{"id":93392,"date":"2016-01-12T13:05:04","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T18:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93392"},"modified":"2016-01-12T14:05:43","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T19:05:43","slug":"in-a-dark-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/12\/in-a-dark-wood\/","title":{"rendered":"In a Dark Wood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assessing the season at the halfway point; what\u2019s going on with the 76ers?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ishmael Smith, newly acquired by the 76ers. Photo via Twitter<\/p><\/div>\n

The midpoint of the NBA season comes a little after the turn of the calendar year. As we settle into the new promises we\u2019ve made to ourselves, basketball teams are busy evaluating how the promises they made to themselves over the summer are going. \u201cPromises\u201d isn\u2019t always the right word: some teams, as we\u2019ll see, make something more like wagers<\/em>, hoping to cash in on a shot in the dark. But the best teams traffic in promises not unlike New Year\u2019s resolutions: promises to maximize talents, to take better care of themselves, to take advantage of the small window of success they\u2019ve been granted.<\/p>\n

Are these teams keeping their promises? Well, there\u2019s little surprise at the top of the league, where the answer is mostly yes. The Warriors and the Cavs, the two teams that played in last year\u2019s finals, are at the top of their respective conferences. The Spurs, eternal contenders, are only three games behind the Warriors for the best record in the league, and they have the largest average margin of victory. The Oklahoma Thunder have Kevin Durant back and two of the five best players in the game on their roster, and some appealing supplementary pieces. The Los Angeles Clippers are playing as well as they have all season, even with their star Blake Griffin on the mend\u2014that said, they\u2019re in a bit of a rut. They\u2019ll win fifty-plus games again this season, yes, and they\u2019ll be a relatively tough out in the playoffs, but there\u2019s too much not quite there in their game to see them going much further than that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The NBA playoffs have the highest ceiling in all of sports. Only ten NBA franchises have won titles over the past thirty-six years<\/a>. You\u2019ll go a decade, sometimes longer, seeing the same teams there. It\u2019s a long season, and it\u2019s hard for a flawed team to miracle its way through one best-of-seven series after another against the best teams in the league. Ball don\u2019t lie.<\/p>\n

Some teams have learned to live with this. The Bulls, once an unshakeable champion, have settled into the role of permanent (and yet not real) threat. They\u2019re under the ceiling. Same for the Memphis Grizzlies and Dallas Mavericks. The Milwaukee Bucks were on the cusp of contending, but something hasn\u2019t clicked with them. The stifling defense they played last year has gone up in smoke. Their coach, Jason Kidd, looked around and decided to get hip surgery and take the rest of the year off. It\u2019s almost as if signing a defensively challenged center to anchor your defense\u2014as they did when they gave Greg Monroe a big contract this summer<\/a>\u2014would make your defense worse. Of course, it\u2019s not all Monroe\u2019s fault, but it was strange to see so many pundits praise Milwaukee for signing Monroe. But basketball punditry\u2014what to say? It is what it is.<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn Nets are awful, and they just fired their coach, Lionel Hollins. They also reassigned their general manager, Billy King. He must\u2019ve done something<\/em> well to remain employed by a team he\u2019s razed to the ground, but that thing will remain a mystery. Allegedly, he\u2019ll help hire his replacement. This new architect-arsonist position the Nets have devised is rare and innovative. Good for them.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, shed a tear for fans of the Philadelphia 76ers as they spend the remainder of the season watching their team actually try to win an occasional game. In 2013, the 76ers hired Sam Hinkie as general manager and president of basketball operations. Since then, they\u2019ve won nineteen games one season and eighteen the next; this time they\u2019re on track to win negative seven.<\/p>\n

Okay, that last part isn\u2019t true: the Sixers are currently 4\u201336. But if you told Hinkie that his team would win extra Ping-Pong balls in the draft lottery for having less than zero wins, trust that he\u2019d find a way to do it. Philadelphia\u2019s fans have been told to trust the process, even though the process works like this: trade away any talent that will bring in assets in the form of future draft picks; stockpile those draft picks while cultivating a roster utterly devoid of talent; stockpile even more assets while drafting players who have the same position so they can\u2019t play on the court together and learn to win (which would ruin the bottom line); draft a talented but injured player so you can continue to lose while you wait for his reemergence; hope that the sheer number of assets you\u2019ve accumulated leads somehow to discovering a generational talent. This is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and, having failed, maxing out your credit cards to buy more hay. And yet fans have kept the faith. There\u2019s something poignant about their position. It\u2019s like Lear howling in the storm. Heartrending, yes, but also senseless.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a glimmer of performance art in Hinkie\u2019s appetite for destruction<\/a>: How far can he tear this down? What happens when you refuse to use any emotional intelligence at all to manage a sports team<\/a>? At what point will the bottom line\u2014which, let\u2019s not kid ourselves, is revenue\u2014become an issue? This last appears to have moved the needle in Philadelphia. They\u2019ve become so bad that when they play on the road, the opposition has trouble drawing crowds. It\u2019s one thing to affect your own bottom line, but the Sixers have dive-bombed into the pockets of other NBA owners. The Sixers last month hired the longtime NBA executive Jerry Colangelo as \u201cchairman of basketball operations.\u201d He\u2019s as close to a Don in the league as there is. Meanwhile, Hinkie is still on the job. So what does it mean when you\u2019re the \u201cgeneral manager and president of basketball operations\u201d and your employer hires a \u201cchairman of basketball operations\u201d? The answer to that question may lie in Colangelo\u2019s second title: special advisor to managing partner. Any questions?<\/p>\n

Dante Alighieri, ousted from his position of influence in Florence, began the\u00a0Inferno<\/em> in exile at the midpoint of his life in a dark forest:<\/p>\n

\n

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
<\/em>mi ritrovai per una selva oscura<\/em>,
ch\u00e9 la diritta via era smarrita<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or, roughly, \u201cMidway in our lives, I found myself in a dark wood because the way straight ahead had been lost.\u201d In\u00a0Philadelphia, a lot of\u00a0the Sixers are probably saying roughly the same thing.<\/p>\n

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the<\/em>\u00a0Daily\u2019s basketball columnist. His<\/em>\u00a0second book of poems,\u00a0<\/em>Heaven<\/a>,\u00a0was published earlier this year.\u00a0<\/em>He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN<\/small>\/Joyce Osterweil Award, a 2013 Whiting Writers\u2019 Award, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Assessing the season at the halfway point; what\u2019s going on with the 76ers? The midpoint of the NBA season comes a little after the turn of the calendar year. As we settle into the new promises we\u2019ve made to ourselves, basketball teams are busy evaluating how the promises they made to themselves over the summer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":457,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20117],"tags":[382,20750,18238,20747,20749,20122,20746,1115,5009,20748],"class_list":["post-93392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-dallas-mavericks","tag-dante-alighieri","tag-ishmael-smith","tag-memphis-grizzlies","tag-milwaukee-bucks","tag-philadelphia-76ers","tag-playoffs","tag-rowan-ricardo-phillips","tag-sam-hinkie"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAbandon All Hope: Rowan Ricardo Phillips on the 76ers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 12, 2016 \u2013 Assessing the season at the halfway point; what\u2019s going on with the 76ers?The midpoint of the NBA season comes a little after the turn of the calendar\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/12\/in-a-dark-wood\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In a Dark Wood by Rowan Ricardo Phillips\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 12, 2016 \u2013 Assessing the season at the halfway point; 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