Ezra Is To Dave As...

It's clear that Shane, having admitted that my linking to him doubles his traffic (which must mean from 2 to 4, or something like that), is now pulling the same trick that I do. Most people, when they have a salient comment about something that a blogger has written, leave a comment on that Blogger's site. Those of us struggling to make our voices heard in the wilderness, on the other hand, will post to our own blog with the comment, thus ensuring that it basically gets heard by no one at all. Except, of course, for that occasional, glorious occasion when your man-crush links to your blog, and your traffic spikes 4900%, etc. etc. etc. Sometimes, we'll even make up controversial opinions just to try and get the other person's goat and get them to link to us.

I don't know what it says that Shane is to me on the blogger scale as I am to Ezra. Whatever it is, it's not complimentary to Shane, I know that much.

However, he does, as usual, have some interesting things to say, so let's get to 'em.

1) Yes, Shane, congratulations on being one of about eight people in the world, one of whom is Reggie Bush, to tear your PCL while participating in sports. Maybe he also shares your atrocious layout form, which is what caused you to tear yours. Of course, he also has the excuse of playing a contact sport, which you lack. Although, as this is coming from someone whose retirement-causing injury came when he was running in a straight line on a flat grassy field, it probably doesn't count for much.

2) The 2007-08 Denver Nuggets are the greatest collection of indivudual talent in the history of, well, the Denver Nuggets anyhow. But I do disagree pretty strongly when Shane says that the Nuggets are a terrible defensive team. Like all teams, they have their strengths and their weaknesses, but Karl has done a pretty good job of figuring out what those are and playing to them.

To watch the Nuggets play D is an entertaining, and often frustrating, exercise. It is undoubtedly true that they give up a ton of layups, which gives opponents a fairly high shooting percentage. However, there is a lot more to life than shooting percentage. The Nuggets' strategy is built around Marcus Camby, who is almost certainly the best weakside defender in the NBA. He gets a ton of blocks, and gets almost all of them not on the guy he is guarding, but coming on to assist a teammate who has been beating near the basket. He also grabs a ton of rebounds, because he is always aware of what's going on around the rim.

So Marcus is the lynchpin of the D. Knowing that they have a safety blanket, so to speak, allows the perimeter players to ballhawk and play passing lanes. As a result, they get a lot of steals, or at least opposition possessions that end in turnovers (this is Hollinger's TOR, turnover rate, in which the Nuggets are second in the league.) They also don't give up many offensive rebounds, also due mostly to Camby and, oddly, to Iverson, who is a very good defensive rebounder for a tiny guy. Again, they are second in the league in allowing offensive boards.

Also, they don't give up a ton of 3-pointers, both because they are more aggressive on the perimeter and because they give up so many easy layups that teams stop trying to take them.

So, the point is, there is more to D than getting stops. That's what Hollinger's stats are trying to show. You can argue about the validity of any given stat, but I don't think it's a legitimate beef to say 'well, I saw them play, and they were terrible!' I won't argue that their being actually a quite good defensive team is a weird thing, and rather counterintuitive, but given the number of injuries they've already suffered this year, to be tied for the lead in their division is pretty impressive.

3) Finally, last week or the week before, Shane criticized my call to eliminate the BCS in favor of, well, nothing. And he's right, to some extent: it is the nature of sports to crown a winner, and if you're going to have a season, people are going to argue who had the best one, or who is the best team, or whatever.

I wanted to keep the length of my original argument under control, so I didn't write about what I thought would pop up in place of the BCS. I'll give a quick nod to that now. What I imagine happening is that a variety of new polls will come out. Some of them will be similar to what we have now; coaches' polls, press member polls, computer polls, etc.

But someone, somewhere, will start to use a poll which says things that make sense, like 'beating Akron 72-7 in September is not worth anything, while losing to Georgia in triple-overtime means you're a pretty damn good team.' Under this sort of poll, Ohio State could go undefeated over the schedule they had this year, and still not get within sniffing distance of #1 in this poll.

And some people will say 'hey, that's a damn good poll. It really seems to pick who the best teams actually are, and rewards the kinds of things we like, such as being in a tough conference, and playing tough out-of-conference games.' And, magically, through nothing more than the experience of having lots of different ideas tried out, and seeing which ones actually worked well for people, we would have arrived at a better system. I don't know if this would result in an eventual bowl game between the #'s 1 and 2 teams in this poll - honestly I don't spend much time worrying about it, since it doesn't matter either way as this idea would require the NCAA actually loosening their grip over the process, which means it will never happen.

But wouldn't it be nice?