Welcome! Come one, come all, to the main event! It's season preview time, and Upside and Motor is ready to rock your world. The previews will be both concrete and lyrical in this magical world, both by numbers and by prose. To take a look at all the previews, click here.
Straight Up
Straight Up features all the stuff you actually want to see in your team previews: who are the new kids on the block, who skipped town, and where the team stands for the upcoming season. Along with my projection and standing for the upcoming season, it'll also feature three individual awards: Team MVP (let's not get into the debate over exactly what that means), the Most Important Reserve, and the Most Unheralded Asset.
Projected Record: 32-50 (4th in the Atlantic Division, T-10th in the Eastern Conference)
Off-season Acquisitions: Brook Lopez, Chris Douglas-Roberts, Julius Hodge, Jarvis Hayes, Eduardo Najera, Keyon Dooling, Yi Jianlian, Bobby Simmons, Brian Hamilton, Ryan Anderson
Notable Losses: Nenad Krstic, Richard Jefferson, Marcus Williams
2008-2009 Team MVP: Vince Carter - Sadly. The team's going to rise and fall at his whim based on his shot selection and defensive effort, and I say that in the most pessimistic way possible.
Most Important Reserve: Josh Boone - Yi seems set to start at the 4 alongside the "NBA ready" Brook Lopez, but someone's going to have to being energy and defense to the position off the bench (Boone may start on opening day, but Lopez was drafted to slide into that starter's role). Sean Williams is always an enigma in terms of his production, but Boone has shown a lot of promise. Entering his third season, it's time that he establishes some consistency. He can get up there to swat shots with the best of 'em, but his interior scoring and defensive discipline can use a little improvement. I've got high hopes for Boone this season; look for him to round into form.
Most Unheralded Asset: Bobby Simmons: He's definitely overpaid, so this title need not apply from a salary standpoint. Every season, as Simmons becomes more and more invisible, I want to talk about how he's fallen off. But when you really look at his game in comparison to his Most Improved Player season, not much has changed. He's a decent defender and has a fairly complete game, and can be a very consistent starter at the small forward position for the Nets this year. He won't wow like Jefferson does, but Simmons is an all-around solid player.
Poetry in Motion
Poetry in Motion will feature my feeble attempts at mimicking the sonnets of one William Shakespeare, complete with a weak, liberal interpretation of iambic pentameter and an identical rhyme scheme. As they say, the NBA imitates art...I mean poetry...err, life imitates the NBA...or I imitate poetry while writing about the NBA. Something like that. Either way, each preview will contain two sonnets: one focusing on a wider, team outlook and another focusing on the roles and futures of individual players. Revel! Criticize! Enjoy!
Townshend said it best: “Who are you? Who? Who?”
The Nets a lost team in search of its soul,
Departed are franchise cornerstones two,
J-Kidd and
But not all is lost, there is hope in youth,
And the new-look Nets sure have that in spades,
Devin and Yi will have chances to prove
That the Nets got the better end of their trades.
Is this Vince’s team? Is he on his way out?
So many questions unanswered to date,
In the meantime, expect a playoff drought,
While all eyes look to
The Nets will be mediocre again.
Carter will need to provide the scoring
Without floating in and out of the game,
Harris keeps it anything but boring,
CDR – out to clear his dirtied name.
Yi’s impressive, but has a ways to go
Before he finds his potential fulfilled,
But along with Lopez, Williams, and Co.,
The Nets have young bigs around which to build.
The cast of role players is truly strange,
As if they’re posturing for a big run,
Dooling, Hodge, Najera, and Jarvis Hayes
Must know that their team will soon be outdone.
And their playoff push, though futile, gallant.
Player Preview Spotlight: Devin Harris
The Player Spotlight feature highlights just one of the many cogs that make up the team. They may not be the best player on the team and they may not be the most recognizable (or who knows, they may be both), but I can guarantee that they're interesting. Their game, their on-court persona, their role within the greater scope of the team. Something about the player in the spotlight deserves your attention, and, as usual, I'm more than willing to point it out to you.
Devin Harris is pure, unbridled speed. Only, y'know, bridled. At least he was. Shackled by the confines of Avery Johnson's regime in Dallas, Lawrence Frank allowed Devin to test the waters of the one-man fast break late last season with reasonable success. But as long as the Nets try to slide Devin into Jason Kidd's pretty unique shoes, they'll crash headfirst into the limitations of his game.
Harris is not a typical fast break point guard. Despite what Don Nelson wanted, he wasn't going to be Nash. Despite what Avery wanted, he wasn't going to be that structured, controlled point. Devin is probably the fastest player with the ball, baseline to baseline, in the entire league, which creates a pretty strange fast break situation. If in "normal" opportunities there is the primary fast break followed by a secondary break, Devin is on his own wavelength entirely. His primary strength on the break is to score the damn basketball through flat out sprinting to the basket. He's great at finishing after contact, and his fast-break playmaking is average, probably because he's not used to his teammates keeping pace with him.
He's more controlled than the wildfire of Barbosa and divergent from the tenacity of Iverson. His game is herky-jerky like a lightning bolt and similar in speed and destructive ability. But oddly enough...dude's Jackson Pollock.
The chaotic nature of Harris' one-man break. Action painting, which captured "not a picture, but an event" and acted as a "liberation from value - political, aesthetic, moral." Whether your evaluation of the metaphor is purely superficial (Devin's spontaneity, sudden changes in speed) or more liberal in interpretation, the parallels seem pretty apparent. And like Pollock, who eventually was met with critical acclaim despite early backlash against the seemingly pedestrian element of his works, what Harris represents is a different kind of beast that the basketball world isn't always prepared to grapple with.
Devin Harris is *gasp* one of those god-awful scoring point guards. But even in a world where Chauncey and Tony Parker can (and do) win championships, the distributing PG is a much more privileged identity. So I'm going to put this out there, and I know it's far from revolutionary: being a scoring point guard is not a sin. Devin Harris has plenty of flaws in his game, but the fact that he thinks to attack the rim is not one of them.
"It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said."
-Jackson Pollock
Season Previews, F'real
For those poor, conservative souls trapped in normativity, I'll make sure to send you to a few places where you can read through more conventional, in-depth season previews. Most of these links will be from team bloggers whose trade is knowing what there is to know about their respective teams, so tell your ears to perk up; it's time to listen.
About Basketball
Nets Daily (Review of magazine previews)
Hardwood Paroxysm
2 comments:
Very ambitious first post of the series, Rob. Looking forward to the rest of the previews.
Good stuff, Rob. The crazy part is that you posted this BEFORE Harris looked absolutely dominant in today's game versus the Heat. You play pickup with him over the summer or something?
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