Playoff Mind Games

In any sport, the playoffs are inevitably the time where teams bear down, focus, and try every trick, ploy, strategy, and maneuver they can to scratch out one more victory. This past Sunday, basketball may have witnessed one of the more peculiar playoff strategies Los Angeles Lakers head coach Phil Jackson reined in NBA-leading-scorer Kobe Bryant, who scored only 22 points in the teams 107-102 Game 1 loss to the Phoenix Suns. In certain respects, the strategy makes a lot of sense. LA is much stronger than Phoenix inside, so Jackson wanted to press that advantage by focusing more on promising power forward Kwame Brown than on Bryant. Also, talented though Bryant is, the Lakers cannot win a championship without strong contributions from the supporting cast, so Game 1 is as good a time as ever to try to get them involved.

But on a much more obvious level the strategy makes no sense at all. Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a single game this season. He is the NBA's leading scorer and may very win the MVP award. He is the most dangerous weapon the Lakers have. In the playoffs, where every game counts, why would you not shoot all your bullets? In Sunday's game, when Bryant was given free range on offense in the fourth quarter, his shots weren't falling because he hadn't been able to establish a consistent flow earlier in the game. It seems that the Lakers had wasted their best asset.

Phil Jackson is not a stupid coach -- after all, he has one nine championships. Which is why I wonder if he's playing mind games with the Suns. Going into Game 1, the Suns undoubtedly had one defensive agenda: stop Kobe. But now after the Lakers nearly beat them in Game 1 without too much help from Bryant, their defensive game plan for the rest of the series suddenly becomes much more muddied. Do they focus on Bryant and get killed inside? Do they ease off on Kobe and risk being the victims of one of his offensive ambushes? Is it possible that Phil Jackson played a risky Game 1 hand by under-utilizing Bryant just to push the Suns back on their heels, to give the Lakers the advantage of surprising them game in and game out for the rest of the series with their offensive approach?

If that is indeed what Jackson has done, it only confirms for me his strategic brilliance. He found a way to turn a perceived weakness (the one-dimensional nature of the Lakers attack) and turned it into a source of frustration, doubt, and anxiety for the Phoenix Suns, a situation that can only improve LA's chances for victory.

The $106 Million Underdog?

Only in New York could a team with a payroll of $106 million be considered the underdog. The New York Mets, usually second-class citizens in this town, living perpetually in the shadow of Steinbrenner's Yankees, are the most exciting team in the baseball this year. In the extremely insular world of New York sports, however, what is even more important is that they are the most exciting team in town. Going into last night's game, the $229 million Yankees were 6-7, in the cellar of the AL East, playing uninspired and inconsistent ball all year. As has been the trend the last few years with this team, they look old, predictable, and creaking under the weight of the monumental pressure put upon them by their salaries and their pinstripes.

The Mets, on the other hand, were 10-3, at the top of the NL East, and playing an exciting style of baseball, combining great pitching with a productive, small-ball style National League offense. While the Mets have their share of Forbes 500 players, like Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado, they also have some of the most exciting, young, home-grown talent in the league in pitcher Brian Bannister, shortstop Jose Reyes, and, most specifically, stellar third baseman David Wright. Wright is off to a torrid start, batting .391 through 13 games, with the New York fans chanting “MVP” almost every time he steps to the plate. While the Mets have their flaws (most noticeably a weak pitching rotation and some shaky middle relief pitching), they are an intriguing mix of high-price free agent superstars (since, after all, this is New York) and wide-eyed, idealistic young prospects who have worked their way up to the big leagues.

With the Mets at 10-3 and the Yanks at 6-7, it feels like Rudy is running toward the end zone for the game winning touchdown. Perhaps it's a New York thing. The Mets have always been seen as lovable losers, as pull-up-bootstraps go-getters, valiantly trying to fill the baseball space left vacant by the departed Giants and Dodgers. And though they now spend almost as much money as anyone, have their own cable network like the Yankees, and are planning an expensive and breathtaking new ballpark to open in 2009, which will bring in even more cash, they still retain that underdog status, at least in the five boroughs. The baseball season is long and a lot can change, but at least for now, the Mets are the kings of the New York sports world, and I can't help but be happy for them.

Baseball's Brave New Statistical World

I'm currently reading Baseball between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong, put together by the people behind the excellent baseball statistics site Baseball Prospectus. If you read Michael Lewis's Moneyball and are hungry for more cutting-edge baseball thinking, I'd heartily recommend this book. While they do get into some heavy math explaining the latest baseball statistical analysis, these data are used to examine some of baseball's most basic questions, such as whether or not a team's lineup matters, whether or not baseball needs a salary cap, or whether or not Alex Rodriguez is overpaid. Using sometimes dry numerical methods in the service of such fascinating questions is what makes this book really work.

What the thinking baseball fan loves about sabermetrics (the nickname for the new "generation" of baseball statistics that have been in use since the 1970s) is that they dissect the game down to the constituent parts and really make you think about the game on the most basic level. Instead of accepting the hackneyed wisdom of TV analysts and grandparents who long for the Dodgers to return to Brooklyn, this new approach to baseball allows the interested fan to get some new perspectives on the game, which are truly exciting and valuable. You watch a game and see your favorite player strike out in a big spot and you think, "Geez, what a dope! Couldn't he at least have hit the ball?" and then you read Baseball between the Numbers and you learn that oftentimes a strikeout is less dangerous than a groundball, because of the chance of a double play. That's a very small issue, but even something like that expands and enlivens my experience of the game, revealing layers of possible interpretations I never even thought possible.

Team Chemistry

So what exactly is team chemistry? In theory, sports should be easy. You assemble the most talented athletes you can find, throw them together, and watch the magic happen. But as sports fans have experienced time and time again, it is rarely that simple. There is that weird, ineffable, indescribable thing called chemistry, the force that binds together individual talents into an even greater whole. It's what transforms chaos into harmony, also-rans into champions.

I was reminded of this incontrovertible sports truth last week as I watched the Phoenix Suns floundering as they tried to welcome back into the fold their dynamic superstar, Amare Stoudemire. Sidelined all year as he recovered from knee surgery as the Suns ran away with the Pacific Division, he attempted an early recovery last week and disrupted the delicate balance Phoenix had spent the entire season developing. After a stellar opening game in which he scored 20 points in 19 minutes leading Phoenix to victory, Stoudemire struggled in his subsequent games as the Suns floundered. Not only was Stoudemire disappointed in realizing that he might not be able to return this season, the Phoenix Suns were left confused and befuddled as their ineffable chemistry was nowhere to be seen. What had been a high-scoring, dynamic, cohesive unit all season long turned into a disorganized mess, style with no substance, form with no function.

How does that happen? Adding one of the league's greatest talents should only make the team better, not worse, right? Sports, though, does not happen in the fields of statistics we see in the morning box score – it happens on the court, the field, the ice. Just because Stoudemire averaged 26 points a game last year doesn't mean he'll walk right into the retooled Phoenix Suns and make them 26 points better. Not only is there the obvious point that his shots take shots away from others, but his presence disrupts the player rotations and delicate egos that go along with them that have made the team such a success. By the time most teams get to the playoffs in April, they know where the other guy is going to be on the court before he even gets there. Adding a dominant piece in late March, no matter how transcendent that talent, is bound to cause trouble. It happened when Jordan returned from his first retirement, it happened when Webber returned to the Kings in their prime, and it happened to Phoenix this year.

It appears, however, that Stoudemire might just pack it in this season and wait till he's 100% next season. And while Phoenix may not be able to beat San Antonio without his inside presence, they probably wouldn't even make it to a showdown with the Spurs if Stoudemire hung around and continued to disrupt the team. Hopefully the Suns will be able to get back on track before the playoffs begin and go as far as they can. Being without their most talented player, ironically, may be the best shot they've got.