Basketball 101 - Organizing The Bench

Basketball is a sport where ''riding the pine'' has a different meaning. Of all the major sports in America, basketball is the one where having quality players on your bench is the most important. The games are 48 minutes long, require tremendous endurance and as good as your starters might be, you can't expect them to play 48 minutes every game for a complete season.

When your stars get in their late twenties, early thirties (i.e Dwyane Wade), it's asking for injuries to do so. You need to strategize using your bench players in order to limit your stars and starters' limits, in order to have them healthy through a grueling year. The Grand Dooda of coaching Gregg Popovich has mastered bench strategizing for several years now, as Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker all turned the wrong side of 30 in San Antonio. So how does a perfect, strategical basketball bench look like? Let's see.

The Existential Meaning of Last Trade Deadline

The 2014 NBA trade deadline passed, six days ago, and once again it wasn't anything to go nuts about. It wasn't a snoozer like last year, but the range of transactions meaning went from ''cool'' to ''scraping drawer bottoms to save cap space''. Nonetheless, anything would've been better than last year's reenactment of Andy Warhol's SLEEP. 

The CBA has ruined the trade deadline, at least for its duration. Its strict rules were meant to regulate the free agent market, but instead the market adapted and the trade market suffered. It became difficult to accept the contractual decisions of another GM and make them work on your team. Anyway, here are the highlights of the last trade deadline and their existential meaning. I won't go over every trade in this blog post, but if I don't mention, you shouldn't care about it.

About that thing...

You might be wondering about the silence or you might not. In any case, please know that The Hoops Nerd will be back next week with a break down of how the NBA trade deadline has went (the said deadline is tomorrow, by the way). For now, I am caught up in an overtime stretch at work that will end up next Sunday night.

In the meantime, the photo speaks for itself. I'll need a couple of days to get back into writing shape.

Basketball 101 - Center

Whenever non-fans think about basketball, they think about 7 foot tall people. Believe it or not, they're kind of a rare commodity in the sport. I don't have an expect number for you, but I believe this number to be well below 10%. 99,9% of these players play center, the most important defensive position in basketball. You don't need to be 7 foot tall to play center, but it'll be eerily easier for you to get a job if you do, something I've been disagreeing with. The most skilled centers often are 6'10 and 6'11. I believe the most skilled center in the NBA is 6'11 DeMarcus Cousins. But anyway, that's another debate...

Foreseeing the NBA Trade Deadline

The NBA trade deadline is 15 days away. I should be bouncing off the walls about this. The league-wide roster overhaul, the heated jockeying for playoffs X factors, the strategic long-term planning, these things get my nerd brain going. The 2014 NBA trade deadline cannot, in any possible way, be worse than last year. Three moves in two days, J.J Redick being the center of attention, journalists turning to the Dexter Pittman trade for column fodder, it can't possibly sink any lower. Yet the NBA trade deadline will be a non-event again, this year.

It's just the way things are now. The latest CBA makes it ungodly hard to organize a blockbuster trade. The salary cap makes superstar contracts binding and is influencing an athlete's worth like never before. So I'm expecting a lot of action this yet, yet it'll probably be as exciting as Saturday afternoon in an accounting convention. The NBA trade deadline will be a non-event this year, or rather, it will find a way to become a non-event, where trades will make sense at the bank and not on the court. Let me borrow Clairvoyant Bill's hat has for a second and predict you what the 2014 NBA trade deadline will be like.