Archive for the 'Layups' Category

Sporcle actually e-mailed us and let us know about this one... Can you name the NBA's top 5 players in Player Efficiency Rating (PER) for every season between 1970 and 2009?

Bill Simmons' new 700-page tome (and I just got it in the mail today, it's a legit 700 pages, there are no typeface shenanigans going on here) is called "The Book of Basketball", and the amount of work he put into it certainly lives up to the title's lofty aspirations. But for as many trees that had to die to make TBOB happen, is it so thick that it can stop a speeding bullet?

You didn't think we'd let the season begin without linking our favorite uniform guru's preview, did you? Over at ESPN, Paul Lukas breaks down all of the offseason changes that have nothing to do with roster movement, and yet feel only slightly less important... It's the 2010 Uni Watch NBA Preview!

I'm not a huge fan of the reality genre, but I make exceptions for shows based on current athletes, which is why this new Ty Lawson series could be interesting:

The general consensus from us stat folks is that Lawson -- at #18 overall -- could go down as the steal of the draft (thanks, Dean Oliver!), so I'm pretty interested in how well he makes that transition from college stardom to the NBA, since the metrics say he should probably have been taken ahead of Flynn & Holiday.

Basketball Geek Ryan Parker tweeted this link, and I think it's pretty cool: the NBA's Video Rule Book. In fact, now that the regular refs are going to be back on the job (thank goodness, BTW), you can watch these clips and know exactly how to once again criticize them, complain about how bad they are, and wish the league had different officials. It'll be just like old times again!

(Sorry about the dearth of real posts this week, but I'm hard at work on our 2-part NBA preview for next Mon. and Tues...)

In case you didn't already see this when Skeets linked it over at Ball Don't Lie, here's a sweet vid by Hoops4Life about KG, Kobe, LeBron, and the preps-to-pros revolution:

Sporcle wants you to name every #1 seed since the NCAA Tournament started seeding teams in 1979. Are you up to the challenge?

Sporcle wants to know: Can you name the best-selling NBA jerseys of 2009?

Here's a Sporcle quiz for all of our college hoops fans, especially those hailing from the Bluegrass State: Can you correctly name the rosters of the Kentucky Wildcats' 1996 and 1998 NCAA Championship teams?

Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, EA Sports composer Traz Damji put together a series of ridiculously funky (and catchy) background songs for the best years of the NBA Live franchise. They became synonymous with video hoops action for a generation of young, impressionable gamers, and now they're available in all their old-school glory courtesy of YouTube:

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