Links to the Present: Cover Boy and Trade Deadline Blues

2015-02-19 Off By Nate Smith

The trade deadline is coming (3:00 PM EST), and the Cavs are looking quiet. As Jason Lloyd reports for the Beacon Journal, Cleveland looks like they’ll make any roster additions through free agency rather than through trades.

Barring a dramatic change in the final few hours, today’s 3 p.m. trade deadline is expected to pass without the Cavs making any deals, multiple league sources told the Beacon Journal. The Cavs are still trying, but weren’t close on any trades early Thursday morning and losing faith they could get anything done, league sources said.

Ideally they would still like to upgrade the point guard position and add another big, but they are simply left with too few trade assets and no cap flexibility after a flurry of recent moves.

In other Cavs related news, Alonzo Gee has just been traded again.

Former Cavalier consultant Ben Alamar wrote this fascinating piece on analytics and the NBA for ESPN the Magazine. He talks of pitching Kevin Love and Russell Westbrook to Sam Presti, and ranking Brook Lopez as a bust “(hey, you can’t win ’em all.)”

[After the draft,] Presti came out with a big smile on his face, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations. You got your guy.” I had been hammering the group for the previous two weeks with emails lobbying for Westbrook. I’ll never know whether those arguments made a difference, but it was thrilling to be on the same side as the decision that Presti made.

But Alamar argues that the NBA is falling behind the curve again.

So, after five seasons with the Sonics and Thunder, I hooked on with the Cavaliers. The process of being trusted was much quicker in Cleveland. Several members of the team’s front office were actually eager to hear what the analytics said.

But soon a new challenge emerged: Starting in the 2013-14 season, SportVU cameras were installed in every NBA arena. The amount of data available to teams suddenly grew from a pond to an ocean. Think about it: Those cameras capture the coordinates of 10 players plus the ball 25 times every second. That’s a vast amount of data. As a result, the race to unlock the secrets of the SportVU requires a much higher level of skill than what was needed when I first started working for the Sonics. In the beginning, anyone with advanced spreadsheet skills could probably add value to a front office. Now, though, deep statistical programming skills, along with advanced computer science knowledge, are needed to create value. These are skills for which companies such as Google and Facebook pay quite handsomely.

Alamar relays the story of his top intern earning a masters degree in statistics who turned down a job offer with the Cavs for $35,000 per year to take a job paying double that with a venture capital firm.

Teams spend top dollar on the very best head coaches and general managers, spend millions on practice facilities — even the last guy off the bench — but when it comes to analytics, there is no commitment to hiring the best of the best.

Finally, and most importantly, Kevin Love is on the cover of this month’s GQ. He’s interviewed in video by Mark Anthony Green and photographed by Peggy Sirota. I’m going to have to hear about this article from my wife all week. She’s in Love with Kevin. This is only going to make it worse.

Kevin Love stands up and something changes. He’s six ten and walks with that well-rehearsed swagger that all ballplayers have. You see a dozen women swoon as he moves past and you remember: Oh yeah, this guy looks like a Calvin Klein model.

Then you watch him very easily drop twenty-five points and grab fifteen rebounds and you remember why LeBron James personally picked Love to join him in Cleveland this season. When you read about him and the bombshell actress he’s dating, Cody Horn (Channing Tatum’s girlfriend in Magic Mike), you start to think completely differently about the name Kevin Love. It’s a name that’s less ironic and more badass. Like John Shaft.

In this article and video interview Kevin discusses Taco Bell mexi-nuggets, Frank Sinatra, and bad facial hair. Enjoy.

Share