Dave's Verse

I got into this a bit in my recap of the Spurs series. I wanted to go more in depth with what we should do this offseason. Here's a list of free agents for the next two years: http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/8589693/nba-free-agents-2013-2014 Austin Daye and Jon Leuer are restricted free agents. They didn't play much. So I wouldn't think they would get a lot of interest from teams. But given a reasonable matching price, I wouldn't mind bringing them back. They are tall and can shoot decently. There can be value in that. Our unrestricted free agents are Tony Allen, Jerryd Bayless and Keyon Dooling. Bayless has a player option and only has 2 years at $3 million left on his deal. So regardless of his production he isn't killing the team's cap situation. He can come or go, just like his streaky shooting. I don't see a reason to play Dooling ahead of Tony Wroten, who we've invested more in. I love Tony Allen and even with his age I'd be up for giving h...

What a crappy way to end a really good season. That was close to a dominant performance by the Spurs. All of the games were close aside from game 1. But the Spurs are clearly the better team, both in regards to having the better players and the better coach. This series wasn't complicated. The Grizz like to throw the ball down to ZBo and Gasol in the post and play really good defense. The Spurs like to let Tony Parker run the pick and roll where he gets an open shot for himself or finds an open 3 point shooter. And they play an underrated defense. Those are their strengths. The weakness of the Grizz was 3 point shooting, both making them and defending them. The Spurs don't really have any offensively (maybe Duncan not being a low post player anymore). And defensively they were probably not great at defending the post, which everyone thought the Grizz could exploit. Given all of that most people thought this would be a close series, going 6 or 7 games. So what happened? The ...

I was going to name this the gif of the day. But this is too epic for such a title. This is one of the (possibly the ) best gifs I've ever seen. That comes from a pajiba biz break post where Henry Cavill says he would like to see a Batman and Superman team up movie. Uh, seconded. That would be incredible. I'm not sure how that movie wouldn't completely destroy the box office. It would be so huge that the Friday it opens it might be declared a national holiday so that everyone could get off work to go see it. Make this happen Warner Bros. Speaking of Batman, I had an idea I posted on pajiba regarding the Batman franchise. They are obviously going to keep making Batman movies. If for some reason they pull another Schumaker and screw things up, I have an idea for them that they could do in about 20 years. By that time Christian Bale will be about 60. You could go full "The Dark Knight Returns" within the continuity of the The Dark Knight Rises story. John Blak...

Obama gave a wide-ranging speech about the "war on terror" today. I'll send you to the always awesome Charles Pierce for some reaction to the speech . I don't expect this speech to have much, if any, effect on policy. Congress won't all the sudden be convinced to close Gitmo. What this speech seemed like to me was a way for Obama to try and frame his legacy. As he acknowledged, the topics he discussed can be very difficult issues. The answers aren't clear cut in many cases, though less clear cut than Obama wants to admit. For instance, he suggests that he has to send drones to kill people because someone sitting around thinking about killing people is the same as (or similar enough to) someone actively killing people. I think that's kind of ridiculous, or at least ridiculous to conclude that you need to kill that person instead of arresting them. Anyway, I'm not sure why he chose today to make this speech. But unless he has learned nothing the past...

That was a weird game. The first half played out almost exactly how game 1 did, with the Grizzlies playing poorly on both ends of the floor and with ZBo looking like he didn't put in his contacts. But ZBo got things going in the 2nd half and the Spurs finally stopped making shots in the 4th quarter. That allowed us to grind back into the game and tie it up. But our offensive problems showed up again in OT and we couldn't pull out what would have been a pretty crazy comeback. The fact that we took this game to OT doesn't have me very optimistic about the series. We were still significantly outplayed for most of the game. And we still haven't really figured out the Spurs' offense. I thought they still got too many open 3s. They just regressed to the mean and only hit a solid 36% instead of over 50%. We still can't figure out the pick and roll. I don't think we will completely stop Tony Parker. He's just too good. But I would like to see us go under every...

Apparently the creator of the "gif" says it's pronounced "jif". That's bullshit. I'm going with the hard g and I don't care what the consensus is. Today's gif comes from Dustin Rowles at warmingglow.com (he also runs pajiba.com). He celebrated the awesomeness that was the show Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23. Here's one of my favorites from his list: The unaired episodes from the second season are on abc.com. I plan on spending the weekend watching them and lamenting the loss of a great show. And then maybe I'll get weird and play some Mario Kart.

Game 1 against the Spurs was almost as ugly as it gets. ZBo had one of his weird off nights that he has from time to time. Surely that won't happen again. And even though we played horrible defense, the Spurs aren't likely to shoot quite as well as they did. So I'm not terribly concerned about this series yet. But there are some problems we have to deal with. And they weren't things we didn't know about coming into the series. Here's what I said after we beat the Thunder: The only weakness I see in this team is 3 point shooting on both ends. Defensively we leave 3 point shooters open too much. Late last night we left Derek Fisher (I'm not sure why he was in the game. But thanks Scott Brooks) wide open several times. That happened throughout the series. And that could be a big problem facing either the Spurs or Warriors, both of whom shoot the 3 very well. Offensively we don't have many good 3 point shooters. Conley is pretty good. But Allen and Prince...

I came across this on my Tumblr feed and had to share it. I'm not sure Bruce Wayne is an introvert by nature. It could be because of his childhood trauma that he seems to be an introvert. But however he got there, it's one of the many reasons I love the character and can identify with him. Speaking of Batman, the Bitter Script Reader tweeted this story of the real story of how Batman was created. Bill Finger was a friend of collaborator with Bob Kane. He came up with a lot of the ideas for Batman but Kane and the comic industry screwed him out of credit. I feel bad for Finger for not getting his due as what looks like the major force in creating one of the greatest characters ever. But at least he is now going to get his due from one of his biggest fans.

I'll admit to having a thing for Sorkin-like political speeches. Sorkin is the liberal id. He has his politicians speak the way we want to hear them speak, not in the political BS-talk they all use. Even the Congressman I worked for and admire in part because he speaks his mind more often than most politicians speaks politically sometimes. Grad school pounded some of this out of me. I understand that politicians are very concerned with reelection and are thus very risk averse. Many of them think it's just not worth it to possibly say something that could get them in trouble. A lot of them still get into trouble when they are trying to be careful. But there are times when not only do I think the blunt truth, spoken in "real" talk, would not only satisfy the liberal id, but would actually be beneficial to the politician's agenda (be it policy or reelection). We kind of saw this with Obama after Senate Republicans filibustered gun legislation requiring background c...

As with a lot of tv I was late to New Girl. I guess I just assume everything on network tv is crap unless I'm repeatedly told otherwise. Pajiba.com finally beat the drum for New Girl long and hard enough for me to give it a try. I'm glad I did, which means I now regret that I've come to it so late. I've only seen about the last half of this season. So I don't know much of the backstory between Nick and Jess and CeCe and Schmidt. But I liked Nick, Jess and Schmidt enough right from the start to care about their relationships. I hope I'm missing something with CeCe because I'm not really feeling her. I mention those two relationships because they were the big focus on this half of the season, and especially the season finale. CeCe, for some reason I'm still not sure of, decided to have an arranged married. We thought her and Schmidt had moved on from each other. But magically, during Schmidt and Winston's sabotage of the wedding, CeCe realized that s...

When we beat the Clippers and were set to face the Thunder without Russell Westbrook I thought we had a good chance to win. But I didn't think we would beat a good team in 5 games. Westbrook is a good player. But they are still a very good team, in large part because Kevin Durant is a great player, just behind LeBron James. And even though the Griz won in 5 games, all 5 were close games at the end. We were definitely the better team. But they weren't far off. The Griz won the same way they always do, with grit and grind. That means throwing it down in the post to Gasol and Randolph, or Gasol in the high post. Or it means running screens for Mike Conley and letting him create something. Defensively it means letting Tony Allen do what he does best and having Gasol guard the paint in case someone gets by Allen, Conley or Prince. And once the shot goes up we have pretty good rebounders at each position, a very good one in Randolph. The only weakness I see in this team is 3 poin...

Game 1 hurt. No lead in the NBA is safe. But when you have a lead in the 4th quarter after playing better than the other team the whole game you should expect to win. The obvious criticism from game 1 was Tony Allen playing less than two minutes in the 4th quarter. I don't think this was as completely unreasonable as most seem to. Lionel's logic seemed to be that Quincy was having a good game offensively and Tayshaun is a better defensive matchup on Kevin Durant. So putting Tony in would deprive us from a good 3 point shooter or put Tony in the very tough position of guarding Durant. I don't think that logic is totally misguided. But while Tony Allen isn't the 3 point shooter Quincy Pondexter is or is as tall and long as Tayshaun Prince is, he is a better overall player than both. At worst he should be splitting time with one or both of those players. I don't see why Tony or Quincy couldn't guard Durant for a while. Anyway, the point is that Tony Allen should ...

I went to a wedding this weekend for a longtime childhood friend of mine. A lot of people I went to K-12 with were there and it was nice catching up with them. And aside from the religious nature of the ceremony (along with the gendered nature of it and the digs at gay marriage), it was nice to see people get married and be happy. One common theme in my talks with old friends (who are all the same age as me) was how hard it is in today's economy. We all graduated at about the same time and we've all had a hard time finding good work. Because of that, many of us still have student loan debt and still live with our parents in order to compensate for that and low wages. The big reason I haven't been blogging basically at all lately is that I've been doing another unpaid internship (though I at least got a gas stipend this time). That's been occupying most of my mental energy when it comes to politics. I just don't feel like blogging when I've been thinking ab...