Respect, or the value of gravity in the NBA

Tom Haberstroh lists his top floor-spacers of the year in the NBA (ESPN Insider paywalled article). He came up with a composite of SportVU's proprietary gravity and distraction scores, two pieces of data which, as far as I can tell, are only provided by Stats Inc. to ESPN Insider and other professional paying customers (if any of you NBA Hoops fans know where I can find the data myself online, let me know!).

Haberstroh explains these two scores and his methodology for generating a composite:

To recap, gravity score measures how closely a player's defender sticks to him off the ball. Higher gravity scores generally belong to bigs because their primary defender must stay close and also protect the basket. On the other hand, guards typically have lower gravity scores simply because defenders have more liberty to shade off their guy on the perimeter. But elite shooters typically generate more attention off the ball.

Then there's distraction score, which quantifies how much a player's defender is willing to help off the ball to stop the ball handler. The worse he is as a shooter, the more likely his defender will be distracted by the ball handler. To identify the most effective floor-spacers in the NBA, I created a composite score that combines the two metrics. The result is what I've called "respect rating," which has now been translated to a 1-to-100 scale with 100 being the most magnetic (think sharpshooters) and 1 being least magnetic (think non-scoring bigs).

No surprise, Steph Curry tops the list with a respect rating of 97.9. He was #1 in Haberstroh's composite ranking last year as well. Klay Thompson is third with a rating of 94.4, and you can understand much of the Warriors success this year in those two rankings.

What's interesting to me as a Bulls fan is that Derrick Rose ranks 14th. Much analysis of his value to the Bulls is built off his raw individual stats, but the interaction effects of basketball mean he's undervalued in terms of his value to the team as someone who keeps defenders away from his teammates.

In the modern game, where zone defense is allowed and where the trend is for heavy help defense to swarm the ball, having players who have high gravity and distraction scores, who you can't help off of, is critical to maintaining the type of floor spacing that opens driving lines or provide open jump shots. There's a reason that the most trendy NBA offense now is "pace and space"; both pace and space are ways of trying to neutralize the trendiest style of defense, the Thibodeau-style defense that punishes isolation plays and post-ups.

I still wish Rose would decrease his number of three point shot attempts, at least until he finds consistent form in practice. His form on threes has been so erratic this season, and he squanders his value as one of the top floor-spacers in the NBA when he chucks one of those up. When he drives, he not only increases his chance of drawing a foul, but his gravity increases the odds one of his teammates will come open for a higher percentage shot.

I'm still super bullish (pun sort of intended) on the Bulls this season. Cleveland is a mess, the Bulls are deeper than they've been in years, and the East is much weaker than the West as a conference. Noah is still coming back into fitness and health after offseason knee surgery, Butler has blossomed into a true two-way star, Mirotic adds a legitimate floor spacer as a true stretch four, Brooks is an effective source of offense for the second string team, and declarations of Rose as Grant Hill Part 2 were premature. 

One of the kinks they still have to work out, however, is how for Rose to best maximize his gravitational pull. Three-pointers and layups/dunks are the two most efficient forms of offense, but only if you can get them. The mid-range jump shot may be inefficient and a dying art, but Rose is one of the rare players for whom that seems to be an exception.

State of cinema

I wrote about the Mark Harris piece “The Birdcage” a few weeks ago, noting that the major U.S. studios were playing a dangerous game of higher and higher stakes poker by going all-in with franchises, or at least with a healthy portion of their annual budgets.

Richard Brody makes a great point, though, that judging the state of cinema by the output of just the six major U.S. studios is a silly thing in this age we live in, when we have increased access to a greater selection of movies from all over the world, from this year or throughout history, at our finger tips. In fact, it's likely never been a greater time to be alive as a cinephile than today.

But Mark Harris, one of the best film historians and industry analysts around (he’s the author of “Pictures at a Revolution” and “Five Came Back”), has written in Grantland about large and negative changes that he perceives in the film industry arising as a result of changing practices at the “studios.” He hangs his argument from the talons of a mediocre movie, “Birdman,” in which an actor who is frustrated by his enduring identification with a superhero role attempts to remake his career by means of serious theatre. Harris writes that “Birdman” “is a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about.” What the industry is about, Harris asserts, is the program of thirty-two superhero movies that were announced this year, for release between now and 2020, and the seventy “sequels and franchise installments” in preparation for the same six-year span.

As a result of this concentration of effort, Harris writes, “In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business.” He’s being impressively hyperbolic: non-franchise movies (such as “Birdman”) are being made by independent producers. What’s more, this hyperbole is metaphorically useful only in money terms: there aren’t more franchise films being made than independent ones, they’re just much more lucrative. Franchise films get most of the investment and take most of the box office. But this is neither a big deal nor even a problem—because the movie business isn’t all that matters in the world of movies. McDonald’s does a lot more business than Per Se, and John Grisham sells a lot more books than Marilynne Robinson, but a book critic wouldn’t evaluate the state of literature through best-sellers any more than a food writer would use fast food to gauge the state of cuisine.

As I noted the other day, the receding power of the studio system from its heyday led to lots of hand-wringing in its day, just as the declining influence and fortunes of media stalwarts has today. But just as I think journalism as an institution is overall in a better place, so is cinema as a whole, on an absolute basis.

What many considered to be the genius of the system (the studio system, that is) was likely just the genius of the geniuses involved; the studio system just happened to be in place and captured the credit.

As Brody notes:

Harris’s argument is a familiar one; it comes every few years. Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, and Ross Douthat made it in 2010, and Harris himself made it on Twitter earlier this year. (I wrote about it then, too). The argument is a twist on the long-standing lament for the death of the “midrange drama” or the “adult drama,” and it’s an essentially reactionary, anti-artistic conception of cinema, in two different ways. In decrying the separation of leading directors from the studios, it comes down to a “genius of the system” argument, an assertion that movies come out best when directors’ inclinations are harnessed and channelled into the high-stakes commerce imposed by studio budgets and studio politics. It’s praise of industrial product in lieu of personal creation—praise of the business in place of the art.

In decrying the great success of franchises and the modest success of the humanistic movies that he admires, Harris seems to be writing in an echo chamber—as if a movie that doesn’t open on three thousand screens, doesn’t cost a hundred million dollars, and doesn’t make a hundred million, doesn’t really count. He’s wrong. What counts is the movie, whether it’s seen by a few thousand viewers or by millions, and what makes a movie count (whether it’s seen by millions or thousands) is the critical judgment that asserts that it counts and shows why it counts.

Critics and journalists often make the self-serving yet self-defeating mistake of writing mainly about movies that reach (or are likely to reach, or are designed for the purpose of reaching) the widest audience, on the assumption that they thereby insure their own popularity and centrality.

So next time you want to make a proclamation about the state of movies, don't just count the movies that played at your multiplex, most of it the output of the six major studios. When people discuss their access to information today, they don't just count what they can get via snail mail and/or from the big old media institutions like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, et al; everything on the internet, from blogs to social media and elsewhere, counts. Look at many people wrote “best things I read in 2014” lists this year instead of just “the best books I read in 2014.”

The same should apply to movies. I still love going to movie theaters, and many of my favorites of the year were seen there. But some of the best movies I saw this year were streamed online from iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, or rented on DVD or Blu-ray from Netflix, and I've never had access to as many of them as conveniently as today. I judge the year in movies based on the best movies I saw in a year, regardless of source, and by that measure, the past few years have been amazing and rich.

Vive la revolution.

Why Idris Elba can't play James Bond?

[Ian] Fleming described Bond as looking like musician Hoagy Carmichael. As such, we’ve never gotten a screen incarnation of 007 who matches Fleming’s description perfectly, and across 50+ years there has been quite a bit of variation. Black hair, brown hair, blonde hair. Blue eyes, brown eyes. Scottish, Welsh, Irish, even an Australian. The persona, too, tends to shift with each portrayal: Sean Connery’s earthy, predatory swagger; Roger Moore’s upper crust dandyism; Daniel Craig’s “blunt instrument” interpretation. But whatever the variations thus far, there’s a glaring commonality among these actors which - let’s just say it - clearly leaves Idris Elba out of the running. And I get it; it’s trendy to shake up formula, and change things just for the sake of change, but someone needs to be unafraid to point out the obvious here.

With apologies to Mr. Elba, James Bond simply cannot have a mustache.

Now that I’ve baited you in with a facetious headline, can we talk for a minute about how the idea of Idris Elba as James Bond is a way bigger deal than simply being an exciting, outside the box casting choice? On that criteria alone, I do think Elba would be a great and interesting pick. 

Apologies for borrowing the click-baity headline from here, but the whole piece is a worthwhile quick read.

Having never read the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, I had no idea they contained so much extreme racism. I'm glad most of that never made it into the movies.

Inasmuch as 007 was a drinking, fighting, screwing avatar through which aging white male readers could live vicariously, Bond was also a reassuring fiction that England was still a crucial player, secretly saving the world from non-British (and often mixed raced) villains and madmen who would plunge it into chaos and darkness. In the course of these missions, the literary James Bond looks down his nose at women, at homosexuals, and very much so at the “Orientals” and “Coloureds” with whom he’s thrust into conflict. In all of Fleming’s 007 stories, only one villain was an actual Brit; many had complex ethnic backgrounds described in exacting detail by the author. Quite often, underneath Fleming's fascination with foreign cultures lied a xenophobic streak that betrayed an ugly superiority complex.

While it’s true that the cinematic Bond has never been QUITE as racist as his printed counterpart, the residue is there: Connery snapping “Fetch my shoes!” at Quarrel in Doctor No is a rather gross moment, and Moore using Indian street beggars as obstacles during a tuk-tuk chase in Octopussy is a bit troublesome. But the films carved their own path away from the novels, doing their best approximation of “changing with the times.” 1962’s Doctor No, for example, has no mention of the “Chigroes” (you can figure that portmanteau out) described in its source novel. By 1973, the cinematic Bond was bedding African-American agents in Live And Let Die, a far cry from what passes for race relations in Fleming’s novel of the same name: “One used to go to the Savoy Ballroom (in Harlem) and watch the dancing. Perhaps pick up a high-yaller and risk the doctor's bills afterwards.”

That happens in chapter four. Chapter five is called “Nigger Heaven.”

If they named Elba as Bond, and I'd love to see it, can you imagine the number of articles to be written consisting entirely of a collection of outrageous racist posts from Twitter and Facebook? Someone has probably already pre-written the Buzzfeed listicle or Onion article.

Effective income equality, ad-supported business models

UK households with the lowest income faced the fastest cost of living rise in the past 11 years, figures show.

The rising cost of domestic gas and electricity was one suggested reason for the trend.

Households without children and retirees also experienced faster price increases in their typical basket of goods, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

The ONS analysed inflation rates for different households from 2003 to 2014.

Those who spent the most money saw the lowest level of inflation, the ONS concluded.

This could be explained, in part, by prices of package holidays and education barely rising over recent years.

Full article here. It's not just absolute but effective income inequality that is seeming to rise.

Among some sizable number of people I follow on Twitter, ad-supported products and services in tech are seen as evil. ”You get what you pay for!“ and “If you're not paying, you are the product” and variants thereof are common dismissals or denunciations of any ad-supported product.

They lament the proliferation of free apps in mobile app stores, turn their noses up at Facebook, lament the ad-free days of Twitter. Look at anyone who writes such things and a few things become clear. They're almost always fairly well-off (middle to upper middle class on up) and so spending a few extra bucks is no big deal to them. Also, they almost always generalize off of one egregious example.

Ad-supported business models have enabled many people without the financial means otherwise to access many products and services. You may not think it's that important for someone who's poor to access Instagram without paying, but that's a very privileged stance, one that ignores how many people in other countries use such services.

Many businesses can only achieve the scale necessary to be useful with a free, ad-supported business model. Facebook is just one example. Sure, it means that many companies that set off in that direction will fail—scale businesses require, well, massive scale—but a high extinction rate for those who attempt to build a scale business is to be expected.

Finally, it's hardly clear that either a pay or ad-supported business is more friendly to customers. Derek Powazek had a great post on this a few years ago.

I don't mind paying for services I love. For example, I'm strongly anti-piracy when it comes to people who can afford the things they pirate, no matter what reasons they come up with to justify their behavior.

I'm happy, though, that the things I enjoy come in a mix of pay and ad-supported models. As I've noted before, I just hope ad-supported businesses embrace the natural evolution to native ad units more and more in 2015, especially all the old media sites I enjoy but whose user experiences are being destroyed by their advertising unit selection.

I don't now how I got from an article on income inequality to a discussion of ad-supported business models, but all my New Year's Eve alcohol consumption seems to have connected some strange regions of my brain this morning.