Eugene Fischer

Tag: Kawhi Leonard

Kawhi Has a Great Idea For a Novel, Just Needs You To Write It and Split the Money Fifty-fifty

I mean, not quite. But it’s close. Kawhi Leonard used to have an endorsement deal with Nike. Now he has an endorsement deal with New Balance. Also, Nike and Kawhi are suing each other, both claiming authorship of the logo that was on Kawhi’s stuff from Nike. The linked article has an image:

corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture

A Klawmedy of Errors

—Act 1—

Nike: [Gives Kawhi a swimming pool full of money for seven years of endorsement rights.]

Kawhi: Cool, thanks. Maybe my logo could be, like, my hand, and also my initials, and also the number 2 that I wear on my sports shirt when I am being a professional athlete?

Nike: Sure, we employ designers who can do something with that.

Designer: [Spends years in training, maybe gets a degree in graphic design, builds a portfolio, is hired by Nike to create brand marks that will be worth millions of dollars. Uses this expertise to turn Kawhi’s vague notion into an actual professional logo.]

Nike: Cool, thanks. Here’s your paycheck, we own the logo now.

Designer: Yes, that is my job.

Nike: [Spends more money marketing Kawhi and making the logo recognizable, recoups that money by selling products featuring the logo.]

—ACT 2: Seven Years Later—

Kawhi: The contract for selling products featuring my logo has expired. I am arguably the best at my sport in the world now, so a new contract will require thirty-three swimming pools full of money.

Nike: That is too many swimming pools.

Kawhi: I must leave where I am and go to a new place.

New Balance: [Gives Kawhi all of the money pools.]

Kawhi: Now New Balance is allowed to sell products featuring the exact logo that Nike paid a designer to create and spent the past seven years marketing.

Nike: Oh Kawhi, you are such a joker.

Nike & Kawhi: [Both laugh because Kawhi made a very good joke. The laughter sounds entirely natural.]

—End—

NBA Finals Roundup: Articles, Images, Videos

I’ve posted my own thoughts already, but after the jump is a whole mess of Spurs stuff that hit the internet after their championship.

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2014 NBA Champion San Antonio Spurs

HandsOnTrophyThere has never been a team like this before.

Over the course of the season–a season in which they had the best record in the NBA–no player averaged as many as 30 minutes a game. No player averaged as many as 20 points a game, though there were nine players that averaged between  8 and 17. The roster included eight international players, representing seven countries and four continents. They used 29 different starting lineups. There was a 38-year-old starter. There was a 22-year-old starter.

People talk about unselfish basketball. They talk about team-first basketball. They talk about the need to sacrifice individual achievement for the good of the group. These things are held up as lofty ideals that teams should strive for in an essentially star-driven league. But the 2013-2014 San Antonio Spurs embodied all of them, to such a degree that they will now be the measure by which such things are judged.

There were individual narratives, yes. There was Tim Duncan, becoming the first NBA player ever to start on championship teams in three different decades. There was Kawhi Leonard, emerging onto the national stage and joining Tim Duncan and Magic Johnson as the youngest Finals MVPs ever. There was Manu Ginobili, leading the Spurs comeback and silencing with thunderous authority those who said his career was over a year ago. There was Boris Diaw, waived by the worst team in NBA history, but a crucial starter on a championship team. There was Tony Parker, winning right next to him, the two of them best friends since they were teenagers in France, and coming right after they led their national team to Euroleague victory. There was Danny Green’s silky offense and suffocating defense, Patty Mills’s unfailing energy and scoring prowess, Tiago Splitter becoming the first Brazilian to ever win a ring. There’s R. C. Buford’s personnel, and Popovich’s plan. There were plenty of individual narratives.

But the most important narrative was the collective. This group of men suffered the most heartbreaking finals loss imaginable in 2013, and responded to it by trusting each other more, deferring to each other more, committing to the idea that the way forward was to forego personal accolades for team success. And when those choices led them again to the finals, against the same opponent, they produced the most crushing victory the NBA has ever seen. They set a record for shot-clock era Finals field goal percentage at 52.8%. They beat the Heat by an average 14 points a game, the largest average margin of victory in Finals history. They believed in each other, set records doing it, and emerged victorious.

I’ve run out of ways to describe how amazing this team was. But that hardly matters; they are a team for the ages. New things to say or no, I’ll be talking about them for the rest of my life.

Tweek in Review

This week’s favstarred tweets get a little basketball heavy towards the end.

https://twitter.com/BobbyRobertsPDX/statuses/475133887790981122
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NBA Finals: Spurs 3, Heat 1

Kawhi

Utter domination. The Spurs controlled the entire game and won by 21 points.  I’m running out of ways to express how well the Spurs are playing. So here is just a list of some facts.

  • Tim Duncan passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for most postseason minutes played in NBA history.
  • Tim Duncan also passed Magic Johnson for most postseason double-doubles in NBA history, with 158. That is nearly two full seasons worth of playoff double-doubles.
  • Tim Duncan is 38 years old.
  • Kawhi Leonard had 20 points, 14 rebounds, 3 assists, 3 steals, and 3 blocks. The last player to put up a line like that in a Finals game? Tim Duncan, in 2003.
  • Kawhi Leonard is only 22 years old.
  • Boris Diaw had 8 points, 9 rebounds, and 9 assists. Last player older than 30 to do that in a Finals game? Michael Jordan in 1997.
  • The Spurs join the 1960 Boston Celtics as the only teams in NBA history with three or more 15+ point wins in a Finals series.
  • The Spurs are the first team in NBA history to win two Finals road games by 19+ points.
  • The Spurs have won 11 playoff games by 15+ points, a record for a single postseason.
  • The Spurs are the first team in the shot clock era to shoot 55% or better from the floor in three games of a single Finals series.
  • Teams with a 3-1 series lead are 31-0 in NBA Finals history.

One more win. Go Spurs Go!

NBA Finals: Spurs 2, Heat 1

KawhiDuncan

I wasn’t able to watch this game live because I was stuck on a delayed airplane for the whole thing. But I watched it on video, and it was wonderful. The national coming-out party for Kawhi Leonard as a superstar. A fun note, given my comments on the BoxscoreGeeks show, is that Popovich declined to share what he said to Leonard before the game, citing, “family business.” Here’s the BBallBreakdown video for the game. As Arturo Galletti noted on Twitter, the Spurs are a couple missed free throws away from being up 3-0. On to game 4!

Two Tweeks in Review

I was at WisCon this weekend, so didn’t do my normal roundup of favorited tweets last friday. Here’s two weeks worth instead.


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Go Spurs Articles Go

The San Antonio Spurs, perennially underrepresented in sports media, have been so phenomenally good this year that people are actually starting to write articles about them. There have been several nice ones recently.

  • “Gregg Popovich’s Portable Program” by J. A. Adande. An analysis of how the Spurs’ culture has led to success, and why it is now the model that other teams–especially small-market teams–are attempting to emulate.
  • “21 Shades of Gray” by Chris Ballard. A long and detailed character study of Tim Duncan, which ran as a cover story for Sports Illustrated.
  • “The San Antonio Spurs Aren’t Boring” by Kevin Arnovitz. A detailed analysis of the Spurs “motion weak” offense, and why it is both so effective and so overlooked by NBA fans.
  • John Hollinger, who I generally dislike for crimes against meaningful statistics, had a pretty great Per-Diem column on the Spurs’ season. You have to pay ESPN to read it, unless you manage to find it mirrored somewhere or something.
  • “Kawhi Leonard not awed by finishing fourth in Rookie of the Year voting.” More specifically, he said, “I wasn’t really looking at the rankings. It’s an individual honor. Congratulations to whoever won it.” That is either the driest humor out of a rookie since, well, Tim Duncan, or Leonard is in fact a machine built to be a San Antonio Spur. Noteworthy also is that, of the top 12 vote-getters for ROY, Leonard is the only one still playing. Congrats to whoever won that individual award, indeed.

Some rare good sports reporting from the usual suspects. For statistically defensible analysis, though, the gold standard remains The Wages of Wins, with important statistical backup from NerdNumbers, The NBA Geek, and Baskteball-Reference.com