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Sheed taps into his inner Yogi Bera:
"I always tell Afflalo, whenever he gets into the game, I don't have to say anything to him," Rasheed Wallace said. "He hangs his hat on defense."
If he doesn't have to say anything, why is he always telling him?
- Michael Curry said the three-guard lineup isn't going away ...
"We like having Rodney Stuckey out there with Afflalo or Rip and A.I.," Curry said of his three-guard attack. "That gives us a chance to run weak-side (away from the ball) pick-and-roll with Rasheed lifted (spotted up on the perimeter). That puts a lot of pressure on the defense."
- ... at least as long as Stuckey is producing. From Chris McCosky's blog:
Curry has had Rodney Stuckey on the floor finishing games the last week or so, so I asked Curry today if that was a permanent move. He said no. He said it was a game to game thing and it depended on the situations and what combination of players was working. He doesn't want to have one set lineup to finish every game. Hard to deny, though, that the Pistons best chance of containing pick-and-roll teams is when Stuckey and Arron Afflalo are on the floor.
- Rasheed gives a tour of the new wing of the practice facility.
- Elton Brand didn't make the trip for tonight's game due to a hamstring injury. I guess the Pistons dodged a bullet, but I'm actually bummed -- I'd rather see a possible preview of the playoffs than watching a visitor come in short-handed with built-in excuse for losing.
- In an extremely pointless and yet oddly interesting exercise, Ross Siler of the Salt Lake Tribune calculated the cost of an average minute of NBA action:
For starters, there are 1,230 games each season, multiplied by 48 minutes a game, two teams in each game, and five players on the court for each team. That means there are 590,400 available minutes to be played in the NBA each season.
If you add up the salaries of every player currently on the active roster of an NBA team - - and trust me, you'll burn out a calculator trying to do so - -you get $2.058 billion. That's 30 teams with an average payroll of $68.6 million.
If you divide the two numbers - - $2.058 billion in player salaries by 590,400 minutes - - you arrive at $3,487 per minute. Next time you watch a game, ask yourself if the five players on the court just gave you $17,436 worth of effort in that minute.
I think he got too creative with his math: if there are 1,230 games in a season, there are only [1,230 games x 48 min/game = 59,040 minutes], which means the real cost per minute is [$2.058 billion / 59,040 minutes = $34,857 per minute].
(Edit: Nevermind, Henry Abbott just made me realize he's right. Siler answered the question, "What does it cost on average for an NBA player to log one minute of game action?" and I answered the question, "What does one minute of an NBA game cost?" Since there are 10 players on the court at a time, my answer was 10 times his. Carry on.)
I'm a sportswriter, so I think about sports all day long, and when I'm done with work, I often turn on a game and think about sports some more. My point? I'm pretty numb when it comes to thinking about the finances of professional sports -- the numbers don't shock me, especially when they're so large I can no longer wrap my head around them.
But $35K for every minute? I can wrap my head around that. What a weird industry.
- Shaquille O'Neal is on Twitter these days, and after losing last night, he was definitely grumpy. Terry Porter has his work cut out for him.
- For the first time in the history of DBB, an impromptu rebus competition broke out in the comments last night. DBB readers Rob G. and Mike Payne went a little nuts with the Photoshop -- here, here, here, here, here and here. Enjoy, and if you're creatively inclined, leave your own in the comments.
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