PaulKatcher.com

Photos: Blizzard '09 in Central Park

Heavy snowstorms present opportunities for great photos, and I captured a few today around Central Park. Unfortunately, heavy snowstorms also present opportunities to hunker down in a bar and stay warm, and so I didn't wake early enough to hit the park before it got really crowded and much of the snow got trampled.

Moneyball Has Come to the NBA

Despite the Knicks' sucktitude, I'm trying to get more into the NBA to fill my NFL-to-MLB sports fix, in a time when college hoops gets progressively less interesting with one-and-done stars.

I'm more than halfway through Bill Simmons' 700-page The Book of Basketball, which weighs the merits of players and eras and illuminates the NBA as a true team sport, where individual skills, circumstances and, ultimately, value vary significantly from one 18-ppg, 7-rpg guy to another. Think less MLB and more NFL, where you can argue what Barry Sanders would have done with Emmitt Smith's offensive mates or why a shutdown corner shouldn't be measured solely by INTs, because fewer balls come his way.

Simmons' book mentions a site called 82games.com as a resource for the new age of sports numbers crunching. I went over there and — holy shit — there's a lot of data being processed to determine the value of NBA players.

Just look at the player page for David Lee of the New York Knicks. As far as I can tell, he's a 18-point scorer who grabs 10 rebounds per game and serves as a negative for the Knicks for the second season in a row. Hence, a key to any game for the Knicks should be to keep their leading rebounder and second-leading scorer off the court! (Another key would be to prevent fans from killing themselves, which might be an even tougher task if LeBron snubs us, which I fully expect.)

I hope to be a more sophisticated NBA fan by the Super Bowl, which is when I go into serious sports depression (two straight months without an NFL snap or MLB pitch). By then I should have a firmer grasp on players' assets and liabilities on both ends of the court. And when I see a capable low-post scorer defend like the Venus de Milo, I'll understand better why an 18-10 guy is an overall liability.

(82games.com's Commentary section links to dozens of articles that'll make your brain hurt for a week.)