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There is plenty to appreciate in this, the first in a weekly series of of Spurs-related news highlights we’ll call, Hump Wednesday. From the Associated Press (“Spurs beat Pacers 101-79 for first 4-0 start“): The San Antonio Spurs have won four NBA championships, made 32 playoff appearances and captured 18 division titles in their 40-year history. Yet for all their success, they had never opened a season with four straight…
I have two buddies that I play music with. We’re all runners. One is an ultra-marathoner, another is a marathoner, and I’m a half-marathoner. We all approach our training and races differently. While we’re all trying to maximize our abilities and finish in the quickest times possible, we have different expectations and realities about how that can happen. At 50 miles, a 7-minute mile probably isn’t too realistic. However, as…
There’s a neat little trick in songwriting and performance: rather than devising a complicated melody, you compose a rather simple one, and then make the song “move” around that simple melody. Just a simple 3 or 4 note (or even less) line, and then change the chords underneath that line, over and over. By keeping the overriding melody simple, you can create a line that will live in the mind…
And just like that, I’m back in. Devoting so much time and energy to the Spurs during the regular season, I tend to completely disassociate myself from the Spurs and the NBA in the off-season. There’s a lot of meaningless noise in the off-season. And in particular with this Spurs team, returning almost the exact same team from last year, there isn’t a whole lot to learn until that first…
Zach Lowe at Grantland argued that there are only four, but that was before the OKC Thunder traded James Harden to the Houston Rockets. So, make that just three legitimate title contenders — the Heat, the Lakers, and your favorite team in silver and black. From Grantland.com (“Who are the NBA’s top title contenders this season? And who’s trailing the pack?”) : It’s fine if you want to slide them…
As we near the tip off to this season, I can’t help but be thrilled to watch some basketball. No one hates baseball more than I do and if it weren’t for fantasy football, I wouldn’t watch that either. The Olympics are cool, I guess, but the level of intensity and drama doesn’t match what comes out of the David Stern Basketball Association. But more than that, I am rotating…
Where did the offseason go? One minute we were crying in our beer after watching the Oklahoma City Thunder beat our Spurs in four straight playoff games. The next, we were watching Manu (Argentina), Tiago (Brazil), Tony, Boris and Nando (France) play in the London Olympics. (Way to bring home the Gold, Dream Team 2012!) And now, here we are, in the midst of the World Series, seven weeks into…
The recency effect is a cognitive bias wherein we assign too much significance to an observation that occurred recently in comparison to earlier observations or to the trend represented by the entire record of observations. Or, in terms of the San Antonio Spurs, we remember the last 4 games of their season, and not the 20 (or 45) that preceded it. Flaming out so spectacularly to a team that seemed…
63. 36. The perfect mirroring of the two halves perfectly mirrored the 2 distinct phases of this series. For 24 minutes (and 2 games), the Spurs were the Spurs we’ve seen all season, running an immaculate offense, getting every shot they wanted (and hitting a good portion of them) and running roughshod over whatever the Thunder threw at them. With the building a complete ruckus, the Spurs came out quickly…
Got ‘em right where we want them. The rush to crown the Spurs champs after 10 playoff wins was premature; the rush to bury them and claim the Thunder as the Western powerhouse for the next decade is probably likewise premature. The truth is, 5 games have been played between these two teams, 3 have been insanely close and contested, 1 has been kind of close but mostly controlled by…
