(Fine, if you really want a Turkey Day post on hoops, last year we ran one on the best Thanksgiving Day performances since 1986... You can add Dwight Howard to that rebounding list, too, because he pulled down 14 vs. Washington last year. And if you want an Iverson fix, we ran a Keltner List on A.I. back in late February, which turned out to encompass all but the final few games of his career.)

"We narrowed it down to 108 of the most influential Blazers ever. However, keep the following disclaimers in mind: (1) We only included players that were on a Blazers roster for more than one season (sorry, Jim Barnett fan), (2) We included the front office and coaches (those that really mattered) and thus (3) were unable to mention every single Blazers' cubicle warrior, despite everyone's best effort to make the Portland Trail Blazers the one we've come to love and support unconditionally, just as (4) you'll have to come to support my being a die-hard Blazer fan and a big, fat, nerd.

But, this is chemistry. Regular old water? That's easy - H(2) + O - or, in this case Drexler(2) + Porter. Another example brings up three of my all-time favorite Blazers: Silver Nitrate - Ag + N + O(3), or - Aldridge + Petrovic + Porter."

Let's start with the perception of Bias in college... According to the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia, Bias was Bob Gibbons' 8th-ranked national prospect out of high school, eventually becoming a consensus All-America -- and highlight machine -- in 1986, his senior year. "He's maybe the closest thing to Michael Jordan to come out in a long time," Celtics scout Ed Badger said after watching Bias in six games. "I'm not saying he's as good as Michael Jordan, but he's an explosive and exciting kind of player like that." (Ed.'s note: I guess two years is a "long time"?) Here's another statement about the pre-draft scouting of Bias:

"...In scouting reports, it is customary to make player comparisons. Our basic report characterized Bias as a 'Michael Jordan type who was bigger, with a better jump shot, but who didn't go to the basket as well.' "

This is what Sports Illustrated was saying about Bias before the 1986 season:

"Lefty [Driesell] has always had excellent forwards, and he thinks senior Len Bias, the '84-85 ACC Player of the Year, is his best ever."

[...]

"The only question about the power-forward position is what Bias, the 6'8", 195-pound gamebreaker who grew up in Landover, just down the street from Cole Field House, will do for an encore. Last season he led the conference in scoring (19.0 points per game), and was an iron man, averaging 36.5 minutes. For a time, though, there was doubt that there would even be an encore. Rumors had Bias jumping to the pros, but he claims he never seriously considered leaving Maryland."

"'I didn't think I was that good,' Bias says. 'I wasn't ready. My game wasn't ready. I wanted to stay in school, get it perfected and get my degree.' Says Driesell, 'Last year Leonard probably would have been one of the top 10 picks in the draft. This year he could be number one. He didn't care whether he was one or one hundred. He wanted to stay in school.'"

And I found this passage from the '86 ACC tournament interesting:

"...6'10" [UNC] forward Joe Wolf crashed to the court early in the first half and had to be carried away with a sprained ankle. Though the Tar Heels led Maryland at the half 34-28, the numbers of the Terps' Bias were more meaningful: two baskets, five turnovers; pennies from heaven for Carolina. Soon, without Wolf, the Tar Heels could not guard Bias—he had 13 points and 10 rebounds after intermission—nor play their high-low double-post offense with Daugherty alone. Maryland scored 18 of the first 21 points in the second half for a 46-37 lead and later outran the losers 20-4, as Terp guards Keith Gatlin and Jeff Baxter lit up the Carolina backcourt for 39 points. A helpless Daugherty did not score a field goal for a stretch of 16½ minutes in the 85-75 Maryland victory..."

"Possessing the body of a Greek god and a surly demeanor, the 6'8" Bias has had a spectacular big-game year—41 points against Duke, 35 against Carolina, 30 against Georgia Tech. A sometime artist and a self-described born-again Christian—'Yeah,' says Doug Doughty of the Roanoke Times, 'from the church of the Holy Vicious Elbow'—Bias was MVP of the ACC tournament as a sophomore when Maryland won it in Greensboro in 1984. This season Driesell has called Bias 'the player of the universe' ..."

"Maryland had taken command [vs. Georgia Tech in the following game] at 47-41 on a Bias baseline jumper early in the second half, when the defensive effects of the Yellow Jackets' [John] Salley quickly were felt. Bias started missing shots, throwing away passes, looking frustrated..."

"Maryland went 9:23, and Bias himself more than 11 minutes, without a field goal as Georgia Tech rallied to take a 62-60 lead. But then Bias did jump over Salley, not to mention the moon, to tie the game with 12 seconds left."

Maryland ended up losing, though, when Duane Ferrell picked off Keith Gatlin's inbound pass with 5 seconds left in the game, dunking for the win as time expired. At any rate, you've got Daugherty and Bias establishing themselves as the clear-cut top two players in the 1986 Draft, and Daugherty was flat-out shut down by Maryland in that ACC Tournament game. (Not that Bias himself was above being stopped with physical play, however, as the Salley example showed.) We've seen a lot of Jordan comparisons to Bias, many of which were somewhat favorable for the Maryland product. With the draft approaching, were teams considering Bias the first "next Jordan"?

Well, come draft day Daugherty was taken 1st overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Bias was taken 2nd by the Celtics. Why Daugherty over Bias? Some people like to say they needed a center and that it was just a case of Sam Bowie Part II, but I'm not so sure... If Cleveland merely drafted out of need, why take Daugherty when you already had a former #6 overall pick at center in 26-year-old Mel Turpin, who had just posted a 16.4 PER and 6.0 Win Shares? And if they didn't need a stud forward, why was their starting PF the following season Hot Rod Williams, a rookie that they took 45th overall?

It actually looks to me like the Cavaliers thought they had a better future with the duo of Ron Harper and Brad Daugherty than with Bias. Now, there are two caveats: 1) teams overrated size back then, so if you considered Daugherty equal to Bias, you went with the big man; and 2) these are the Cavs we're talking about, the same team that had drafted Tim McCormick over John Stockton in 1984 & Charles Oakley over Karl Malone in 1985. But still, with Jordan tearing up the league already (the "God disguised as MJ" game had occurred just a few months before the '86 draft), wouldn't it stand to reason that teams might want to right the wrong of '84 and get a do-over if they truly thought Bias was going to be as good as -- or better than -- Jordan?

Let's look at the numbers from college:

Ed Weiland of HoopsAnalyst does great work with the NBA Draft, and he came up with some benchmarks for players based on their NCAA stats. These are not hard-and-fast rules, mind you, since so many factors can influence college stats, but they serve pretty well as general guidelines. Weiland broke forwards into the traditional SFs & PFs, and also what he called "Combo Forwards", who kind of split the difference between 3s and 4s. Since Bias could be described as a SF or a PF, we'll compare him to the benchmarks for each position. Weiland determined that the most important factors for SFs were adjusted (or "Effective") FG%, Points/40 min, Rebounds/40 min, Assist-to-Turnover ratio, and (Assists + Steals + Blocks)/40 min. Here's how Bias stacks up each season, along with some contemporaries:

And what if we considered Bias a Power Forward? For PFs, the key categories Weiland found were 2-point FG%, Pts/40, Reb/40, (Stl + Blk)/40, A/TO ratio, and PPS (Pts per shot; Pts/FGA):

Despite all the accolades, it's not clear that there was much evidence (besides Bias' raw athleticism) to suggest Bias was going to be as good as Jordan -- or even that he was going to be a future All-Star. Playing in the same conference, his key indicators were inferior to Jordan at every stage of his career; and Jordan was able to leap to the NBA after his junior year, while Bias stayed at Maryland for a fourth year. I would imagine his ceiling was going to be a poor man's James Worthy instead:

Or, to make a few, more current, comparisons:

Would '87 Boston have been a sweetheart of a situation for a rookie? Oh, yeah. And it would have helped Bias get as much out of his potential as any young player could hope for, so everyone was right to be terrified of the fact that the defending champs (and possibly the greatest team ever) added the #2 pick in the draft. However, in college Bias didn't rebound or contribute in non-scoring areas as much as his fellow prospects (historical, modern, you name it) did, and his NCAA efficiency numbers were sub-par. I'm not saying he would be a bust or even that it would have been impossible for him to be a star, but I am saying that we might have allowed Bias' tragic and untimely passing to distort the way we viewed his potential. Just like anyone who died before their time, there's the tendency to idealize the person and put them up on a pedestal, projecting onto them everything we wished and hoped they could someday be. In Bias' case, what my dad and so many other Celtics fans wanted was for him to become Larry Bird's heir at the helm of the Boston dynasty. Unfortunately, given his important performance indicators in college, that probably wasn't the most realistic expectation in basketball history.

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To take a college football example, Oklahoma has a very impressive point differential this year against a very tough strength of schedule, and consequently their SRS is 5th-best in the country. Unfortunately for the Sooners, though, they also have lost four games. Would the Sooners likely win against most of the teams with fewer losses than they have? Yes, probably -- according to SRS they should be favored vs. everyone in the FBS except Texas, Florida, Alabama, and TCU. But no one in their right mind is going to rank OU ahead of undefeated Cincinnati and Boise State, or 1-loss Georgia Tech if we're talking about accomplishments, because the bottom line is that Oklahoma lost four games, and no amount of predictive advantage in the future is going to change that fact in the past.

All of this is to say that the premise of these rankings is to rate NBA teams on their past accomplishments rather than their likelihood of winning in the future. They're meant as a compliment to the SRS, and in fact, the basic structure of the ratings is the same as the SRS. Here's how they work: I calculated the average margin of victory for a winning team this year at home and on the road, and then averaged those together to determine the average point differential of a winning team on a neutral court (I didn't take a simple average of all winning teams because home teams are more likely to win by bigger margins, therefore skewing the value away from neutral). This is the baseline value that I give a team for winning (or deduct from them for losing). However, I also calculated the average MOV for teams at home this season, which is our HCA value. For teams that won at home, I gave them the avg. winner's MOV minus the HCA; for road winners, I gave them the winner's MOV plus the HCA; home losers received the avg. loser's MOV minus the HCA; and road losers got the loser's MOV plus the HCA. These were our static values for each team, crediting them only for wins and losses (and where each game took place). I then calculated the SRS normally (with HCA factored in), and those values were used for the SOS component of the BBR rankings. So, in effect, point differential does not matter when assessing the team's won-loss performance, to credit teams for "just winning" regardless of margin, but it does matter when assessing the strength of a team's opposition. I like this because there's no way to game the system by running up the score -- when you run up the score, you're actually only helping your opponents.

The end result is a ranking that takes into account strength of schedule in a legitimate, predictive way, but also credits a team for their own performance in the past. So, if you've managed to make it this far, here are the first BBR Rankings of the season:

From 1998-99 to 2009-10, against the Spurs, in the regular season, requiring Points >= 30, sorted by most games matching criteria.

So after Dirk's 41-point performance last night, he now has dropped 30 or more on the Spurs 10 times in their dynasty era, more than anyone except Kobe and A.I.

You can put together lists just like this using our Play Index, with the Player Game Finder Tool. So give it a try and have fun making queries like this of your own, and let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Well, Nash is the ringleader of the team with the best record in basketball right now, the 10-2 Phoenix Suns. And, yes, these are the same Suns who had been left for dead by fans and the media after breaking up their popular Seven Seconds or Less core, adding Shaquille O'Neal in a move that failed pretty glaringly, and burning through 3 coaches in 8 months. The fact that they're on top of the league has to be one of the feel-good stories of the year, and Nash is inarguably their catalyst, leading the team in Win Shares, PER, Assist Rate, TS% (with Jason Richardson), and Possession % (if you ignore Alando Tucker, who has played all of 24 minutes). Statheads decried his back-to-back selections in 2005 & '06, but the resume I laid out above sounds like something they could get behind, right?

Maybe. But there are, as always, issues with Nash's candidacy. First, there's the fact that, despite their gaudy record, the Suns aren't really the best team in the league. By SRS, which takes into account their point differential and strength of schedule, Phoenix ranks just 12th in the NBA, behind Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Portland, Dallas, the Lakers, Oklahoma City, Houston, Miami, San Antonio, and Cleveland. Now, Phoenix has beaten three of those teams, all on the road, but they were also blown out by 20+ points against both Orlando and the Lakers, and their biggest wins margin-wise have come against Golden State, Washington, and New Orleans, teams that are a combined 9-22 on the year. The Suns' performance so far has been both surprising and commendable, but the jury is still out on whether they can maintain it, because the best predictor of future results says they're not quite as good as their record says they are.

There's also the matter of defense, Nash's familiar bête noire from his earlier MVP seasons. Remember the old way to assassinate the basketball character of the Mike D'Antoni Suns, to point out that they were bad defensively because of how many points they allowed per game? And remember how that claim was largely bunk, since when you removed the illusions of pace, the Suns were essentially an average defensive team? Well, that cliche may have been off-base during the D'Antoni era, but under Alvin Gentry it's a very legitimate criticism. After giving up 1.09 pts/possession to the Rockets last night, the Suns now rank 21st out of 30 teams in defensive efficiency; they're also the second-worst team in the NBA at forcing turnovers. And unfortunately, Nash has been one of the major culprits -- he has nabbed just 1 steal all season, and the Suns have an abominable 111.2 defensive rating when he's on the floor, compared to a (still terrible, but less-bad) 109.2 rating when he sits. And if you think this is a one-year occurence, think again: Nash has made the Suns defense worse when on the floor in 5 of his 6 seasons since coming to Phoenix. Compare it to other recent MVP winners, and you'll find that Dirk Nowitzki is the only other MVP in the 82games era whose team was better on D when he gathered bench splinters.

Of course, it's still ridiculously early in the season to discuss anyone's MVP bid, and Nash could certainly bolster his candidacy between now and April. But, that said, I don't think we should get too carried away with the idea of Nash hoisting a Podoloff he actually deserved, because the same complaints about Nash's first two MVPs still largely ring true today. Nash has been masterful at leading the Suns offense back to prominence in '09-10, but his defensive performance is still holding him back from getting the full APBRmetric endorsement as league MVP.

(More after the jump...)

(Why Robert "Bubbles" Hawkins? I have no idea.)

(more after the jump...)

Also, you can read more about that Rockets team here.