The Basketball Diagrams

In a recent commercial, I noticed that the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet was wearing a T-shirt with an odd triangular logo that looked like one of those adaptors they used for record holes. But after a few times seeing the ad, I realized that the symbol looked like an “F” and a “V,” so I wondered if it was his personal logo.

Years ago, I made a post about athletes with their own logos, so this shouldn’t surprise me. But still — much as I identify with VanVleet as a fellow vertically-challenged person, and admire his fighting back from many challenges to become an important member of a top team — he is the second-string point guard. In contrast, the athletes I found with symbols were among the best ever at their respective sports. But I did a little digging, and was surprised to find that most of the Raptors line-up have their own logos:

It turns out that although those earlier logos were created by equipment manufacturers to associate products with the athlete, today’s players are often taking it upon themselves to create a symbol for themselves. Indeed, Fred VanVleet will sell you one of his logo shirts, so he’s essentially doing for himself what Nike et al will do for the biggest stars in the game. Also, Kyle Lowry invited logo designs, but he’s still going with clothing that just has “7” on it at least for now.

In case you’re wondering where the rest of team is on this, Danny Green doesn’t have one, but his podcast does. And coach Nick Nurse has a hat with his initials on it, though that was supposedly a gift. I’m left wondering how Marc Gasol got left out of the fun. He’s a newcomer to the team, but he was a star for Memphis for many years, so I’m left wondering if this is unique to the Raptors.

I’m sure a star studded team like the Warriors all have their own logos. Well, the famous ones, anyway; their bench probably just has “Hello my name is” stickers. So I’ll look at Eastern Conference rivals the Milwaukee Bucks. Not surprisingly, their star Giannis Antetokounmpo has one, though it’s not real creative. And better still, I found a mnemonic for spelling his name. But what about his less-famous teammates? I went looking, and I couldn’t find one for Eric Bledsoe or Brook Lopez, though Khris Middleton has one that I don’t entirely understand.

So this is a weird Raptors tradition, like Jurassic Park or Drake. Hopefully they can spin this into a new way of winning over free agents: sign with the Raptors and no matter your role with the team, you get your own logo, and as many endorsements as you have time for.

Lucretia, My Election

There's a series of ads going around trying to guilt us into buying jewelry for Mothers' Day. They each feature a mother's voice talking about things they've put up with over the years. In one of them, she talks about "putting up with your goth phase." It ends with a yearbook photo of a vaguely gothy teen - fair enough. But it's accompanied by some sort of death metal. So now I'm like, great, I have to boycott a jeweller, because they don't know the difference between goth and metal. The future sure is weird.

But on the other hand, gothism has been getting some respect. Andrew Yang, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has said that he would be the first ex-goth president. Oh, yeah, he could be the first Asian-American major party candidate, but the important thing is, we could have a former goth in the White House, which I assume would not stay white for long.

My first reaction was to marvel at how many people are running for the Democratic nomination. Candidates always try to carve out a niche for themselves: you have the education candidate, the law-and-order candidate etc. But there have got to be a lot of people if you're stuck with being the ex-goth candidate.

To be fair, most of the bands that Yang mentions as his favourites would be more accurately classed as Dark Wave. But I'm glad to finally find a left-wing politician who shares my musical sensibilities. I had an on-and-off series of articles about right-wingers who liked the same music I did, even when the music's message hugely contradicted their own policies.

But even though I'm tickled by this development, I have to temper my feelings, because I know that this is part of what is bad about politics today. People are choosing politicians as though they are a lifestyle choice, rather than based on substantive policies. As they say, people vote for the candidate they'd rather have a beer with. That's an attitude that's led to many bad election choices, and it's not any better to ask which candidate you'd like to sip absinthe with. So remember, vote for the best candidate, even if they don't know anything about your music. Express your lifestyle through some other choice, like jewelry.

Plus And Minus

You may have seen that Google+ was recently shut down.  You may also have forgotten what Google+ was; it was Google's attempt to cash in on the social network gold rush. It wasn't too successful. Too bad, we could use some new blood in the Social Media field. Facebook is still making a fool of itself on the privacy issue, and Twitter is still dragging its feet on the should-we-allow-nazis issue.

And frankly, this is the sort of thing I wish Google would put more effort into. My complaint about them in recent years has been that they are choosing which business to enter on a whim, rather than the classic business basis of find-a-problem-and-fix-it. We needed a good search engine, and they built one. We needed a competitor for iOS and they built one (well, bought and nurtured one, but close enough.)

Then they started going off the rails with Chrome. If they'd released it a decade earlier to counter the dominance of Internet Explorer, that would have been great. But doing it after Firefox had managed to - improbably - break the monopoly, Google just looked like bullies. Now they're bringing out a game streaming service, despite the fact that the gaming world is already a crowded business, and that people are starting to get leery of the everything-is-a-subscription juggernaut. Oh, and rural folks keep trying to point out that they're not okay with streaming everything on their antiquated broadband. And hey, that's just the sort of problem Google could solve and win lots of kudos, instead of suspicion.

So if you're not too pleased about Google's game streaming plans, just remember that it might be another Google+ instead of a Chrome. After all, I wasn't even going to comment on the passing of Google+, except that they somehow set things up so that if you had a Google+ account when you signed up for Blogger, it lost the connection with your Google account, so I just had to have a panicked run through FAQ's and message boards to try to get signed back in. And this post is my combined test/scream-of-frustration

Mmmall Mmmemoirs

Today I was looking through news headlines and I was surprised to see a Toronto Star headline, "The Rise and Fall of the 90's Muffin." That intrigued me, because it combines two favourites of mine (the 90's and muffins, that is; not so keen on rise-and-falls.)

It turns out to be the story of the MMMuffins chain. If your personal journey through time and space hasn't taken you near that name, I'll tell you that they were a chain of muffin shops, predominantly in malls, in Canada, through the 80's and 90's. If you haven't heard of them, I'm sure you can think of a similar example of a chain that used to be ubiquitous but is now gone.

The chain is, surprisingly, not completely out of business: according to their website, they have precisely two locations left, one in Toronto, one in Montreal. Also strange about that: they have a website. It looks kind of weird to see an older name with "www." & ".com" around it. Just watch:

www.k-tel.com

www.fotomat.com

www.pan-am.com

www.americanmotors.com/gremlin

www.ptl.org

www.coleco.com/cabbagepatch

And that leads to my realization: stores can come and go without you even noticing. They're sort of like TV commercials. Sometimes I'll be watching something recorded a few months ago and I'll catch one of the commercials and be like, wow, where did you go? You were everywhere and then, boom, nothing. And I didn't even notice.

It's hard to believe, but entire store chains can disappear from consciousness, like MMMuffins. I'm pretty sure that at least once in the last twenty years, I asked myself, "hey, what ever happened to that MMMuffins place?" But on the other hand, I didn't even notice The It Store was gone until a few years back when I saw it on a Facebook meme of stores that have disappeared. They used to be a regular mall feature, now they're so forgotten they don't even have a Wikipedia entry.

So let's spare a thought for some of the chains that have disappeared unceremoniously from our malls:

Randy River

Northern Elements/Getaway

Big Steel Man

Bata

Thrifty's

Cotton Ginny

Coconut Joe

Lewiscraft

Leasure World

Direct Film

Smart Set

Put On My Thinking Cap

Normally, I’m a believer in the concept of the salary cap. But I’m now noticing things that are kind of unexpected. Basketball has a salary cap, but teams are thinking more and more in terms of building through big fee agent signings. The most extreme example being when the Knicks traded young superstar Kristaps Porziņģis so they’d have more money to go free agent shopping this summer. In contrast, Baseball has no salary cap, yet dozens of free agents remain unsigned at the start of spring training because there’s little interest from teams.

How did we get here? Mainly it is a result of the NBA’s relatively low maximum on individual salaries. That is, it’s low compared to the total salary cap, and the small number of players on a basketball team, and the very small number of players who make a difference in a superstar-focused sport. It’s a real distortion of the market: if salaries were free (other than the limit of the salary cap) star players would be paid much more than they are now: In the NBA, a superstar is a huge advantage, so teams would be paying large percentages of their cap for one player to build around. That would drive the salaries of star players through the roof, with the result that no team would be able to fit more than one or maybe two under their cap. Super teams with many superstars wouldn’t exist.

The irony is that now things are looking bad for small teams. As others have pointed out, if a player can only make so much money from salary, then that means there’s a big financial advantage to play on a team that’s either in a big city or is already successful, so they’ll have more chances to do endorsements and supplement the salary. So strangely, while the salary cap may help smaller-market-teams compete, artificially keeping the maximum salary low is hurting them.

It’s a very different dynamic than other sports: in baseball and hockey, there’s a huge emphasis on youth. In baseball, young players are a way for small-market teams to compete without breaking the bank, and in hockey, it’s a way to get value out of the cap. You wouldn’t see anything like the Knicks trading a young star to get cap space so they can sign veterans. On the other end of that trade, people were complimenting the Mavericks on getting two great young players to build around. But I’m wondering what good that is. They may end up getting crushed by a hastily-assembled team of veterans.

Meanwhile, baseball had its own strangeness: no one wants to sign free agents. That’s strange in a sport that used to be dominated by rich teams with expensive players. Many people are blaming this on collusion, a conspiracy of the owners agreeing not to sign anyone. That's happened before, so it's hardly tinfoil hat territory.

But I have to disagree. I don't have much faith in the morality of team owners either, I just think there's a simpler explanation. The fact is that with modern statistics, we know that a good-but-not-great player will only add two or three wins for a team. And while it’s true that more wins generally means more fans (and thus more money) a small improvement like that won’t make a big enough difference to be financially worth it. Say you’re a .500 team: signing one of these “good” free agents would mean spending $10 million a year to go from 81-81 to 83-79. There’s no way that makes financial sense. Sure, you could pay for several of these players to improve the team enough to get into the playoffs, but then you’re talking about spending about $50 million a year just to get into the wild card game.

Baseball’s high costs and hard-to-make playoffs have lead to an all-or-nothing approach by the teams, in which they either spend big to make a great team, or emphasize the farm system to slowly groom a winner. That means the market for mid-range free agents is very small. Teams waiting for the youngsters to develop don’t want free agents because they aren’t trying to win at the moment, and once those youngsters are ready, they don’t want many free agents, because they have a team full of young, talented, and inexpensive players. And the few rich teams have spent most of their money on superstars, and have little need for good players. So if you’re a good player at age 30, there simply aren’t many people looking for your services.

So now the business of sports is even stranger than it normally is. Basketball has a salary cap but may be about to grind into a no-parity rut, while Baseball has no salary cap, but is very frugal, but still has no parity. And I continue to think that the NHL may actually have the best system.

Find An Ending, But Don’t Cheat

There’s a concept in storytelling called deus ex machina , which is when a conflict is resolved by an unreasonably lucky occurrence, rather than the characters overcoming the obstacle. I first became aware of it when I took drama in high school. It stuck out for a few reasons:

• It sounds cool in a way that other Latin phrases like habeas corpus and carpe diem don’t.
• It sounds even cooler when you realize it literally means “god from a machine”
• It allows you to condemn stories for a reason that would be too hard to explain otherwise. So many people want a happy ending and don’t care how it comes about, and it’s a struggle to explain why these happy endings aren’t satisfying. But now I can just say it’s a deus ex machina, and they say, "huh?" But I feel better.

But I have to say to science fiction creators: please stop using this in titles. It started in 2000 with the cyberpunk video game Deus Ex. Okay, that made sense, since the blurring of humanity and machines gives the phrase new meaning, with the idea that what was once thought of as exclusively divine could now come from a machine. But then there was a movie about humanoid robots a few years ago called Ex Machina, essentially copying the same idea, but leaving out a different word to sound original.

Now I see that there’s another game coming out called Daemon x Machina. Sure, that’s funny and appropriate to the subject matter (battling giant robots.) And old-school Unix users will appreciate the use of “daemon.” But really, can’t we come up with some new ways to describe stories involving robots, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics? It’s becoming a cliche and something should end it. I don’t even care if it’s something unanticipated that comes from out of nowhere.

Lotto Super 7

All sports have a physical component to them. We tell ourselves it's all about heart, effort, practice, character, hussle, intangibles. It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. But we know that those things can only do so much. All things being equal, I'm betting on the big dog.

But no sport has that physical side shoved in our face quite like basketball. There are examples of small people in the game, but there are far more examples of tall folks that clearly don’t have the athletic ability of most professional athletes, but are nevertheless able to make meaningful contributions in the game.

So I wondered: if you were seven feet tall, what are your chances of making it into professional basketball. I mean, it's clear that there are plenty of tall players in the sport that could never make it without their extra vertical advantage, but how much of a difference does that make?

I googled the question, and got a reference to a widely quoted article claiming that it's 17%. However, this other post points out that there are a few problems with that:

1. The calculation is based on comparing the number of Americans who are seven-feet tall or more, with the number of seven-footers in the NBA. But most of the seven-footers in the NBA are not American.
2. The heights you see quoted in NBA statistics are measured with shoes on, while most people measure heights without shoes. So really, there are hardly any seven-foot-tall players in the NBA.

So we don't really know the percentage, but it's probably on the order of 1%. In contrast, another study looked at Americans 6'6" to 6'8" (or, Michael Jordan to Lebron James) and they had a 0.07% chance of being in the NBA. And among all Americans, less than one-in-a-million are in the NBA. So whatever the number, a seven-footer is orders-of-magnitude more likely to make the NBA.

But still, it’s not like they’re just grabbing random tall people and shoving them on the court. Even among the tallest, they’re getting particularly athletic people. But the standards are not nearly as astronomical as it is for your average person. To put it in perspective, in my high school, there were about a hundred boys in each grade. Imagine you just had to be the best athlete in your grade, and that would be enough to get drafted into the NBA. That’s essentially the situation for a seven-foot-tall individual.

But when you think about it, their lot isn’t really any different from anyone else. After all, if you were, say, six-feet tall and wanted to make the NBA, you’d have to be blessed with your own set of physical gifts, like speed and agility. But in that case, your genetic traits are not nearly as obvious or measurable. And they can be augmented by exercise and practice, allowing us to believe that their success is more than just a genetic lottery. But basketball’s big men shove it in our face that their ticket to success came largely from their DNA.