computers spitting out ideal outcomes and advanced three pointer math and icons of basketball religion that the Sloan Analytics crowd refers to as Assets, and the Bulls are bludgeoning them to death with their big, meaty forearms. No one can stop Robin Lopez, who may be adopted into the Bulls' Society of Alphas if they can find a cloak large enough. Rondo, who is so instinctively despised by every NBA fan that he's been non-rhotically abused every time he touches the ball in the Garden even though he's a bona fide Boston playoff hero, has been systematically dismantling the Celtics. Dwyane Wade has gone into Playoff Mode, so if he thinks he has been fouled but did not get the call, he occasionally deigns to get back on defense instead of whipping out his half-glasses and meticulously typing a formal complaint while the opposing team goes on a fast break. Jimmy Butler is a single-minded destroyer.
The series comes steeped in the drama of failed trade hypotheticals. The Celtics' and Bulls' front offices spent the days before the trade deadline leaking competing rumors of a Jimmy Butler for Nets draft picks deal to the press. The talks generated thousands of rumors as websites mobilized their content aggregators and dozens perished in the coal furnaces that power the Adrian Wojnarowski tweet factory, but the actual offers remain shrouded in mystery. The failed trade talks disappointed some Bulls fans who see no way forward other than blowing up the team along with relief because absolutely no one trusts the authors of the stop at nothing to acquire Doug McDermott strategy and the Oklahoma City trade fiasco to make another mistake; the state of Bulls fans before the deadline could best be described as pre-swindled. Butler remains a Bull, delightedly dunking on the interchangeable Celtics wings that Danny Ainge was allegedly reluctant to part with for him. The Nets draft picks that the Celtics control cannot do anything in this series because they do not yet have corporeal form-- they cannot be subtly grabbed by Lopez or exchange elbows with Cristiano Felicio and they have not yet been traded to the Bulls to be used on players that some intrepid Bulls blogger will later find have sinister ties to Iowa State.
The Bulls, an aggressively bad and aesthetically revolting team, have fueled their playoff run by spitefully forcing America to continue to watch them. The playoff run will in the long term prove disastrous-- by qualifying they have further eroded their draft position, they have validated the witless scheming endemic to the management strategy of that coach choker John Paxson and his Igor henchman Gar Forman, and they have no chance to advance past any of the other top East seeds. At the same time, this is the most fun Bulls playoff run since a vomiting Nate Robinson brought the Booklyn Nets to their knees. No one, not least of all Bulls fans, wants this godforsaken team in the playoffs, but the Bulls have found their niche, refusing to go away when all the NBA world wants is a respite from their bullshit, ugly, bickering, non-basketball.
The only thing that makes sense for the Bulls is to continue their reviled rampage through the Eastern Conference before their inevitable elimination at the hands of whatever team LeBron James plays for. But because they are the Bulls it is equally likely that they collapse at the hands of the Celtics, going out in a blaze of futility and recrimination while Fred Hoiberg spends the night on the phone with his Blockbuster Video rep to find undiscovered motivational 80s films to splice into his film sessions. The Bulls are a boring force of basketball misery that no one wants in playoffs and they cannot be stopped.
For the past week, the Bulls have sat on a detonator as the potential catalysts for a blockbuster trade that could have blown a dent in the inevitable LeBron James romp to the NBA Finals. They could have sent Jimmy Butler to Boston for a mix of players and draft picks that everyone decided to start referring to as "assets" awhile back when basketball executives all became spreadsheet-monger MBAs that speak in TED Talk dialects instead of grizzled scouts and former players who based personnel decisions on phrenology.
The Celtics could have used Butler to join scoring dynamo Isaiah Thomas and an armada of interchangeable Glue Guy wing players to try to finally stop a hobbled Cavs team. The Bulls would then begin to rebuild, fortified by at least one of the Brooklyn Nets draft picks ceded to the Celtics for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett after a vomiting Nate Robinson had heroically vanquished them from the playoffs. The trade did not take place. The Bulls were not satisfied with the offer, and Butler will remain a Bull, heroically attempting to drag the carcass of this shambling basketball wreck to the playoffs.
In the end, the Bulls made a trade. They sent stalwart Taj Gibson, Doug McDermott and their 2018 second-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Cameron Payne, Anthony Morrow, and Joffrey Lauvergne.
I don't know anything about Taj Gibson even though he had been on the Bulls longer than anyone on the team. Gibson came in off the bench for most of his career, played excellent defense, sank some baseline jumpers, and stayed upright through the endless maelstrom of Bulls bullshit; he was there when John Paxson allegedly throttled Vinny Del Negro, when Rose blew out his knee and then kept returning as a faded, ghoulish specter of himself, when the front office waged an insane war against Tom Thibodeau of such beguiling complexity that it climaxed in accusations of office bugging, when the entire team turned against each other in an elaborate Instagram-fueled civil war, when the Bulls went from an exciting contender to a bizarre wasteland of bricked shots where everyone yells at each other all of the time. Gibson remained a staid, steady presence, only occasionally breaking out to dunk someone into a coffin and then unhinge his jaw and bellow into the United Center rafters to the approval of a roaring crowd and a roaring Carlos Boozer who spent five years on the Bulls screaming more or less continuously.
This Gibson dunk on Wade from 2011 was
so vicious that Wade plotted to leave the Heat
under acrimonious circumstances five years
later, inexplicably join the Bulls, and begin a
devious sabotage campaign that only looks
like a hall-of-famer marooned on a mediocre,
dysfunctional team coached by a Dairy Queen
night manager
The trade marks the end of the Doug McDermott Era of Chicago Bulls basketball. The Bulls gave up an absurd haul of picks to move up and select him even though he had some red flags: poor combine numbers, the inability to play basketball without a t-shirt. McDermott never justified the price, and played at times like a fringe rotation player; nevertheless he was the Bulls' most important player as Gar Forman seemed to want to remake the team in his image. They cast McDermott as the solution to their offensive woes under Tom Thibodeau, where the Bulls attempted to move the ball on the air currents generated by Thibodeau's horase hollering. They fired Thibodeau and brought in Fred Hoiberg to run an Iowa Offense. Everything McDermott did was at least interesting, whether it was inexplicably catching fire to continue the Bulls' hilarious winning streak against the Raptors or defending by chasing opposing shooters down like Clint Eastwood attempting to stop his partner from being shot in a haunting flashback. We will miss McDermott, who will flourish standing in a corner while four opponents swarm Russell Westbrook while futilely calling for the ball.
The centerpiece of the Bulls-Thunder trade is Cameron Payne. Payne is only 22, but coming off a broken foot and one of the statistically worst seasons of any NBA player this season. The acquisition of Payne, who joins a bloated backcourt of identically flawed young guards remains a mystery; the Bulls now exist as a mystical, ten-armed guard that cannot shoot with any of them. Perhaps Payne, a former lottery pick, can flourish outside of the shadow of Russell Westbrook. Perhaps they favored him because his former college coach Steve Prohm happens to be the man who took Fred Hoiberg's old job at Iowa State, which seems like a dumb theory until you remember that Iowa State now exists as a shadowy Pynchonian institution in the minds of a certain species of internet Bulls fans that keeps popping up in everything surrounding the team until a conspiracy either reveals itself or drives them to madness.
After several letters to Iowa State returned unopened, Stan
from Glen Ellyn came home to a ransacked apartment.
The giant, red bird sat on his stained recliner, feet-claws
propped on the ottoman, smoking a pipe from a tiny hole
bored into the middle of its fabric teeth. He handed me a
card. It said "Dr. Splad Halfnelson, Iowa State Department
of Basketball Conspiracy." "The first thing you need to know
is that this whole thing is because of the perversity. The
freaks," he said.
Both Morrow and Lauvergne are expiring contracts and likely have no future with the Bulls or American organized basketball. Morrow's three point shooting has fallen below 30%, which makes him as effective as a kickboxer coming off a leg amputation. Lauvergne, a sweet-shooting French big man, has the rebounding and shotblocking prowess of a muzzled Tyrannosaurus.
The trade raises more questions that it answers. The Bulls currently exist as Jimmy Butler and a scaffolding of declining veterans and young players that seem headed to the Adriatic League without some sort of holy revelation about jumpshooting. They may eventually decide to deal Butler this summer, sell off any player with some value, and plunge the team into the inevitable morass of basketball misery in hopes of landing another star in the draft. But this trade, and the multifarious draft misses, inept trades, and constant atmosphere of intrigue that surrounds the front office leaves little hope for the future no matter what path they take.
POSSESSED
Russian literature is filled with madmen, half-understood outbursts at receptions, and enigmatic grudges, and that is just the academic literature conventions. That impression comes from The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman's celebration of Russian writers coupled with a memoir of travel to Moscow and Uzbekistan interwoven with digressions on ice palaces and Tolstoy murder conspiracy.
The largest chunk of the book involves a summer spent in an intense Uzbek-language course in Samarkand. She has two instructors: a philosophy graduate student who teaches from a Soviet textbook "exclusively through the lens of cotton production: a valuable lesson in monomania" and an Old Uzbek literature professor who disseminated poems, fables, and history. "Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan did not only ride a bull, but he didn't wear any pants. She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, 'but he didn't wear any pants.'"
In another chapter, Batuman travels to Moscow to write an article on the reconstruction of the House of Ice as part of a St. Petersburg's White Days. Empress Ioannova had ordered the construction of the ice palace in 1740 as part of a festival that would culminate with the forced wedding of two jesters in her court. Armed guards compelled the couple to spend the night in the frozen palace, dancing and running around in order to stay warm. The House of Ice featured functioning ice cannons, ice furniture, ice logs in an ice fireplace, and a water-spouting ice elephant, a dedication to ice so elaborate that even Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze character would suggest that they maybe cool it with the ice before sadly realizing that the ice puns had so colonized his thoughts that he had no choice but to surrender to his greatest enemy, room temperature.
Reproduction of the House of Ice in St. Petersburg in 2006.
Why did the Russian government decide to pay tribute to
a former monarch's insanely elaborate lark to freeze her
subjects? According to Batuman, "[Valery] Gromov, a
former army management official, and [Svetlana]
Mikheyeyeva, a former doctor and healthcare manager,
had conceived of this dream during an international
management training program in Tokyo in 1999, where
they ended up stuck in a broken elevator with the chairman
of the Association of Russian Snow, Ice, and Sand Sculptors."
The Possessed on its surface is a hard sell: come for the exploration of Girardian memetic theory in Dostoevksy and stay for negotiations about artifact captions at an academic Isaac Babel conference, but it all works because Batuman is a wonderful writer and brilliantly funny. Batuman depicts the academic world of literature as absurd and even grotesque while never dampening her own underlying argument about the resonance and vitality of the books and authors she loves.
DEADLINE TO SELECTION
Northwestern followed a panicky home win against Rutgers with a demoralizing loss to Illinois. The Chicago Tribune consulted some Certified Bracketologists who tell us that they are still ok, that one more win should finally put them in the dang Tournament, that the State Farm Center ceiling has not caved in and brought ruin to the season, but my default setting remains tournament-related panic. Still, there is nothing to do but hope they can beat a reeling Hoosier squad, that all the other bubble teams shamefully collapse on their home courts in front of wailing fans, and that the Wildcats won't be exiled to the NIT or an exotic alternative tournament in an ice palace.
