San Antonio @ Minnesota

Performing at halftime was Naughty by Nature, the only act that would agree to perform for food.

I watched San Antonio @ Minnesota last night, where the Lynx kept it rolling with an 85-63 victory over the Silver Stars.  It was a good game, but hard to get involved in.

My problem is that I want to impose a narrative on the game.  With most WNBA games, this is easy, because one team is clearly worse than the other, and one can write the game up in one's own mind as "heroism of winning team/ineptitude of losing team", take your pick.  Aside from an awful third quarter where they were outscored 17-9, San Antonio tried hard and played as best as they were able to.  The problem was that Minnesota is an extremely good team, and having a good game won't guarantee a win against the Lynx, particularly when you throw away a quarter.  As Dean Wormer might say, "Shooting 4-for-20 in the third is no way to go through life, Silver Stars."

(I'll have some more stats on throwing away quarters later, but I don't have my box scores sheet updated.  If you're interested in what it looks like,  you can always download the latest copy from the links to the right.)

If there are any stats I'd like to see in a non-standard box score, it's a GU stat - "gave up".  Is there a way through APBRmetrics where you can define the point in the game where the losing team just throws up its hands and goes through the motions?

One way to do it might be to define the "20-20-20" players.  These are the players that appear in a game when:

a) a team is 20 points ahead, or
b) a team is 20 points behind, or
c) there are only 20 seconds left in the game.

Since there are only about 110 games played in the season, it shouldn't be too much effort to go through the play-by-plays and see where the players with the least amount of minutes show up.  Well, it wouldn't be too much effort for someone who had that amount of time on his hands.  I have other fish to fry.

(* * *)

I expect today to be another moving and packing day.  My wife and I are going to visit our future apartment, which has been vacated.   My wife wants to measure things and I'm interested in tagging along.  After that more rest and possibly working on the Box Scores spreadsheet.

Oh yes.  And Atlanta @ Phoenix tonight.  I think that game is on at 10 pm ET on NBA TV.  The 10-day layoff would be the biggest layoff for any team this season, so let's see what teams can do on 10 days rest.

(* * *)

Remember way back when when I said I had two other projects keeping me from working on basketball?  One was a writing messageboard and the other was a baseball simulation game?

It seems that the baseball simulation game is coming to an end.  It was a wonderfully detailed universe, but it suffered the fault of one guy carrying the load.  He stepped down to work on a novel, and no one has been able to pick up the slack. 

Therefore, by August 11, one of three things shall be decided by the "core players", of which I am not one:

a)  some new plan will be devised to keep the league alive, or
b)  the league will run one more (simulated) "Goodbye!" season, or
c)  the league will fold.

I've loved my time in the league, but I'd choose c), because it would give me a means of gracefully stepping down and freeing myself of this obligation.  I promised myself I'd do three seasons and then I felt I could step away with no hard feelings.  Hopefully, fate has changed that to one season.