The Oscars

I flirted with idea of bloging the Oscars after writting about Martin Scorcese v. Clint Eastwood, but then I realized that I am sort of over them.

The reason is pretty simple, they are almost always wrong. If you are going to slap a lable like "Best Picture" on a movie, then it had better be a movie that is watchable 10 or 20 years later. If you are going to name someone "Best Actor", then maybe it should be for a character people actually remember. However, let's look at the history Best Picture winners from '85-'90:

1985 Out of Africa - Highly respected movie and Meryl Streep was like the late-90s Jordan in those days, but consider what else came out that year. That was the year of Witness; which had a great plot, intersting characters and Kelly McGillis at her absolute apex. It was also the year of Back to the Future; which was not deep, but had a great premise and was a ton of fun. Brazil, Silverado and Prizzi's Honor were memorable 1985 movies in less than reputable genres that at least appeared on the Academy Radar, but none were the zeitgeist film of the year. That honor goes The Breakfast Club, or its evil twin St. Elmo's Fire. You may think that I am kidding, but on a rainy Saturday 20 years later, if you are confronted with those 8 choices which one do you chose? Isn't that the definition of a classic? Add quirkier 80s fare (Rambo, Cocoon, etc.) and poor "Out of Africa" has a hard time cracking the top ten.

1986 Platoon - This is good movie and an important movie. You can certainly still make the case that it was the best movie of 1986, but consider the fact that Aliens also came out in 1986. "Aliens" may very well be the best action movie ever made, but they don't give Oscars to action movies. How do call something "Best Picture" when a huge percentage of movies are not even considered? '86 also featured the last Woody Allen movie before he lost his fastball, Hannah and her Sisters. But, Mr. Allen is not exactly under-praised. Blue Velvet was a 1986 release that is at least as memorable as "Platoon". Two more cult-classics were released '86, Manhunter and Sid Nancy. Even ultra-mainstream fare like Top Gun and Ferris Bueller's Day Off are probably movies you would rent and enjoy today, but went unrecognized by the Academy. Something Wild was good enough to rescue Melanie Griffths' career, but not an Oscar nod. Demi Moore was never better than About Last Night ..., but nothing. More glaring to mind is that The Color of Money was over-looked. Look at the list of nominees and you tell me how many of those movies were better than that one.

1987 The Last Emperor - I do not know anyone who has seen this movie. The five most memorable movies from '87 were all pretty good: Wall Street; The Untouchables; The Princess Bride; Good Morning, Vietnam; and Raising Arizona. Broadcast News is a classic, "Oh yeah, I liked that one" movie, but so is Empire of the Sun, Full Metal Jacket, Roxanne and River's Edge. Fatal Attraction was a hit zeitgeist movie that got an Osacar nod, but was it really any better than movies of the same ilk that had been ignored in the two prior years? I'd actually say that it was worse than Lethal Weapon, but that's me.

1988 Rain Man - This movie may be the third (or fourth) best Tom Cruise movie of the 80s, depending upon where you rank All the Right Moves. It was memorable, but I dare you to sit through the entire thing again. It is a classic 'good once' movie, so it is hardly a classic. A Fish Called Wanda; Die Hard; Bull Durham; Big and; Beeltjuice all were released in '88 and based upon cable TV it seems that all are highly re-watchable. Three movies I like a lot more than most people were also released in '88. They were Dangerous Liasons, The Last Temptation of Christ and Tucker: a Man and his Dream. Tell you what, have a movie night with those three movies and "Rain Man", take a vote of the group on which movie is best and let me know the results. My guess is that "Rain Man" averages under 25% of the vote. Mix in two of the 'big 5' above, or Working Girl (a favorite of my Mom), and that number plunges.

1989 Driving Miss Daisy - Well, the winner was truly putrid. It beat two pretty good movies in Dead Poets Society and Field of Dreams. However, 1989 had an actual masterpiece that caught the mood of the year perfectly. It is Do the Right Thing. It was still three years until the Rodney King verdict, but Spike Lee explained the riot that would come afterwards. That is a great movie. There were several other very good movies that came out that year as well, including two of the best Romantic Comedies of the last 25 years (When Harry Met Sally ... and Say Anything). It also featured the movie that gave birth to the indie movement of the 90s in sex, lies, and videotape. Probably everything that is wrong with Oscars is summed up by this factoid, Jack Nicholson won a Best Actor award for As Good as It Gets and was not nominated for his turn as the Joker in Batman. You tell me which performance you are going to think of the day Jack shuffles off this mortal coil.

1990 Dances With Wolves - Not a bad choice here in most years. "Dances with Wolves" is an above average Western and it was nice that the Academy finally overcame its prejudice against the genre. On the other hand, Goodfellas came out in 1990. "Goodfellas" is probably the masterpiece film of the greatest living American film-maker, so it is kind of important. It is the only gangster film that rivals The Godfather in its depth and complexity. "The Godfather" being the only movie other than Citizen Kane that could be described as the greatest American film, ever. Oh, and Al Pacino appeared in the role of Michael Corleone for the final time in the under-rated Godfather, Part III in 1990. But apparently that was not Oscar worthy, either. Also over-looked were two minor gangster classics, Miller's Crossing and State of Grace. Four classic gangster movies released in one year (including one of the two best, ever) and they give the Oscar to a Western? Oh, and there was another great crime film in '90 with The Grifters. Annette Bening gave one of the best break-out performances in my memory and lost the Supporting Actress award to Whoppi Goldberg doing her exactly the same thing she does in every movie in Ghost. Huh?

If look at the list above, then you get the sense that amybe the Oscars don't really matter that much anyway. I mean, a one-in-six shot to be right about what movie we'll remember most fondly is not exactly noteworthy.

NBA Trade Deadline

This is late, since I wrote it once and lost it. However, I have some thoughts about the deadline moves:

• No moves from the Lakers, which I pretty much assumed after Kobe gave Caron Butler a 'get well' message in his final pre-deadline interview. I cannot believe I gave Jack Haley any credence at all. A 3-for-1 to get an 'impact player' did not seem too implausible, but no one out there would have really changed the course of this season. Carlos Boozer is a nice player, but doesn't make me think Championship. Better to let the whole group finish the season together, then make moves for the new coach.
• The glamour move was the Sixers acquiring Chris Webber, which means the '02 Kings are as far into the past as the '02 Lakers. It makes me a little sad. I thought we would see at least one rematch of that play-off series. I guess it should make me feel good that Horry creating that teams inflection point with his huge shot, but it really doesn't. The best active rivalry in sports ended a minimum of two years early and it is a shame.
• On the other side of the ledger, the Sixers made a nice move. They got something for nothing really, so you have to be happy if you are in Philly. Like I said during All-Star Game, Iverson is a much better player with a quality big man. He finds another level in his play. Also, the NBA is just better when teams like the 76ers are good. The truth is that like the NHL, only about one-third of NBA teams have real fan-bases. Most of the markets can turn out the fans when they are cruising for 60+ wins. But a real fan-base turns out when the team is struggling to stay above .500 in the second half. If the NBA has its best teams in those 9-10 markets, then it is thriving. It always seems to be sinking when fewer than half those markets have elite teams.
• The other big move was freeing Baron Davis from the New Orleans Hornets. In a sport that features the L.A. Clippers, it is highly dubious distinction to be the worst franchise. After burning out a good market in Charlotte and fleeing to a terrible one in New Orleans, the Hornets have earned that distinction. My lovely wife Carolyn and I attended the first Hornets home game in New Orleans and it felt like a mistake from day one. They have a nice arena and nicer people, but they just do not care about NBA basketball. Baron Davis was supposed to be a super-star coming out of UCLA, but injuries have derailed his career. Maybe after his current contract runs, Baron take a mid-level deal somewhere and play 25-30 minutes per game on a contender. You can see him winning a championship as the third option somewhere that has enough depth to rest him a lot during the season. I know ... Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Warriors side of the deal.
• I was glad to see Antione Walker return to the Celtics. Boston is another of the 4-5 markets in the Eastern Conference that features an actual NBA fan-base. They also once were the home to the Dynasty of Pro Basketball. Like everyone of my generation west of the Colorado River (well ... Except the racists), I grew up despising the Boston Celtics. They had caused so much pain for the Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain Lakers, that seems unbeatable during the 70s and early-80s. That was what made the 1985 Championship Team so special, it is like the Southern Californian version of '04 Red Sox finally beating THOSE GUYS. It always seemed like a shame that '00 Lakers started another dynasty without a Celtics team to challenge them. Part of me stopped believing that Lakers group of Lakers would win another championship when Danny Ainge shipped 'Toine to Dallas and started the re-building over. I mean, there is no way Phil Jackson passes Red Auerbach for his 10th Championship (and the Lakers 14th) without facing the Celtics. Part of me thinks it was a purely a passive-aggressive move by Ainge (knowing that they were good enough to come out the East, but not good enough to stop the Lakers). Whatever his weaknesses, Antione Walker is a real Celtic and it is good to see him back there.
• Keith Van Horn to the Dallas Mavericks is a bit odd. He makes a ton of money for someone who is the definition of an average NBA player. Cuban seems to love to acquire the high-priced, Tweener-types, but at least Van Horn will not be called upon to do much. But again, you also have got to assume that he will not a Maverick for long either as his contract is set to expire. The constant churning of the roster cannot be helping. Basketball requires a lot of knowledge of the other players on your team. This is most true on defense, since knowing when to help is critical. In particular, this is the case if a team lacks strong one-on-one defenders. Dallas is always scoring a lot of points and giving up a lot of points. I am not sure how adding Van Horn makes much of a difference, other than to just change something.
• The Cleveland Cavaliers added Jiri Welsh and probably lost their shot at Michael Redd a classic gain a little, but lose a lot, move. Combine that with swapping Drew Gooden for Boozer over the summer and you start to wonder if even LeBron James is going to save that franchise. They have a huge decision with Zydrunas Ilgauskas this summer and I am starting to wonder if they are even capable making the right call.
• Of course, the Spurs fleeced Issah Thomas out of useful player by offering him a bad contract. Even the Houston Rockets got help in the form of Moochie Norris in exchange for an overpaid, under-sized PF. If you are getting out-witted by the Rockets in a season that they cannot figure out how to put the right players around Yao Ming and T-Mac, then you are in trouble. How Jeff Van Gundy is not running the Princeton Offense is a total mystery. Thomas is planning to go after an elite coach in the off-season, but I do not see that happening. What benefit is it to someone like Phil Jackson to join a capped out team with a ton of overpaid journeymen and be subjected to the crush of the New York media? There are much better jobs available.
• The Miami Heat acquired Steve Smith from Charlotte, which means yet another older player joining this team. Apparently, the Heat have decided to load-up and make a run at a championship. Given their 41-16 record, this is not a bizarre objective. However, I think this is going to end badly. Shaq may have a mild sprain, but there are no minor leg injuries for 7'1" men who weigh 320+ lbs. This is most true once they are into their 30s. I have seen him wear down in each of the last 3 seasons and I fully expect the same this year. Also, neither Smith, nor Alonzo Mourning, figure to be in the picture next year. They will be taking minutes from players who have a sacrificed already to get here, so what message does that send? To me, it says that the Heat see a very narrow window with Shaq and intend to squeeze through it. Shaq is highly sensitive, so the notion that he might no longer be in the running for his max extension might have a very negative effect. This is most true as Dwyane Wade continues to become the focal point of the franchise. Trust me, this is not a man who you want to give the impression that you are favoring his 'little brother' over him. Shaq can handle a lot in 82 games of pounding, but not that.

iVillage

No, I am not going to write about the internet version of Lifetime.

Andrew Sullivan wrote a nice little piece about iPods on the streets of New York that I linked to above. That combined with the death of Hunter S. Thompson put me in mind of something. It really is time to stop beating up on the 1960s counter-culture. It is mantra of the backlash right that the Sixties were the point of departure at which the cultural decline began and, therefore, the 'culture wars' began. During the past few years, a few central figures of counter-culture have shuffled off this mortal coil. Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey and now Hunter S Thompson are all gone. That puts a huge piece of 60s counter-culture officially into history. That begs the question: how dangerous were those guys anyway? I mean, if the culture is in severe decline from the legacy of the 1960s wouldn't things be really awful today all these (40+) years later?

Clearly, using psycho-active drugs is not great for the health of your mind, or body. All these guys from Jim Morrison onward died very young and often very tragically. However, it is hard to spot any real social ills back the counter-culture. Crime rose through the 60s and into the 70s. By the 1980s, the crime rate was six times what it was in 1960. However, it fell as the population aged during the 1990s. By 2000, the US crime rate was very nearly where it was in 1970. Despite the spectacular nature of the darkest part of the counter-culture, the size of the baby boom itself appears to be as significant a driver for crime as the nature of the counter-culture. Young men are over-whelmingly the perpetrators of crime, so as the US population has aged the crime rate has fallen. If you remove the criminal stigma from the counter-culture, then you begin to see that its effects are far more complex than the easy cartoon depiction in the media.

In his book Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank bemoans the appropriation of the attitude of the counter-culture from leftist perspective. He has a remarkably good point regarding how firms have positioned their brands in the post-Woodstock era. Firms, like Nike, work hard to maintain a hip brand identity using a lot of the language of the counter-culture. Unlike some firms, like Ben & Jerry's, they have not transferred that language into pro-social action and employed a 'caring capitalism' business-model. Unlike Mr. Frank, I believe the incorporation of the language of Sixties counter-culture into the DNA of modern marketing has had several positive effects. The largest is the rise of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, but that is a large topic that deserves its own space. The next largest effect is the paradigm shift that occurred within the culture industry. This is an enormous source of irritation to Backlash Republicans, but I truly believe that it has been extremely good for the rest of us.

The effect of Woodstock especially on the culture industry was the realization that there was an enormous audience for entertainment that was not 'mainstream'. Prior to the 1960s, entertainment had been dominated by a factory model (i.e. the Hollywood studio system). That era is now regarded with considerable nostalgia, but it is important to remember the primary achievement of any factory system is standardization. The production of both film and music was broken into the component parts of its assembly. Even the most distinctive talents were very rarely authors of their own material in the sense that a novelist would be. With the realization that non-mainstream material could be highly profitable, the production process adapted to accept it. Nearly every piece of popular culture that I have enjoyed in my lifetime came through this channel. Consider these examples:

• The 'film school brats' of the 1970s, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
• The 'college rock' of the 1980s and its descendent in the 1990s, 'alternative rock'.
• The 'Indie Cinema' of the 1990s, such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Doug Liman

None of those movements began within the structure of the culture industry itself. Rather, they were 'discovered' after having developed outside the system. Even Punk Rock (the great rebellion against "peace, love & understanding" as a product) was started someone looking for alternative to the old alternative and selling it. In all those cases, the culture industry acted less in the classic factory model and more as a channel to market for artists that had developed elsewhere. This is totally impossible, if the counter-culture of the 1960s does not alert the media business to the profit potential of serving a niche audience. In order to bring something new into the system, someone has to be out looking for the emerging trends and trying to package them. Turning something 'cool' into a media product that can be consumed by a mass audience first requires the knowledge that it is even possible. The next thing that is required is a channel-to-market. This where I am actually excited about the iPod, iTunes and the possibility of similar technologies.

For my part, I am actually interested in new music for the first time in a very long time. The reason is pretty simple: I now have the ability to search for music that I actually like, have the opportunity to sample it before I buy and download it easily knowing the artist is getting paid for their work. Over the past decade, the channel most music had come to consumers was mass retailers (i.e. Wal-Mart). In turn, they passed their sound-scan data back to record companies that developed the product. This lead to some depressing, but not shocking, news. It turns out that people who buy music at places like Wal-Mart enjoy crappy music. This dynamic has led to the past decade which has seemed like an unending stream of Orlando-based boy bands, air-brushed ingenues and alleged rebels who sound exactly the actual rebels of their parents generation. I mean, if there is a difference between Fred Durst and the Fonz I cannot see it. Bleh.

As these retailers began to use DVDs along with CDs as loss-leaders to drive traffic through their stores, they began to exert greater control over the types of movies that got made. DVD has been a great medium for television. The extra revenue stream has kept shows like Arrested Development on the air. Moreover, it has encouraged shows like The Sopranos, 24 and Lost to view their seasons as 20+ hour movies. For the first time since Erich von Stroheim made Greed, filmed drama is acquiring novelistic depth. However, the chilling effect on mature themes in film is rough trade-off to make. As break-out roles in Oscar bait movies go, I will take Annette Bening in The Grifters over Natalie Portman in Closer any day of the week. That is why I am rooting for a device that enables me to cut the brick-and-mortar retailers out of the process, something like a TiVo DVR coupled with video-on-demand. Open up your 'iMovies' folder that has a list of trailers for you to watch (based upon your preferences), then you pay to view it with TiVo-like functions. Afterwards, you maybe you get an email asking you to rate it and the option to buy a DVD.

I am a big boy. With the help of a good preference engine I can scan the fringes of the Culture Industry for stuff I like on my own, but thanks for all your help.

Back Bay, Newport Beach 

The Current Cycle and Beyond ...

According the Brookings Institution, 50% of all 'built space' in 2030 will have been constructed after 2000. That is a staggering statistic and utterly plausible given the macro-level trends. The 'echo boom' is its teens and will be entering the workforce very soon. Given the size of this demographic, one would expect its effects to be nearly as large as their 'Baby Boom' parents. Already fast growing sun-belt states had a disproportionate share of the birth-rate during that (i.e. California, Texas and Florida accounted for 50% of the live births in the 1980s).

That said, I do not believe the current real estate cycle will end any differently than any other business cycle. Someone will be the last person to buy into the bubble markets and they get burned. Someone will be discovered to have done something shady based upon the assumption of unlimited price appreciation and they will be made an example of poor business ethics. It happened in the S&L business, it happened in the dot-com era and it will happen here.

You can even see the shape of the pin that will prick the balloon. It only took the possibility of a major Asian central bank "diversifying their portfolio" out of dollars to rattle the currency. Given how fast the US debt load has risen and how few concrete answers the administration has to address our long-term unfunded liabilities (forget Social Security and think Medi-Care), then how much longer before that happens is the only real question. Japan, in particular, is exposed to an enormous currency risk, but China and Korea have large exposures US Dollars as well. The amount of deficit spending makes a crisis virtually unavoidable. With the 2004 election in the past, there is nothing to be done about it now. I would rather focus on what can be done to fix some of our structural problems.

The building cycle of the next 25 years offers an opportunity to do that to some degree. As I have noted in the past, a huge percentage of the gap in our current accounts is taken up by two line item: fuel and non-rail transportation. Any efforts to reduce imports in those categories will have a disproportionate impact on the current accounts deficit (and the strength of the dollar). As an added bonus, reduced petroleum-based fuel consumption would have a National Security benefit in reducing revenues to Middle-Eastern states. This is obviously much easier said than done, but it is worth looking at potential solutions. Part of the solution is probably more transit-oriented design and urban in-fill. Another piece of the puzzle is re-thinking the suburb.

This article from Architecture Week is an interesting take on the problem. The idea of edible landscaping is sort of fun, but highly unlikely to become popular. On the other hand, using open space as the centerpiece of a development is something I have always been a huge believer in. It does encourage you to walk around (rather than drive) to some degree. It is a major feature of the older parts of Irvine and is even re-appearing in some projects like Woodbury. The challenge is getting people to limit the use of cars even further. Howver, you need to be realistic about human nature, only the hardest core environmentalist is going to ride their bike to the Supermarket. No one over the age 22 is going to carry a large purchase home. In this regard, technology can be your friend to some degree. Internet retailing (or 'e-tailing') limits some of a consumers shopping trips. However, good planning is necessary as well. Very few people are willing to walk five miles on even the loveliest walking trail to get a carton of milk.

Home Life 

For the record ...

In the previous post, I called the Southern California sports culture "sanguine". Some readers might look at the definition and think that I was using the wrong word. Most people who are not from the area do not consider our sports culture to be neither passionate, nor "cheerfully confident; optimistic". They consider it indifferent.

The reason for this is simple, the mass exodus out of games before they end. Very few people like this aspect of Southern California sports culture, but even fewer seem to understand it. As someone who grew up going to 'SC Trojans Football games, let me explain. It is an expression of confidence to leave half-way through the fourth quarter of 49-7 game. It is saying, "This game is over, no matter what the clock says". Leaving early from a loss says something as well. It is like leaving halfway through a crappy movie. It says, "I am not rewarding that feeble effort". That is why a player like Eric Gagne (or a coach like Pete Carroll) is so perfect for this market. Cheering Gagne coming into a Dodger game is (if anything) a bigger statement than heading for the exits. You may not like that the So Cal fans behaving this way, but it just ignorant to describe it as 'indifference'. I have left multiple Dodgers and Lakers games when fans wearing opposing colors would be wise to be concerned for their lives. In the late eighties, Kings games were often nearly as bad as the legendarily hostile LA-era Raiders games.

By the way, this aspect is what makes the UCLA-USC game so unique. There are plenty of great college footbal rivalries, but I doubt that any feature the fans of both teams utterly certain of a win before every match-up irrespective of their actual strengthes.

Southern California and the Sports Media

My favorite sport-writer currently is Bill Simmons, the 'Sports Guy' from espn.com. He is funny and insightful. He writes about sports in the context of the broader pop culture landscape in a way that is almost unique. His column is the only one on sports that I actually look forward to reading. However, he has a pretty significant weakness, like virtually all the national sports media he write form an east-coast perspective. Simmons is now Los Angeles-based and does the only significant writing on the Clippers I have ever read, but he started his career as the 'Boston Sports Guy'. That means lots of Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics columns. Boston, MA is a nice place with a lot of history, but the city itself has one-fifth the population of the market the Anaheim Angels feel is too limiting. So, whenever the column touches on LA sports (in general) and the Lakers (in particular) he makes assertions of fact that are all too often totally ignorant. This is from an otherwise excellent column today:

"If the Pistons-Pacers melee was the worst story of the season, Shaq's emergence
as a goofy, larger-than-life character in the post-Kobe Era has been the best.
For over a decade, we always heard that Shaq was a different guy behind the
scenes, that the mumbling, monosyllabic behemoth with the media was just his way
of keeping his privacy. Now there isn't a more likeable athlete in sports. "

Huh? Shaquille O'Neal was not a goofy, larger-than-life character from the moment he was drafted by the Magic? Somehow, getting off the plane in Orlando with Mickey Mouse ears was not 'goofy'. I've personally seen the guy at Staples Center rountinely clowning around during warm-ups. During the '03 season, I even saw Shaq doing a comical cross-over at the three-point line being guarded by a laughing Kobe Bryant. Did Simmons somehow miss the Shaq episode of Mtv Cribs? Shaq seemed sort of larger than life in that one and he was still a Laker. I mean, we are talking about one of the most popular athletes in the HISTORY OF L.A. SPORTS. It is not like his personality is news to any of the over 9.5 million folks living in LA County, nor the over 2.8 million of us living in Orange County. OC is the kid brother of LA and it is larger than Miami-Dade County. Yet, Shaq is somehow a revelation as a Heat.

Of course, despite its claim of being the "Worldwide Leader in Sports", ESPN is unbelievably myopic. It is based in Bristol, CT. This is really a town located between Boston and New York that is one-sixth the size of just the city of Anaheim. And yet, Orange County is treated like some tiny regional backwater in their content. That is partly a result of sheer regionalism at ESPN, but another aspect of the problem is that virtually the entire Northeast is growing much more slowly than the national average. As the population migrates out of these areas and into the sunbelt, they try to hold on to their regional identity. They become what I like to call the "Let's Go, YAN-KEES" Brigade after the disruptive Yankee fans at Angels games. They sit at Starbucks in Santa Monica with their Eagles hats sipping espresso and complaining about that lack of decent cheesesteak in California. Those people lead a lot of young people in Southern California to think that they do not like people from the Northeast. It turns out that they are perfectly fine in their native environment. One of the best baseball experiences of life was with my brother Doug at Fenway and it was the Red Sox fans around me that made it special. I always enjoy NYC and I have had great experiences in Buffalo, Philly, Baltimore and etc. Even a large percentage of the transplants are fine when they accept Southern California for what it is and assimilate. However, the "east-coast guy forced by weather to live on the west-coast" act wears very thin after a while. I just want to say to these people, "If the sports, the food, etc. is so bad here, then please feel free to leave. With our population growing at 13.8%, I am sure we can find someone who is willing to enjoy our fish tacos and sanguine sports culture."

Clearly, I am not totally alone in this type of frustration. The otherwise brilliant and very civil Susan Estrich just had a very public meltdown over Mike Kinsley using mostly male and east-coast writers in the Op-Ed section of the L.A. Times. Frankly, I am not sure what to do about it. Simmons and Kinsley are both otherwise totally commendable media-types. Protesting the creators of "Sports Guy World" and "Slate" respectively seems utterly self-defeating. It is like complaining about a weak episode of "Arrested Development", the only reason I saw it was that everything else they've done is so good that I make the time for it.

NBA All-Star blog, Q4

If the West wins, then Nash will be the MVP by creating in the open court with current & former team-mates. LeBron might just be the MVP of the East, that team is just better with him on the floor. Of course, they will probably give it Shaq instead.

Other than that, it is a stone boring 4th quarter.

Kobe is having fun playing defense on AI. The west shooters have gone cold as ice, so they have no chance to close the gap. Doug Collins started talking about the MVP with 9 minutes left, which tells you everything you need to know about how much drama there was.

Surprise, they gave the MVP Award to AI. The East won, but did not have a real stand-out. I guess it is the NBA way of saying 'thanks for not dying before your 30th birthday AI'. Anyway, he went out of his way to give Shaq props.

No 'Arrested Development' tonight, so I am not sure what I am going to do to get the sour taste out of my mouth. I guess that is why I have a DVD collection.

NBA All-Star blog, Q3

What is the point of all the country music at the NBA All-Star game? Was Outkast unavailable? Shouldn't half these people be at the Dayton 500? Leanne Rhymes at least can sing, but what is the deal with Big & Rich?

Kobe has taken a giant leap forward with his passing and play-making. Of course, he will have to average a triple-double over 82 games before the mainstream media (MSM) says anything. The MSM is all in the east, so the Lakers are an athema. The Kobe-Shaq feud and divorce was the best thing in the world for these guys, since it sent the likeable Shaq to the east and left Kobe to take the fall during the Lakers re-building era. Shaq clearly has endurance problems, but now that he is in the east it is love-feast. LeBron James would never have gotten this hyped as a Clipper. If you ever doubt this, just google for stories about the Patriots third-title and the Lakers third-title. It is not exactly a bias, but more a total laziness of reporting by the MSM. They know what they see in eastern time zone, so the west coast perspective cannot be any different. Look at the NFL. The Super Bowl TV ratings are down 4%, which is the fourth year in the last five that their showpiecec has declined. Most notably, ratings in the LA market are 14% under the national average (37.3 v 43.4). And yet we have no 'crisis in the NFL' stories. I cannot believe that it is an accident Northeastern US teams are doing well on the field and the league is presumed to be just fine. Whatever.

It is officially going to be a game. That probably favors the East a bit. You have got to assume the Poppavich will rest Duncan (and, therefore, Garnett) above all else in the 4th. SVG doesn't have the leverage to prevent Shaq from getting a bit more revenge if he wants it.

NBA All-Star blog, Q2

Ray Allen is putting together a nice game. He is in a contract year, so he may be viewing this an audition. Seattle is a team built to bust the zone defense with shooting to spare, but I am not sure why you let a guy like Allen go into the market.

Shaq is having some fun with the individual match-up with Yao Ming. Shaq and Yao bring out the best in each other in much the same T-Mac (or LeBron) does with Kobe. I feel a little cheated that I never got to see a 7-game series featuring the Shaq/Kobe Lakers against the Yao/T-Mac Houston Rockets. I'd be in the stands for every home game. That and never seeing re-match of the '02 Lakers v. Kings Western Conf. Finals are on the top of my sports regrets list.

Speaking of missed opportunities, how much better is Allen Iverson when he is playing alongside a quality Center? It is utterly absurd how well he is when playing off a quality big man. First with the pre-embalming Dikembe Mutumbo and with Shaq and Z, AI is just on another level when someone is taking up space down low.

NBA All-Star game blog, Q1

I am settling in with some chili from Firehouse and getting ready to watch the NBA All-Star game. I am reminded of last year's game, which proved to be the last great moment for Shaq in L.A. This is Shaq v. Kobe II, so the drama is a bit higher than normal. It is also LeBron James first All-Star appearance. LeBron was just interviewed alongside Grant Hill and could not have looked less comfortable. My guess is that at this stage Kobe Bryant would rather do a life after Shaq interview alongside Penny Hardaway. LeBron looks like it just occurred to him that something could go wrong on the road to being "the next Jordan". Given that the Slam Dunk contest was the first one in over a decade that didn't utterly stink, I am borderline fired up for the All-Star Game. Unfortunately, the tunnel that they have erected for the players to emerge from looks utterly absurd. My lovely wife Carolyn said that appears like "the most boring ride at Disneyland". The East players expressions all reflect that sentiment of utter boredom.

The West players look loose and happy for the most part. If those things matter, then this could be a massacre.

After watching the Lakers all season, the All-Star defense is not exactly shocking. I mean, it is not exactly the first time I've seen soft defense lead to dribble penetration and a score. Not that I think the Lakers would be so much better this season with Shaq. The Big Fella takes up a ton of space down low, but that only helps on one end of the floor. He still has some exceptional explosiveness and agility, but he clearly lost something. Steve Nash is making a much bigger difference on the floor. As fun as Nash has always been to watch, I never thought I'd say that.

What is Dodger tradition, exactly?

Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

The tumult of the Dodger off-season has given way to pitchers & catchers reporting. Which makes it a good time to publish my case study on the Dodgers.

Dodgers fans talk an awful lot about tradition. In particular, we talk about it when someone new to the organization does something we do not like. Depodesta had a strike against him when he arrived at Dodger Stadium. As the right-hand man to Billy Beane on the Oakland A's, Depodesta had appeared in 'Moneyball' as 'the guy with laptop'. A lot of the baseball press was dismissive out of hand. Depodesta was perceived as not connected to 'Dodger Tradition'. However, what does that really mean?

It occurred to me that the book 'Built to Last' by James Collins had a lot of insights into why the Dodgers were so successful in the years prior to the Fox purchase. Obviously, I am going to be returning to the Dodgers a lot, so it seems like a good exercise to step through the case of the pre-1997 Los Angeles Dodgers with an eye on Collins observations. There was a lot success against those benchmarks, but some notable failures:

1. Be a clock builder, not a time teller - Walter O'Malley (web-site) is a villain to a lot baby-boom era folks who grew up in and around NYC. However, he was also the prime mover in making baseball truly the national pastime. To the moment the Dodgers (and Giants) moved West MLB was a regional circuit confined to cities that mostly would have a net outflow of population. The Dodgers moved to a growing market, selected a prime piece of real estate on which to build and maintained that stadium meticulously for 40+ years. The result is a revenue machine that has passed through three owners.
2. Have a sense of purpose: a motive for the team - Former Dodger GM, Al Campanis, actually wrote a book called "The Dodger Way" that describes the motive of the team. Another former GM, Fred Claire, attempts to describe it briefly here, but it build down to continuity. Hard to imagine a better defined purpose than one that yields a book.
3. Articulate an ideology which is "more than profits" - The L.A. Dodgers of the O'Malley era was often listed as one of the 'Best companies to work for in America'. The family feeling of the team extended throughout the organization. Examples like the fact that Dodgers served ice-cream to all employees every-day the team was in first place give you a flavor of what the O'Malley family strove for.
4. Cult-like cultures - Both acquisitions of the Dodgers have resulted in floods of long-time employees leaving the organization over seemingly minor changes in the manner that the team does business. This powerful culture extends beyond the team itself and into the community through the media. Joe McDonald and Doug Krikorian conduct a daily mourning on local radio for the end of the O'Malley era.
5. Home-grown management - From 1954-1996 to the Dodger had two field managers. Tommy Lasorda was promoted from 3B coach to manager in 1979 and never worked for another team. From 1974-1997, the Dodgers had three Catchers as each was promoted from the farm system to replace the other. From 1973-1988, the Dodgers had two 2B. Both came from within the organization. In fact from 1974-'82, the Dodgers had the exact same infield and all had been promoted from within.
6. Try a lot of stuff and keep what works - The Branch Rickey era was a massive point departure for the Dodgers. Rickey was perhaps the most innovative General Manager in baseball history. His inventions include the Farm System and using statistics to make baseball decisions. Of course, Rickey was also the person who enabled Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier with the Dodgers. This had several massive effects beyond the obvious. Primarily, Rickey (an evangelical Christian) had linked Dodger baseball to a higher moral purpose. A major secondary effect was to change the way the Dodgers played. Robinson brought a vastly more advanced running game with him from the Negro Leagues that vaulted the Dodgers into the elite in the National League.
7. Good enough never is: force the team members out of their comfort zone - This is the great failing of the Dodger organization in the final days of the halcyon O'Malley era. The team attempted to plug new players into the old formula with mixed success. Eric Young was unable to control the game from the basepaths in the manner that Robinson, Maury Wills and Davey Lopes had in years past. Rather than revise the strategy, the O'Malley family sold to Fox. At that point, it transformed into a follower organization paying market rates for 'name' players (i.e. Kevin Brown, Devon White) and their competative advantage evaporated.
8. The end of the beginning: Translate core ideology into the fabric of the organization - This is another area in which the Dodgers declined after the Fox sale. The positioning of the Dodgers brand has remained virtually identical for my entire life. The key-stones of the brand are the continuity symbolized by Vin Scully, the family feeling of Dodger Stadium and the tradition of the whole mattering more than the parts personified by Tommy Lasorda. Nearly every element of what the Dodger brand meant became less and less true of the Dodger product in the period from '98-'04.
9. Preserve the core, stimulate progress - This is another area in which the O'Malley era far surpassed what followed. The Dodgers embraced the idea of growing the base of players from which MLB drew, not simply being the team of "Black America". This had both positive and negative effects. On the positive side of the ledger, the Dodgers were on the forefront of bringing Latin American (Fernando Valenzuela ) and Asian (Hideo Nomo)players to the major leagues. The negaitve side was the inability of the Dodgers to perceive the prejudice that existed within their own organization toward the abilities of blacks to perform in non-playing capacites. Al Campanis took the fall, but the poor record was there for everyone to see. Dusty Baker was not developed as a field manager withing the Dodger organization. Therefore, the best internal candidate to replace Tommy Lasorda was already gone by 1996. Therefore, that left in Fox in a position to misplay the next transition and let Mike Scioscia get away in 1999.
10. Set Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) - In this department, the Dodgers organization is without peer in sports. The NY Yankees hand their hat on setting out to win a championship every year, but even that run of success is a footnote next to the Dodgers. First, they broke the color barrier. Then, they made the sport truly the national past-time by moving west. Most recently, the Dodgers opened Asia as a source of major league talent. Huge, risky objectives that have generally paid off. Take the move West as an example. The Dodgers left behind the New York market and all that implies. They invested their own money in building a stadium 3,000 miles from what had been the center of the baseball world in the prior decade depending upon the then new technology of Jet Aircraft to make it work. The decision seems obvious in retrospect, since it vaulted the Dodgers to the top revenue group. At the time, the sheer number of things that could have caused it to fail (i.e. the Giants not joining them in the move) is staggering. It was a massive gamble based upon a vision of what could be by Walter O'Malley.

It is in this way that Paul DePodesta is the perfect fit for the GM role of the Dodgers. If you have read 'Moneyball', then you understand that DePodesta has set out to revolutionize the market for baseball players. In this way, he is more in keeping with the real traditions on which the Dodgers have been built than anything we have seen in quite some time.

Carolyn @ Diedrichs

Bonds, Steroids and some stats

This is the moment of the year during which I have me seven-year-old moment. Ever since '01 when I noticed that Barry Bonds looked very different than he used to, it has been the same. That part of me that is still a little innocent screams, "they are going to let him play? But, he is cheating!

This year is both better and worse. At least the story is in front of the public. The circumstantial evidence is strong enough to convince anyone who Johnnie Cochran wouldn't have excused from the OJ jury. His trainer ordered it, Bonds took delivery of it and admitted that he used it. However, his 'defense' is that he was to lazy to pay attention to what his flunkies were giving him. Oh, and that the steroids did not have any effect on his play anyway. Neither of those two arguements are remotely credible. I will address them in order:

1. The presumption that Bonds was just taking whatever his trainer gave him is a direct appeal to the most negative sterotype of black pro athletes. That is the belief that they are simply 'gifted' and that they do not really need to work in the traditional sense to achieve in sports. Bonds is assuming that the general public assumes that he just picked up a bat, started hitting and did what the coaches told him to do. It is blatantly cynical and assumes the absolute worst about the state of race relations in 21st Century America. It assumes the athlete is a passive vessel that is controled by outside forces. To the extent that white sport writers (like Skip Bayless) find this convincing is utterly depressing. More to the point, Bonds was the common point of contact for virtually every other player under investigation. Gary Sheffield was given steroids by Bonds, when Sheffield came to Bonds looking for help. Benito Santiago was on his Giants team, so was Marvin Bernard. Do you really think these guys were going to risk their careers and health on the word of Bonds trainer?
2. The second defense assumes broad-based stupidity, as opposed to racism. Baseball stats are the most abundant and widely understood of all sports. Bonds had an utterly normal career arc for the majority of his career. He improved a great deal in the first 2-3 years, he peaked in his Age 27 season and began to decline in his early 30s. While his on-base numbers remained great, the slugging percentage began to decline. This is exactly what happens to the vast majority of hitters. Suddenly, the errosion halted and reversed itself. Bonds had career highs in HRs in his age 34 & 35 seasons, which are when most players are nearing the end of their careers. Those are also the years that he was signing for packages from Balco.

Bonds 73-HR season at age 35 was also a contract year. Since that year, he has pocketed $48 million from the contract he signed after the '01 season. Maybe I am missing something, but isn't that what is more commonly known as fraud? How is what Bonds and Jason Giambi did any different from taking money to fix a game, other than Bonds cut a better deal than the Black Sox?

Yet, baseball is going to trot these guys out on Opening Day.

NHL '05

The only NHL action, this year

The National Hockey League canceled its entire season today after a 100-odd day lock-out. Somewhere, Bud Selig is moping his brow and thanking God that he is no longer the definative villan of the pro sports landscape. NHL Comish, Gary Bettman, has snatched that poison chalice from his hand. The issues are very similar to the baseball strike of '94 that wiped out the World Series for the first time a hundred years. Owners want 'cost certainty' in the form of a salary cap and the players would prefer a freer market. Unlike baseball, neither side is taking a truly hard stance. The union has come off its refusal of a cap and the owners showed willingness to flex on tying the cap to league revenues. There seemed to be room to negotiate, until the very last moment.

Frankly, I was a bit surprised that the NHL chose to cancel the season. The sides had agreed on the philosophical issues and had submitted 'final' cap numbers that were not that far apart (Owners - $42.5 million, Players - $49 million).

From negotiation stand-point, it seems that the NHL has taken a step backwards not forward. In the post-event news cycle, Bettman seems creepily pleased with himself. It is almost like he has proven something by making the worst labor negotations move in pro sports history. The union chief, Bob Goodenow, seems less like a bitter veteran of labor wars than a under-prepared lawyer in the case of his life. The small difference on substance and the out-sized results lead me to believe that it really is a case in which the principle negotiators were incompetent. Beyond that, I have a few thoughts:

• The NHL has said since the beginning that 20 teams are losing money every season and that 19 of them lose less money by not playing. It always seemed to me that the cancellation of the season would be the proof of that assertion. The players have very little leverage with the owners in that case. If 66% of owners would rather wait for the deal they want, then they will get the deal they want one way or another. Baseball had a much lower percentage of screwed up franchises.
• It was only about 10 years ago that the NHL was "the fastest growing sport in America". Everyone was praising the players for being down-to-earth and accessible. In other words, the media were saying about hockey exactly what they are saying about NASCAR now. The seeds of the current problem were already in place (i.e. over-expansion), but that was not the story-line of the day. So, take the 'no one cares about the lock-out' and 'the NHL is dead' stories with a large grain of salt.
• The NHL would probably be well-served by an NFL-type system of a hard cap and no gurantees on contracts. The sports are similar with their injury risks, so the players would not be begrudged a big-time contract. The core NHL fan-base is blue collar and Northeastern. Those things resonate.
• The NHL will probably never be a big TV sport in the U.S. The product is easily 10-times more exciting in person than on TV. The speed of the game is impossible to perceive on TV. The action is continous, so there are no natural breaks. It is almost the opposite of the NFL in this way. There are no stops to replay a big play from 2-3 angles, so it seems like less is happening. In person, it is exactly the opposite. This caps revenues, until technology changes.
• It is a massive waste of an opportunity in Southern California. We never saw kids playing football in the street until after this years Orange Bowl. However, we saw kids (8-12 year olds) playing street hockey all the time. The Anaheim Ducks did that along with the NFL moving to St. Louis. That fan-base is going to be around for the next fifty years, so alienating them is probably not a great idea.

Urban In-Fill

Main Street at 3,590 ft

Here is a case study in urban in-fill currently occuring our Orange County. Huntington Beach, CA is currently in the midst of renovating an extensive section of its waterfront in the 'dowtown' area. Like most Southern California 'beach towns', the higher income population has primarily aggregated toward the water-front area as seen in this map. However, the city core is a waterside promenade called Main Street that is both renter-occupied and more densely populated than the area immediately to the north along the waterfront. Over the past 10 years extensive efforts have been made to renovate the retail character of the area by adding restaurants and attempting to extend the area up Pacific Coast Highway to Beach Blvd. This has included adding two name-brand, resort-type hotels (a Hilton and Hyatt) that have a total of 741 guest rooms.

Now comes another retail project called The Strand, which is designed to encourage walking between the resorts to the south with Main Street to the North. It will also add an additional 200-plus hotel rooms to the area.

The clear model is Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, which offers a water-front utterly dominated by large resort style hotels and a downtown dominated by the guests of those hotels. The retail mix of the proposed retail area is mid-range end, but they stand in sharp contrast with the surf & beach stores that are the core of main streets current business.

On the balance of trade

My lovely wife is studying her "Wills, Trusts & Estates" after an abnormally heavy retail day for us, so I have few minutes to share some thoughts. The balance of trade is something that I have been curious about lately. You get the gross number on the news and the over-all directionality. However, you never really hear it broken down. So, I decided to take an hour and break it down myself.

If you look at the this chart from B.E.A., then you will see the nature of the challenge. U.S. exports rose 17% from Q1 of '03 through Q3 of '04, but not as fast as the imports (19% over the same period) and the imports started at a higher number. In marketing terms this means that the United States is losing share in the global economy. The question is why. The glib answer is that the United States has labor costs relative to emmerging economies. It is true that China grew 65% during the period we are examining. However, China grew from a fairly small base and their enormous growth accounts for only 33% of the difference. The fact is that every region except Australia and Latin America have grown relative to the U.S.

If you look at this graph, then you will see that in '03 two related industries accounted for 26% of our total imports. Those industries are petroleum and non-rail vehicles. If those two industries stopped importing tomorrow, then the trade deficit would fall by 2/3rds. Non-rail vehicles were also a signifcant (9%) piece of our global exports in '03, but those exports were only 36% the dollar value of the imports. The best solution to fixing the trade deficit problem and heading off the adverse consequences of a weak dollar (such as inflationary pressures) is to fix our competative problems in the energy and vehicle segments. Moreover, the more imported petroleum we consume, the more money goes into the pockets of folks like the Saudi Royal Family.

This where I break from pure laissez faire capitalism.

If you have a problem that involves trade with Nation-States that are deeply inter-linked with an industry, then what sense does it make to leave our corporations to compete on their own? The Japanese Keiretsu benefited a great deal from a government that took an active interest in their growth in heavy industry and allowed them to co-operate. This hardly some quirk Japanese culture. John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil by finding ways to 'co-operate' in his industry. T.R. Roosevelt broke up this type anti-competative arangement, but he did it by nudging pro-social business in directions behind the scenes and using the threat of the courts. None of that is pure, market-driven capitalism and it carried the United States upward from third-world status. I am not clear what the point leaving business completely on its own is, except to maintain our 'honor' and/or 'values'. To my ear, the type of language about international competition coming from the modern conservative is that of an overly principled loser.

Seriously, what is the point complaining to the refs about their calls on those occasions when the game is being called the same way on both ends of the floor?

The U.S. economy is being harmed by petroleum consuming vehicles. The U.S. Government controls the rules of inter-state commerce and foreign trade. Maybe it is time that we changed the rules to unfairly benefit domestic industry, while nudging that industry behind the scenes to do business in a more pro-social (i.e. non petroleum dependent) way. I hate to keep beating on public transit, but the federal government also has a huge carrot in the form of Highway Funding to encourage state and local governments to limit sprawl and improve public transit systems. That is how the 21-year-old drinking age happened and this has a far more direct correlation.

Of course, the U.S. auto industry prefers the status quo. They may be losing share, but at least they are familiar with the game. They roll-out new body types every year and blame the unionized work-force for their problems with global competition. It has been that way since I was a child. So, they donate heavily to the Republicans, who are supposed to undermine the union and make their product cheaper. Maybe it will work, but it hardly seems like a 'win/win' solution.

Viva Los Cohibas

Viva Los Cohibas

Do news cycles get much worse than this last one?

First, we get news that the unstable and paranoid Kim Jong Il not only has nuclear weapons, but also rockets that could deliver them to the Western U.S. It is not like I live anywhere near a major U.S. City on the west coast, or anything. The good news is supposed to be that it appears that North Korea lacks the software to combine the two. Which is supposed to make us feel better becuase good software coders in Asia are so hard to come by. Naturally, the US is taking a hard-line that we will not talk to North Korea outside the 6-party framework and no explanation about why we made that decision. It is always nice to know a madman has access to atomic weapons, ICBMs and that we are provoking him. Add to that the death of Arthur Miller and the on-going collapse of the Lakers and there is not much on a macro-level to feel perky about.

My response was to smoke one of the cigars my lovely wife Carolyn gave me for Christmas, which put me in mind of better days and how much for which I am grateful in my own life.

Game Theory

Witold Rybczynski has a new piece on slate.com today about the Disney town of Celebration, now a decade old. Rybczynski is the author of the book Home: A Short History of an Idea, which was one of the texts used during the design of the original version of The Sims. The book was a very quick read, but full of great insights. It talks in a very interesting way about how people have come to configure their living spaces the way they have and the effect of things like light on the comfort people feel. His short piece started me thinking about several things:

1. The influence of Disney's Celebration upon the planned communities that we are being built today. For example, look at this description of "the village of Woodbury", here in lovely Irvine, CA. The plans call for a variety of types of homes (ranging from condos to million-dollar McMansions). That diversity of income levels is a key feature of nearly every new housing tract that was introduced with Celebration. The focus upon creating a walkable space is also derived from there as well. However, (at least in Southern California) the planners seemed to have missed the key element of creating somewhere to walk to in the community plan. I mean, setting houses forward on their lots to encourage interaction among neighbors is great, but if you have got to get into a car to reach the Post Office it does not matter much. Of course, appealing mass transit like the Centerline would have helped, but it was not to be.
2. I was also reminded of the completely crack-like the game play of the original version of 'The Sims'. I am a big believer of games generally. It is an interesting exercise to attempt to model a mode of thinking, then experiment within that model. All great games are to one degree, or another, models of some mode of thinking. For example, Chess is an abstract war game. Poker focuses upon a players ability to conceal information and induce your opponents to revealing information. 'The Sims' was designed by Will Wright as an architectual simulator, in much the same way that 'SimCity' was designed as a zoning simulator. The addictive component of the gameplay was how open-ended it was. My brother Doug and I spent countless hours designing houses and watching to see how the sims interacted with their surroundings.

The manner in which Wright and the folks at Maxis modeled human behavior within a home is interesting. They gave their characters human necessities like 'hunger' and a 'bladder'. They then assigned different objects with different utilities for those necessities. The objects then 'call' to the characters based upon their utilites. However, there are almost always trade-offs. For example, if you improve your 'hunger' utility, it will harm your 'bladder'. In essense, the game is an exercise in decision theory. The virtual characters are trying to maximize their outcomes based upon utility, need and distance. The net effect is almost eerie in how it reflects actual human behavior.

The amazing thing about games like this is that if they model the particular behavior well enough, they change how you view your life. Playing chess forces you to plan not just the move you are making, but think about how this sets up future moves. Think about how it influences the language of strategic planning. Poker does the same thing in inter-personal relationships. Well, 'The Sims' gets into your brain in exactly the same manner. First, the notion of having actions in a queue that meet various needs is powerful one. Second, it forces you to think about flow and utility in your lving space. If you are remotely like me, then this discipline will be brand new. Third, you might not come to the game with definite ideas about best-practices in home design, but you will leave with a few.

Build Mode

What is probably more interesting is manner in which our inner lives is modeled and how they relate to our built spaces. The simulated people in 'The Sims' are densely woven into their social fabrics. This is represented in the game almost like Friendster where networks radiant outward. The simulated people have social needs that are filled by either contacting people they know, or interacting in essentially random social interactions. In heavily suburban Amerca (like Orange County, CA) the random social contact is fairly rare. Whole businesses (i.e. Starbucks) have sprung up trying to create an elusive 'Third Space' between home and work. To the extent they done this it is very profitable. What Celebration recognized and 'The Sims' acknowledged is a very human desire for that essentially random contact. Neighborhoods people feel passionate about (like, Balboa Island in Newport Beach) tend to be far denser than your average suburb. This is because the street is the "Third Space" that Starbucks charges you for. It makes you wonder how a place like Woodbury is going to turn out.

The Oscars and the Culture War

The Aviator

Now that the Super Bowl is over, the Academy Awards hype machine can begin in earnest. As I have gotten older, I have come to care about the Oscars less and less. For one thing, in retrospect they seem to get it wrong way more often than the they get it right. Try this as an exercise, take out a piece of paper and list your ten favorite movies of the '90s. By this I mean the 10 movies a friend could select from at random and you would sit, watch the whole thing again and not be embarassed. For me, the list reads something like this:

1. Pulp Fiction
2. Swingers
3. Last of the Mohicans
4. The Grifters
5. Miller's Crossing
6. Ride with the Devil
7. Unforgiven
8. Saving Private Ryan
9. The Player
10. Boogie Nights

There are a more than a few honorable mentions and guilty pleasures, but I can live with that list. You know how many 'Best Picture' Oscar winners are on that list? One. I think there is only one major award winner in that group. Let's try the next ten:

1. Heat
2. Goodfellas
3. Fight Club
4. T2: Terminator 2
5. Silence of the Lambs
6. The Last Days of Disco
7. Clerks
8. The Matrix
9. Rounders
10. Desperado

Again the number of 'Best Picture' winners is one-for-ten. The total number of nominations is well below the Mendoza Line. Trust me the batting average only gets worse from here as we get deeper into the Indie film and uber-blockbuster terrain that is the list from this point onward. It is not like they gave Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Kicking & Screaming or Living in Oblivion any awards. Shakespeare in Love is probably still in the Top 25, but I did not like Forrest Gump (nor Braveheart) very much in retrospect. That's a .125 batting average for me and I'd guess it is close to the same for most folks. So, it is hard for me to get to worked up about the results of what is essentially a big P.R. event for the film industry. This is an event designed to encourage the adult film-going public to get out and watch movies after the kids return to school. The nominees are a checklist of movies the studios think we might enjoy.

The good news is this year seems logically to be the year of Martin Scorcese. The Aviator would have a hard time cracking 'career Top 5' list, but that is hardly a critcism. After the mortal locks category (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull & Goodfellas), you have my personal favorite of The Last Temptation of Christ. That leaves one slot in the Top 5 for either The Aviator, The Color of Money, or Casino. Any of those would be #1 on the list for 99% of the film-makers working. If you are talking about currently working film-makers, only Spielberg, Coppola and Robert Altman have as many as five movies on that level. In classic Academy Awards fashion, Scorcese does not yet have an Oscar. Given his career, awarding him a bunch of Oscars would raise the credibility of the institution for more than it would his. This is essentially a mirror of the Schindler's List arguement for Spielberg. The guy has been playing at an MVP-level for decades, but he has never won the award. Maybe this is not his best season, but no one can argue with it either. Seeing Scorcese accept the 'Best Director' and 'Best Picture' awards would make the lengthy slog of the awards show worthwhile.

The bad news is that Scorcese is not running unopposed. Clint Eastwood has made the amazing leap from semi-cheesy 70s action star to another perennial MVP candidate as a film-maker. He has an incredibly depressing movie out in Million-Dollar Baby. This is the more shocking of the two films, since it has a dark plot twist. The critics, of course, love it. Eastwood has already won the Oscar for his masterpiece, Unforgiven. However, that is not an official criteria for voting against him.

What is more problematic is that the culture warriors are looking for Hollywood blood after their pet movie (The Passion of the Christ) got snubbed. Somehow, or another, geniuses like Michael Medved decided the left-winger of the year was Clint Eastwood. This means there is a really good reason to vote for Eastwood's movie. Look, Medved is a guy who went Yale Undergrad (and Yale Law School), yet refers to other people in his chosen profession derisively as the 'elite'. In other words, the guy is a bitter failure, since people who have those things on their resume by 25 ought to be making the decisions. He makes what I assume is a decent living bitching about the values of the people who now hold the jobs to which he once aspired. We have all been guilty of this to one degree, or another. It is human nature. However, to define your entire career by it is bizzare to me. That said, people like Medved always need something new about Hollywood to scandalized about. The debate threatens to become the centerpiece of the run-up to the awards as Roger Ebert has now fired back. With Farenheit 9/11 also out the running for the Oscars, the conservative flaks had to start looking for another example of the alledged 'liberal bias' in the media business to keep their audiences in an uproar (and tuned-in). Apparently, Clint is now advocating sin by playing a character who commits a sin and goes unpunished. Why this never comes up when Mel Gibson makes fantasies about murdering the press, I am bit foggy on.

Oh, that's right ... Gibson pandered to the conservative base this year and made a ton of money doing it. Maybe if Eastwood makes a movie in which Dirty Harry returns but now as Born-Again and haunted by guilt from shooting an abortion Doctor until a spunky 12-year-old teaches a valuable lesson, then Medved could get behind him as an artist again. Whatever, I am just tired of the outrage-a-thon. Clowns like Medved would be unemployed if their audience was not pissed off virtually all the time.

The problem is that targeting the media business as an example of what wrong with America is bit perverse. The media is currently the number two export industry in the U.S. The number one export industry is Aerospace, which receieves heavy R&D subsidies in the form of defense contracts. Given our Current Accounts Deficit a logical question would be not "how can we fix Hollywood's values?", but "how can we make the rest of American business more like Hollywood?" Of course, that would require the 'Pro Business' party to ask what left-coast liberals are doing right. The Republicans cannot ask those questions because they are trapped into the culturally conservative positions they are forced to take to get elected at a national level. The culture warriors are not just poisoning the political climate in America, but they are deliberately attempting to limit the questions we can ask in public about where to go from here as a society. It is a very real threat to the sort of 'outside-the-box' thinking that enabled America to rise in the first place.

If I recall correctly, that was not so very far from the theme of The Aviator. Maybe Scorcese has made the movie of the moment after all.

Super Bowl, Q4

Dillon just made me look pretty smart with that little touchdown run.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the Bill Clinton story is not quite over. With no one else in the Democratic Party with credentials, it seems like the only thing holding back from running for President again is the Constitution. That would be funnier if the Republicans were not so in love with the idea re-writting our founding document for the reason du jour (i.e. Ah-Nuld). More to the point, Clinton seems to be everwhere. He made a bit pf money on the book, so he is free to move around, network and plot his next move. He is always talking to these guys who made their fortune while he was in the White House. Listening to their advice and thinking. You know he has something in mind, it just a matter of what.

The commercials always suck in the fourth quarter. The fear of a blow-out leading to huge tune-out means the advertisers lead with their best stuff. I mean, how many times can they pitch "American Idol"? That show always makes me feel like I live in a foreign country. I cannot imagine a context in which I would watch an episode and yet it is hugely popular. I guess it just an example of the difference between the old broadcasting model and the emmerging narrowcasting model.

On the other hand, has there been a more influential movie than the "Original Kings of Comedy"? Those guys seem to be everywhere. The Cedric the Entertainer spots for Budweiser are getting a bit stale, but still he has had that gig for, like, three years. Bernie Mac is headed for superstardom. He carried a pretty crappy movie in Mr. 3000, so it seems like just a matter of time before he makes the leap.

McNabb is a pretty good QB, but I am starting to think that he not the guy you want leading your team. I hated his response to throwing that INT. The tap on your chest & 'my bad' head-shake is fine if you are in a regular season game, or in the lead by 1o pts. But, behind by 10 in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl? That doesn't seem like a great message to extend to your guys. It is starting to look like Mike Vick will be the first running QB to win a title. It is too bad McNabb doesn't have the personality to cram Rush Limbaugh's comments down his throat.

Well, the last play was an INT thrown by McNabb to Rodney Harrison. Probably the most predictable play in the history of sports. It was coming all game long.

Oh well ... a boring Super Bowl, but on to a good T.V. evening. Thanks to TiVo we have 'Unscripted' on HBO.

Super Bowl, Q3

Ok, is Pro Football watching been correlated to impotence, or what?

Seriously, the cheesy Cialis spots are all over the Super Bowl. If there is a correlation, then let me know and I'll stop watching right now. The Career Builder spots with monkeys are pretty good. It is a really good way of delivering the message in a semi-subtle way. The "War of the Worlds" spot did its job, since I have decided to see the movie. Looking back, I have idea what it was about (other than bad aliens v. Tom Cruise), but it seemed sort of excititng. The 'Thank You' add

The Eagles and the Pats both seem to playing their respective offensive games. The first half was defense vs. defense. This Quarter has been all about both offenses doing what they do well (i.e. the Eagles hitting little screen passes and the Pats banging away with Dillon & extending the field with Brady). The Pats defense has looked pretty good and has had a few big plays. However, the Patriots have let the Eagles hang in with mistakes. The Pats penalties are the story so far. Well, that and Terrell Owens and the Hyperbaric Chamber. Seriously, is there any way to buy stock in this technology? Owens looks totally unaffected by the injury.

That said, my money is on the Pats despite the 14-14 tie. They are running on the Eagles defense with both Dillon and Faulk. Pretty hard to win the Super Bowl when you are giving up chunks of yards on the ground.

Super Bowl, Q2

Well, both offenses put together nice drives and scored. During the Eagles drive I was thinking of the Sports Guy who gave notes on how to beat the Pats defense. The Eagles did exactly what was suggested during the drive (i.e. improvise, test the Pats deep, et al). Just when you think this is going to be the 'Jump the Shark' moment for the Pats dynasty, Tom Brady and Corey Dillon put together a huge drive. 7-7 game going into the half.

The highlight of the commercials had to be the Batman Begins spot. Christian Bale appears to be awesome casting as Batman. The movie appears to be everything that Batman & Robin wasn't. Maybe more important it looks like it isn't everything that movie was (in other words incredibly gay).

Otherwise, the Brad Pitt Heinken spot was clever. Pitt is one of the more self-aware celebrities around and he makes great choices with how to use his image. The NFL spot was fairly interesting, but nothing to write home about.

Super Bowl, Q1

Well, I watched the Lakers v. Rockets and fliped it over to the Super Bowl.

My lovely wife Carolyn is upstairs studying, so I kind of got into the game. Doug has the better game watching position, since he is at the home of the Jeff Thomason's brother, Randy. That is apparently the Maxim Party of So. Cal. McNabb looked awful in the first quarter. He was the subject of the dumbest remark to this point. Someone in the booth (I am afraid it was Aikman)actually said McNabb's mistakes are not a result of bad judgement. Ummm ... what was the definition of a 'mistake' again? McNabb is pumped up and trying to force things a bit too much. The New England defense is going to have some big plays in this one.

The highlight commercials so far have both been from Diet Pepsi spots. I would rate the P.Diddy spot slightly ahead of the "Saturday Night Fever" spot. The whole 'P. Diddy as trend setter' thing is such a cliche that it is funny. Soemhow they got Carson Daly, since he is exactly the pathetic 'follower guy'. In the other spot, it was nice to see Cindy Crawford again. There are not a lot of angles to play if you are just hot (i.e. can't sing, dance, or act) and she played all of them. For the most part she played them well, so she wasn't someone I was eager to get rid of in the first place. The guy from 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' was the perfect topper. The only other noteworthy comercial was the FedEx/Kinkos ad that featured Burt Reynolds. I am a sucker for meta-ads, though.

Carolyn and our trusty Borzoi, Mika

Mika was apparently the Dog of the Day on March 13th, 2004. Here are the posts she received as a response. Neither Carolyn, nor I, have won any awards in the past year. I am not sure that I want to know what that says.

The End of the Centerline

I was in Starbucks this morning waiting to get my hair cut and looked down at the O.C. Register. The Register has got to be one of the worst newspapers in America, so I rarely read it unless I am in line at a Starbucks. However, the lead item was about the likely end of the Centerline Light Rail project. This has been a local debate that has raged for several years, but I have never quite been able to fathom the opppostion to it. Local Republican flaks are adamant in their opposition (as seen in this Hugh Hewitt article), but the why is never clear. My best guess is that it was proposed by the only truly popular local Democrat, Larry Agran. Agran is the guy who scuttled the El Toro International Airport by advancing Measue W. This saved property values in the north part of Irvine (home to those newly million dollar homes) at the expense of the people in Newport Beach who do not like driving to LAX so they can fly to Paris. However, an awful lot of those folks are in the development business anyway and stand to make a ton of money from developing El Toro as a mixed residential/commercial site.

Anyway, the public arguments against the Centerline was a classic of the Republican playbook (i.e. it will cost money) and was apparently effective.

What is interesting is that the arguements for the Centerline were hardly straight out of a piece of Sierra Club propaganda. There would be a likely positive impact upon pollution, but that is hardly the best reason for the Centerline. Look at the proposed route. It runs through the working class neighborhood of Santa Ana and arrives at John Wayne Airport. The airport area is a business district with a lot of mid-rise commercial building that is aging a bit. The other end is a Metrolink station that connects the line to the rest of Southern California. This would have created an opportunity for some transit-oriented development along a corridor of property that is not exactly blighted, but is not headed in a great direction. It would increase the desirability of the commercial space, the usefulness of the airport and give local developers a chance to do some urban in-fill (i.e. knock down some older buildings and covert the land to a higher use). Who loses in this scenario exactly?

From a quality of life perspective, a persons first exposure to new urbanism is almost always a paradigm shift. If you are young and single, then you want an area that combines medium density multi-family residential with highly targeted retail and easy access to work. Nothing like that remotely exists in Orange County. However, all those things tend to aggregate around transportation corridors that are served by light rail. This is one of the core principles of marketing an area to Generation Y and yet these "representatives of business people"scuttle it.

All this goes back to the theme of the conservative backlash that brought the G.O.P. to power leading the Republican Party away from being 'the party of the business-class' and toward being the 'the party of people bound by tradition'. Those things are very nearly exact opposites. Growth is almost by definiton change. As a person ages from a child to an adult, they become very different. They are 'growing' in the sense of becoming larger, but they are also chaging in physical sense to create that change. You can extend that biological model to a community as it grows. The requirments of a large city are different from a small, or a mid-sized, one. I love the 'sleepy beach town on steroids' quality of Newport as much as anyone (probably more than anyone), but you don't need to sacrafice that. No one is talking about running light rail down the peninsula. When they tore out the Pacific Electric Red Car that was probably the end of that. However, to create job growth in an area with really high property values, density has got to increase somewhere. If you are going to compete effectively with other metro areas for talented young professionals, then you need to provide them with a 'hip downtown' area amid the suburban sprawl. You do not need to get a passport to see this at work, just go to Washington DC. Or better yet, ride the DART deep in the heart of Red State Texas.

Frankly, the only flaw in the Centerline from my perspective was that it did not go far enough. They should run the thing from John Wayne airport to the Pond (or better yet Downtown Disney) in Anaheim.

NFL in L.A.

It has become kind of an annual event.

Paul Tagliabue does his 'state of the NFL' speech and mentions the possible retrun of pro football to the L.A. market. This year produced little in the way of news, just the same stuff we have been hearing for 10 years. To recap:

• The NFL wants to return to L.A.
• They have a date for the return waaayyyy in the future (it was 2008, now probably '09)
• There are several locations that are still viable contenders.

This little sliver of hope that Tagliabue always holds out is the height of my interest in the NFL for the year. The only reason I have any idea what is happening in the NFL anymore is the existence of Madden '05 and my fantasy football league. I rarely watch in season NFL football on T.V. My brother Doug and I have been to a few S.D. Chargers games. The play-offs barely register for me . By the Super Bowl, I hardly care. I have a watched some of the interesting ones (i.e. Tampa v. Raiders, Denver v. Green Bay), but it really is not a big deal to me anymore. Last year, my wife and I assumed the crowds would be light during the Super Bowl, so we went to see Big Fish instead and I did not feel like I had missed a thing. It is just hard for me to follow a sport when I don't have a team. I followed a few teams over the years (the Parcells-era Patriots, the Chargers this year), but it never takes. My lovely wife Carolyn probably hopes to convert me to a Dallas Cowboy fan, but they were a rival of my L.A. Rams. That makes it a harder than average switch.

So, the only NFL news that I really care about is in the week before the Super Bowl.

Tagliabue holds out his carrot and the L.A.-based Media jumps after it. There are the "do you really care?" segments on talk radio, that are always over-run by transplants. These people claim to be perfectly happy, since they can get their favorite cold-weather teams games and do not want the black-outs. The local newspapers run down the familiar list of potential stadium sites (Coliseum, Rose Bowl, Carson and the wild card du jour). Sometimes, we even get leaks that indicated that an unhappy NFL owner is looking at L.A. as a place to move their franchise. Over the years, we have been flirted with and discarded by the Seahawks, Colts and Vikings for sure. Probably there are several others that I am forgeting about. For a while, it would get me excited. I would look at the stadium plans and try to figure the soonest team x could get out its lease. Anymore, I barely care.

Los Angeles is not like most of these NFL markets. First, they will be competing for fans with real, tradition-rich pro franchises. Jacksonville may be a lovely place, but the Jaguars are the only game in town for the corporate event dollar. Second, if the team is crappy in November, then you can always go to the beach (or Disneyland, or skiing, or to a concert, or to a plush outdoor mall, or ...). The Rams failed to provide a compelling entertainment option, so they moved to someplace where there was nothing else to do. Third, people in L.A. have pretty high standards for public facilities. In 2000, I spent a summer working on a project in NYC. Of course, I went to a game at Yankee Stadium. I was shocked at how inferior the building was to Dodgers Stadium. That is true of most of the ballparks I have visited. Only PNC Park in Pittsburgh and Camden Yards in Baltimore are on the same level. Trust me, no one will be driving to South-Central L.A. to see the L.A. Coyotes (or whatever) in Coliseum unless they tear 90% of the damn thing down, re-build it and put in a light rail (and a TON of high security parking). If that is the route they are planning on going, then they had better hire Rudy Gulliani to head up Coliseum comission. Either that, or go all in and bring the Raiders back. The 'SC Trojans can sell out that building as is with affluent folks, but no one else can.

Period.

For one thing, the experience at the college football games I have gone to far exceeds the NFL games I have attended. The NFL cannot just move some random team and replicate the experience of the UCLA-USC game, nor the Dodgers v. Giants, nor the Lakers v. Kings of a few years ago. You cannot create the great stuff in sports from scratch. Rivalries evolve over decades. Stadiums acquire character only after great players have played there. A real fan base does not just appear when you print up some hats and t-shirts. Despite what everyone says, just winning does not quite do it either. Watch and see how Arizona D'Back hats you see over the next 4-5 years. All that stuff takes time.

Frankly, I am 37 years-old. It would be hard for me to really get into another sports team at this point. The window for me to be an NFL fan is sort of closing and I just barely care. If hockey can come back in any semblance of itself, then the window may just snap shut. My wife and I went to far more NHL games than anything else from '01-'04. It is her favorite sport, so it is a really easy way for me to be a good husband. The NFL screwed up badly out here. They have pretty much lost guys like me and the next generation does not even have them on the radar. You see some 'SC jerseys now, but I went YEARS without seeing two kids playing touch football in the street. It was all basketball, baseball and hockey. That is your fan base of the future and they have checked out. NFL apologists will tell you that they are just without L.A. Check out the population trends in the Northeast sometime. Compare them to California.

Then, tell me you are fine.

Konichiwa, Norihiro ...

New Dodgers 3B Norihiro Nakamura


The L.A. Dodgers just signed Orix Buffaloes third-baseman Norihiro Nakamura to a contract, likely sparing us a full season of Jose Valentin at 3B. Nakamura has been limited by injury the last couple seasons and (at 31) is no kid. However, it is one-year minor league contract and the guy has some short-term upside. Mostly, he is a pure Moneyball player. Given that Japanese stats are thought be (essentially) Triple-A stats, there is a lot to be positive about a healthy Nakamura. His career OBP is .366, but he has been closer to .400 in recent years. He also has some power, since his career best OPS was 1.064. For perspective, last season Beltre posted a career-best OPS of 1.017. That does not mean that I would not rather have Beltre back. Trust me, I would like nothing better.

However, the short-term future of the Dodgers just got a bit clearer and a bit brighter. Now I just need to buy an Orix Buffaloes throw-back jersey for Opening Day.

Goodbye, Rudy Tomjanovich

So much for the fantasy of Rudy T recruiting Yao ...

I got a voicemail last night from my buddy Brian asking if had heard Rudy T was resigning as the coach of the Lakers (and reminding me that there are plenty of good seats still available on the Clippers bandwagon). After all the drama of the past 18 months with the Lakers, the news hardly made an impact. For the most part, I just Rudy well. He appears to be decent guy, who gets along well with his players. Moreover, he gave one of the greatest sports quotes of all time while with the Rockets, "Never underestimate the heart of a champion". Maybe that is part of why his leaving didn't sting, the guy was the face of another franchise. Just like Jerry West being with another did not seem right, Rudy T as a Laker was like a bear on a unicycle. It may have been impressive, but it just did not seem right. Watching Rudy T coach the Lakers these past few months enabled me to learn why the folks in Houston loved him. However, I never really felt much attachment myself.

Worst of all, he was the polar opposite of the man he replaced. Phil Jackson is cold and manipulative. By the time he got to Staples Center, he considered the bulk of his work to be done. If something wasn't working, then Jackson crossed his legs and got an expression that said "too bad they didn't pay attention in practice". Rudy T was the other end of the spectrum. The offense was always a work in progress to find what made the players happiest. He asked, listened and adapted. In game situation, Rudy T did everything short of ripping off his suit and grabbing a rebound. His Lakers team had that same scrappy, shaggy dog quality that might have grown on the fan base over time. However, Rudy T did not give himself the time. Rather, he felt pressure to win NOW. The Lakers were in the midst of their first re-building year in over a decade and Rudy T was trying to coax the mis-matched cast to the next level. How do you not admire that quality?

In the end, the problem with hirng Rudy T was exactly the reason the Lakers did it. It was a move that was all about the Rockets and what he meant in that place. You heard fans murmuring about him luring the Rockets center, Yao Ming to L.A. The Lakers front office talked about him recently winning championship, as though this made their extreme make-over a lower beta move. Rudy T seemed like the only person who understood that he couldn't take Houston with him to the Lakers. All he had was his considerable savy as a basketball coach and the heart of a champion. Apparently, the stress of using those traits to try to quickly restore a dynasty was too much stress.

I wish him the best and hope his health recovers.

The Lakers are already looking to what comes next. In the biggest ironic twist of recent memory, what comes next might be what came last. The Lakers brain trust (Dr. Buss, Mitch Kupchak and Kobe) sat down after the resignation and thought over who would be best for the team. I guess it shouldn't be a shock (given that Kobe asked Rudy T to add elements of the Triangle Offense back to the Laker play-book), but the name on the top of their minds was Phil Jackson . Jackson has already been contacted while on vacation Australia with Luc Longley. (Re-read that last sentence by the way, isn't the image of Phil Jax on the beach with Longley sort of bizzare in and of itself?) Jackson has been quoted as saying that he "going over the idea in his mind". In other words, he has been offered the job and he is trying to come up with a list of conditions that would get him to accept it. Given that the Laker talent (and salary cap) situation is far better than the New York Knicks, so that 10th Ring is possible. Better still from Jackson's point of view is the fact that his prodigal pupil is coming back to him and saying in essence "I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father". It is the one thing Phil Jackson's career does not have and only Kobe Bryant can give it to him.

This should at least be interesting.

Newport State of Mind

Balboa Peninsula

The title of this post links to the Newport Cam, which provided me with some great comfort during a very cold winter spent doing consulting work in Boston, MA. This post is for a good friend who could probably use a bit of remote sunshine. Enjoy.

Sabermetrics come to the NBA

First of all, you have got to love Mark Cuban.

I mean, who else got out of the Internet bubble at the absolute peak quite like he did? Second, who has spent his money better than Cuban has? If I had $3 billion in liquid assets, then I cannot imagine a better purchase than a sports team. Finally, he really truly thinks about running his franchise. I am life-long L.A. Lakers fan, but watching the ride in Dallas has been a lot of fun. Cuban posts his thoughts on blogmaverick.com as he is running that business. Therefore, when he makes a mistake (like letting Steve Nash leave), you can read Cuban's reasoning in his own words. This is a lot better than trying to reverse engineer the thoughts of your owner and/or GM. Also, Cuban has begun to apply the same types of sabermetric analysis that is transforming some baseball clubs (like the A's, Red Sox and Dodgers). If there is any sport that needs sabermetrics the most, it is the NBA. The manner in which the sport was marketed in the mid-to-late '90s moved the focus away from teams and on to invidual players. This worked to sell tickets, while those players (Jordan, Ewing, Barkley, et al) were active, but it also changed the skills that younger players focused upon. The NBA is badly in need of a movement that helps to de-mystify it as a sport.

Mark Cuban is the first person who can write a big check working on this, so good for him.

More to the point, it is way past time that folks started talking about basketball as a team sport that requires a lot of hard work to master. I am sure there are plenty of dumb NBA players (Ron Artest comes to mind), but in interviews the vast majority of the good ones come of as very smart and self-aware. Anyway, Cuban choses not to spell out his metrics, but there is a great web-site called 82games.com that does. Here are a few things that jump out at me:

• If you read down the list of the Lakers best 5-man rotations, then the substitution pattern Rudy T is using starts to make more sense. Jones is more effective on the floor in the 3-spot than Butler, so Rudy T needs to get him into games ahead of Walton.
• Swapping an expensive Steve Nash for a cheap Jason Terry turns out to be a reasonable move for this season in Dallas. It is still not great to break-up a nucleus of players that works well together, but at least the Mavs found a reasonable statistical replacement.
• In the same vein, the San Antonio Spurs are a case study in the merits of keeping units together. Look at their player pair ratings, when compared with a team like the Houston Rockets who are trying to fit together a lot of new pieces.
• Shaq would've been better if he had stayed with Kobe Bryant. O'Neal and Bryant teamed for +10.5 per game and W% of 81%. Shaq and Dwayne Wade combine for a +6.5 per game and W% of 59%, which is good only comparison to Bryant and Lamar Odom.
• The Baby Bulls may finally be finding their way, but they still need to get rid of Eddy Curry. Look at their player pairs. The kid has an NBA Centers body, but he makes most of his team-mates worse. This is exactly the opposite of what you are looking for in a player. Anyway, here is good article on the kid.

I will have a lot more thoughts on the rise of basketball statistical analysis as I get a handle on it.