Basketball Links

Two wonderful basketball links for you this All-Star weekend.

The first is to a fabulous article by a Clarion Content fave, Michael Lewis the author of the widely acclaimed baseball analysis book called, Moneyball. It popularized a new way of running baseball franchises and ushered a new era of general managers like Theo Epstein, Brian Cashman, Mark Shapiro and Dan O'Dowd. The interesting thing is that Moneyball isn't even Lewis's best book. As we mentioned in linking to a masterful financial article of his a few months back, Michael Lewis's best book is Liar's Poker, about the excess of Wall Street way back in the 80's. This long article from the New York Times is an analysis of why Shane Battier is such an effective basketball player; why do his teams win so frequently. Lewis seeks to understand what is it about Battier's game (statistically) and persona (sociologically) that makes this so.

The other is a link to an annual article by the Clarion Content's favorite NBA writer Bill Simmons. In this annual column Simmons ranks the top forty players in the NBA by trade value. It is a lot of fun. He allows himself plenty of sarcastic asides and cultural references. He also lists the twenty-five worst contracts in the league. This is one of the surest places for Knicks fans to judge our relative improvement. The Knicks have only two of the twenty-five worst contracts in the Association, down from five last year.

*note technically Simmons didn't list Marbury by the Knicks are paying him $21 million not to play this year.