From Simmons. Pretty reasonable. One of the coolest things about my job as it has evolved these past few years: getting access to so many memorable basketball players and basketball minds. Bill Walton and Larry Bird changed my too-harsh opinion of Kobe’s style; shit, the epilogue of my NBA book told the story about Walton and I arguing about “The Secret” or “The Choice.” I spent a year watching basketball games in a tiny conference room with Magic, and then a second year with Doug Collins. I talked shop with Kobe, off the record, a number of times. I spent a whole day with the great Bill Russell. I got to know Steve Nash and Steve Kerr. I spent multiple days with Charles Barkley. I spent three hours with Durant and Harden once. I’ve picked the brains of dozens of famous NBA people on my podcast. I’ve spent the past three years talking for hundreds and hundreds of hours with Jalen. I spent an afternoon in Vegas with Isiah Thomas that became the second chapter of my book. And I’ve talked basketball with dozens of ex-players and ex-coaches who passed through the league — everyone from Kiki Vandeweghe to Danny Ainge to Doc Rivers to Elgin Baylor to Jeff Van Gundy to Hubie Brown. Once you learn how to discount personal agendas (they are endless), personal relationships (there are many), and just plain stubbornness (like Barkley’s recent ill-advised on-air rant about advanced metrics), fundamentally, you realize that those old-school lifers see things that you and I can’t see. Hoop junkies bang out League Pass games, study those advanced metrics, read as much as possible, do everything we can to catch up. And many times, it works — like when we thought Memphis might be better off without Rudy Gay while the old-school guys were astonished that Rudy got traded. So that’s our trump card: just outworking the old-school lifers and learning as much as possible. Their trump card: They can play or coach against someone like Westbrook or Kyrie — even if it’s one time — and pick out something in his DNA that we could never pick out. And again, you need to sift through the noise/agendas/biases/stubbornness to get there. That community doesn’t trust advanced numbers; they don’t care about PER, SportVU, shot charts or real plus-minus. And as the TNT guys recently showed after Kyle Korver made the All-Star team, it’s unclear whether many of them are willing to accept where basketball is going as a sport (pace and space, baby). That community wants basketball to be more black-and-white. It’s just more familiar for them. It’s what they grew up with. Are you talented? Are you competitive? Would you have won my respect on a basketball court? Can you put up numbers? Can you do anything that I couldn’t do? Could I have won a ring with you? Could I have gone to war with you? For them, it’s about heading into basketball battle. That’s also why someone like Blake Griffin drives the old-school dudes crazy. He [itch bay]es at referees too much, [itch bay]es about getting hit too much, forgets to rebound, misses too many free throws and cares a little too much about making an impact off the court. They don’t totally know if they’d want to go into basketball battle with him. They can’t tell. Westbrook is the flip side — they’d put up with his erratic shot selection because he’s a warrior and a crazy competitor and a force of nature and everything else those guys love. And over the years, I have learned HOW to listen to that community. Just put it through its own little filter. For instance, Jalen enjoys Jamal Crawford’s work for a variety of reasons, but mainly for those three times a month when Crawford activates heat-check mode and starts draining shots that nobody else in the NBA can make. The potential of that happening is why Jalen respects Crawford so much. He’s willing to jettison every negative in the Jamal package (poor defense, no rebounding, the occasional 5-for-18 stinker) and drifts toward those heat-check games and Crawford’s unwavering confidence. And why? He understands the degree of difficulty in what Crawford does. Just like I understand the degree of difficulty in, say, someone writing an especially good deadline column. So we agree to respectfully disagree on Crawford; even if Jalen overrates his impact (in my opinion, anyway), I understand why.
