Amateurs vs. Professionals

I have many friends that read this blog almost exclusively for their Blazer material. I believe the coverage here has forced O-Live to take it further and further, including all material from the paper and the Behind the Lockerroom door type series. Without Blazersedge this doesn’t happen. It is the large community here that gives Portland a chance against the larger markets in the internet forums, polls, etc. Dave, you bring the class and humor( odd combo,) which we all appreciate and attempt to replicate when we join the larger NBA interwebs community. Go Blazers. Blazersedge for life!

BE is by far my #1 go-to source for anything Blazers-related. You and Ben consistently write insightful commentary and I love the whole community of people who post here. I’ve been a Blazer fan my entire life and yet when I started reading this site I realized how much there is about basketball that I had never thought about before.

I’m not just saying that either. I mean it.

Because if so, stop it.

I was a writer. A good one. I was in a grad school going for an MFA, had a book mostly written, was starting to get a following on an up and coming website and hits from journals and then I started asking myself those sorts of questions and developed a full blown case of writers block.

I dropped out of grad school and haven’t been able to write a satisfying piece since. That was 4 years ago.

So here is my solution. I suggest you mix yourself a drink, grab a hammer and ask yourself that question in your mind. At the exact moment you finish the question in your mind you need to smash one of your favorite fingers with the hammer. It may sound extreme but if you can associate those mind-numbing, existential death questions with finger-crushing pain you might be able to block them out altogether.

It’s for the best.

Oh and go slap that undergrad student. Precocious little twit…

That in turn raises the community interest and serves the purpose of driving up demand for that same information. Which goes a long way toward generating the income needed to maintaining the team in Portland.

Blazersedge provides some of the best reporting available anywhere. Because we are not limited to the space or time that the media must be we can more fully explore issues and collect far more knowledgeable synergy around those issues. I have never felt more connected to the team than through this site. You are making a difference in my life. I don’t need to read the daily O anymore. They get some scoops but it is all explained better here. In addition I believe we have made a difference in national perspective towards the Blazers. Other Internet sites (including Dime and True Hoop) make reference to your articles and quote them extensively.

Do I think we change the game? No. But we are part of a cultural upheaval in the world based upon nearly instantaneous flashing of information and a growing hunger for accurate and timely information.

I played all the sports in highschool but have never been a real sports guy in my adult life. I now know more about the game of basketball and the Blazers than I ever have before. I watch every blazers game now. That wasn’t the case just two yeas ago. All of this is because I happened apon Blazers Edge. I’m glad I did.

passion is contagious. It’s especially great for us out of town blazer fans to have a community that supports the same things.

The biggest roadblock for someone like me – and there are undoubtedly a few – would probably be that I have no pro player or coaching experience. For someone else it might be the lack of business experience. Or no interest in legal work where Blazers assistant Tom Penn excels. No willingness to travel. Whatever. But it can be done even if you might never be the most talented expert. There are courses for this kind of work like there are for most any profession. Internships. Then learning comes by doing. You don’t start as the GM or head coach (even though some former players seem to believe that) or head of scouting for an NBA team, you rather start as an assistant (if you are lucky), a scout for a small college or high school, an administrator in a minor league, a videographer, something like that. And trying to quantify and strategize things in sports has given rise to more people who don’t have a background as an active “participant” at the highest level.

At least one of the SBN bloggers is now working for a D-League team and the Vegas Summer League (Scott from Ridiculous Upside). His predecessor is writing for a magazine I think. One of Daryl Morey’s assistants in Houston developed the ESPN trade machine. Another one was hired right out of business school. Morey himself has a non-traditional background in statistics/computer science. Most of the ESPN insiders are kind of self-trained in scouting and analyzing over a decade or so (Thorpe, Ford, Hollinger, …). Hollinger basically did what Kevin Pelton & Co. at Basketball Prospectus is doing now, he just was ahead of his time. There are a number of sites like that, and some of them are the same resources the writing pros or the actual pros use. Some player agents were just lucky to be with a star player in college at the same time and he trusted them. I recently learned one of their fantasy football writers on ESPN was a screenwriter before working on Married with Children and Crocodile Dundee in LA. Odd but successful crossover. Kahn was a sportswriter, knew the right people and soon was an assistant GM and owned D-League teams. Heck, even Vecsey tried to become a GM a long time ago. And Bill Simmons, who is also a self-trained sports observer and rather a (comedy) writer and producer by profession ;-)

3 years ago during the summer slumber period, with no news on the Blazers to be found in the newspaper, a friend to3 years ago during the summer slumber period, with no news on the Blazers to be found in the newspaper, a friend told me to start reading blogs. My answer what in hell is a blog. Well after stimulating my uncomputerized 70 year brain, I got the point.

I started out on Blazers.com and found Barretts blog in which I thought was fantastic. Within a couple of weeks, I had cought up on all the news and started to complain again, only this time on a post. I had never posted before on a blog since I had just now found out about. I wrote my complaint and emmitaitly someone wrote a reply. He or she told me to try BE.com. Wow fantastic results.

I never knew the games inside the games; I learned a whole new perspective of BB. It was fascinating. I was able to join in. I got replies on my thoughts, some good and some not so good as I didn’t really know the language of Posting or what some of the shortcuts on words meant. I finally got brave and started asking questions about BB and about abbreviations for words. My first question was what in heck does IMO mean LOL. But the reply wasn’t given in a sarcastic way. That gave me courage to start asking questions concerning the game itself. I have learned more in the last 3 year then I had in a life-time of watching the Blazers (since 1970). I even got 2 green posts in which I had to ask why my post turned green. jscot gave me the answer so he or she became my favorite poster.

I was told that many players’ reads BE. In most cases it gives them confidence, in other cases it gives them insight on what they should be working on and why. Therefore BE does make the difference. The synergy of the fan post makes a difference to other fans.

Keep up the great work

Hg alias BBK
ld me to start reading blogs. My answer what in hell is a blog. Well after stimulating my uncomputerized 70 year brain, I got the point.

I started out on Blazers.com and found Barretts blog in which I thought was fantastic. Within a couple of weeks, I had cought up on all the news and started to complain again, only this time on a post. I had never posted before on a blog since I had just now found out about. I wrote my complaint and emmitaitly someone wrote a reply. He or she told me to try BE.com. Wow fantastic results.

I never knew the games inside the games, I learned a whole new perspective of BB. It was fasinating. I was able to join in. I got replies on my thoughts, some good and not so good as I didn’t really know the language of Posting or what some of the shorcuts on words meant.

for ad hominem. Poor AK.

3 years ago during the summer slumber period, with no news on the Blazers to be found in the newspaper, a friend told me to start reading blogs. My answer what in hell is a blog. Well after stimulating my un-computerized 70 year brain, I got the point.

I started out on Blazers.com and found Barrett’s blog in which I thought was fantastic. Within a couple of weeks, I had caught up on all the news and started to complain again, only this time on a post. I had never posted before on a blog since I had just now found out about. I wrote my complaint and immediately someone wrote a reply. He or she told me to try BE.com. Wow fantastic results.

I never knew the games inside the games; I learned a whole new perspective of BB. It was fascinating. I was able to join in. I got replies on my thoughts, some good and some not so good as I didn’t really know the language of Posting or what some of the shortcuts on words meant. I finally got brave and started asking questions about BB and about abbreviations for words. My first question was what in heck does IMO mean LOL. But the reply wasn’t given in a sarcastic way. That gave me courage to start asking questions concerning the game itself. I have learned more in the last 3 year then I had in a life-time of watching the Blazers (since 1970). I even got 2 green posts in which I had to ask why my post turned green. jscot gave me the answer so he or she became my favorite poster.

I was told that many players’ reads BE. In most cases it gives them confidence, in other cases it gives them insight on what they should be working on and why. Therefore BE does make the difference. The synergy of the fan post makes a difference to other fans.

Keep up the great work

Hg alias BBK

Blogs, in general, are on the verge of completely overthrowing print media, and you wonder if you make a difference?

I think you need look no further than the evolution of some of the principal issues surrounding the Blazers this summer. Let me take one single example: the contract of B-Roy.

The blogs—particularly this blog—was the voice of patience and reason. Who represnted the shrill-shrieking overraction? Print-media. The professionals, as you’ve dubiously labeled them. This is a distinct patter of behavior: pros are giving us yellow-press sensationalism while blogs the reasoned discourse.

And the fans are responding.

Second, I think your astronomy analogy is inaccurate. In the astronomical profession, you’re talking about people with years of specialized math and equipment… AND EVEN HERE THE AMATEURS ARE MAKING CONTRIBUTIONS.

In the world of sports, the “pros” in the sense of coaches, sports-writers, GMs, etc are nothing more than the product of general bachelors degrees in liberal arts or have formerly played. In neither case does this give them the same specialized skill set.

What it does mean is that they are ingrained with the traditions and orthodoxies that tend to dominate the field. In short, they are expert in a language (lingo) and base set of assumptions.

Amateurs are gaining a well-documented history of having an enormous degree of influence over this field—much to their horror.

As one example, look at the effect of the Baseball Prospectus that led to the rise of Billy Beane (see Moneyball) and ultimately the new set of statistics being used to evaluate baseball.

As another exmaple, look at what a similar group of people at Football Outsiders are doing to football: through the use of amateurs, they are logging every single play for every single down in an NFL season and using it to chart an entirely new set of statistics. Currently, their DVOA is some of the most advanced statistical methodology in football.

So much so that ESPN hired them full time. I call that influence.

Amateurs, in the sense that you’re using it, is raising too high the importance and skill set of the curernt crop of “pros” and demaning too much the impact of people who are very, very good at certain types of analysis and communication in other fields and what they can bring to the sport of basketball.

False humility? Dave, I think you sell far too short your influence and the potential influence that you and others have.

Yes, there is a high level experience gap, an information gathering gap, and an NBA insider gap, but for the most part these advantages are time sensitive in nature and have a tendency to dissipate as information leaks out to the general public. In large measure this leaking balloon of information is how NBA executives keep tabs on one another. Much of the same information/misinformation is available to us all in this day and age. The question becomes, "How do interested parties make use of this information when they finally get it."

So, just because execs get the information sooner does not mean that we cannot follow the process pretty well. And, as we follow along, we can learn about our thinking errors as they also learn about their own. The Blazers were behind the curve on Oden’s injury issues, and behind the curve on Kevin Durant’s growth curve, but they have learned a lot more about the situation, and so have we. And as it stands right now, there is a lot more information to come out. It is anybody’s call, and I am sure that GMs still have differing views on the matter.

Yes, there are writers and fans alike that just don’t get it and will always remain substantially behind the curve. But I am sorry, I just don’t buy the concept that all the fans are as much in the dark about NBA basketball as they might be about being a brain surgeon and performing an operation. The gap is just not that large.