This resignation letter from former Philadephia 76ers GM Sam Hinkie is full of gems. Here are a couple.
On contrarianism in a short-sighted league when you’re always under the microscope:
To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse inputs. What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty...
A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble.
I’ve missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It’s been impressive that the NBA could pull this off and still put together a compelling end to the season when everyone assumed that it’d be an asterisk-ridden result with players and teams lost to COVID. It’s turned out to be incredibly well executed. The finals have nearly the same energy...
I’ve been a subscriber to Ben Falk’s excellent Cleaning the Glass blog for well over a year now. He’s a former front office analyst for the Sixers and Blazers that started this site with deep analyses on all aspects of basketball, with an eye for statistics and detail.
This is a great piece on what he’s doing with the site, moving from a purely subscription-based blog with a stats site alongside it to flipping that around: a stats and analytics portal with a splash of analysis writing. His work is excellent and worth...
The conference finals are set — Golden State and Portland in the west, Milwaukee and Toronto in the east. A great couple of matchups both likely to go deep. At halftime right now in Oakland, Portland’s keeping it close.
The east series will be a fun one, with Giannis and Kawhi going at it, each with spectacular playoffs going so far.
In other basketball news, earlier this evening New Orleans came away with the number 1 overall draft pick. With the Anthony Davis drama of a few months ago, and rumors of some sort of trade deal in the...
Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifying the point in a workflow where the optimum point of leverage sits for human interaction:
This means that a lot of the system design is around finding the right points of leverage to apply people to an automated system. Do you capture activity that’s already happening? Google began by using the links that already existed. Do you have...
This post is a bit late since the playoffs started last Sunday. This is the best time of year for sports where you’ve got the NBA in the postseason, MLB in full swing, Stanley Cup, PGA majors, and the final stretches of the Premier League and Champions League. So much to watch.
The NBA is especially dense for me, as a fan with no team allegiance. I try to watch as much as I can. But in these first couple rounds there are far too many games to catch all of. Must-watch series for me in round 1:
A fantastic one-on-one conversation between NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Bill Simmons from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:
Adam Silver is one of the most thoughtful, enthusiastic, and interesting guys in sports leadership. He clearly cares immensely about promoting the health of the league and players. This conversation ranges through mental health, NBA trade deadlines, G League, tampering, and more.
At least 3 or 4 times he references European soccer features as having potential in the NBA — relegation (a long shot), player academies,...
We’re right at the middle of the season, and this one’s been an exciting one so far. A couple teams at the top expected, a few others blew up out of nowhere. The Bucks in the east, Nuggets in the west, PG carrying OKC, Harden’s crazy streak the past month, Giannis’s nightly consistency, Embiid’s dominance. So many fun threads to follow.
I’m thoroughly enjoying League Pass again this year. I probably watch an average of 5-6 games a week, and sometimes more if there are good matchups and I have time. Between YouTube TV for the national broadcasts and League...
A fun travel post from the Mapillary team after FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam. A drive around Zanzibar collecting images for OpenStreetMap mapping. Also check out part 2 of the journey.
Singapore is an interesting experiment: a benevolent authoritarian government, small population, and limited geography to leverage and nurture. This documentary is a bit of a commercial for their plans for the future. Still some fun ideas that (if successful) other megacities could use to maintain quality of life with population growth.
The NBA season spun up a couple of weeks ago. With that, NBA Twitter and the NBA podcast scene is back in full force. Here are the feeds I try to keep up with:
The Ringer NBA Show is every weekday with a rotating cast of hosts, so you can always count on deep dives of nearly every game. And NBA Desktop is a must-watch each week. Hilarious.